Brokenness and healing

Today's readings: Ezekiel 33, 7-9; Romans 13, 8-10; Matthew 18, 15-20.

The readings this Sunday should serve as a wake-up call for the entire Church and for each one of us to re-examine not just the way we speak about reconciliation, but the extent to which we are being catalysts of reconciliation and healing in a world longing for wholeness.

Today's Gospel, seen also in the light of the words of the prophet Ezekiel, highlights to what extent we are responsible for each other in our communities and also our collective responsibility for the world. It speaks of sinners and the way they are treated in communities of faith. To come to terms with all this, we would need a good stock-taking exercise of what in our mind constitutes a public sinner today, given that apparently we have many weights and many measures.

Christianity is mainly about redemption and the word of God speaks loud about our attitudes and our behaviour with those whom we consider sinners. What Jesus puts to question is our way of taking the law as point of departure and point of arrival at the same time. When that is the attitude, then we would have difficulty understanding what Jesus is saying. It is not external discipline that keeps the Christian community together, but the living presence of the Lord.

Christian life is a journey of faith, and like all journeys it is a process. Jesus was extra patient with all, and never gave up finding the redeeming factor in people. On the same path of Jesus, the Church is not the institution or the community sent out in the world to preach reconciliation, but rather to be the concrete space where reconciliation can be seen to be possible in a world which makes us believe otherwise.

The Gospel outlines a process to be followed to bring back a drop-out to full communion. That has always been Jesus' major concern: leaving the 99 to fetch one. Unfortunately, in many of our practices we've abandoned all this. It's a principle we find difficult to understand and to follow. In our parish set-ups, it's even something that makes no sense at all: we concentrate on the converted, with little concern for the estranged.

Jesus came not to abolish the law but to bring it to perfection. Yet he went beyond the manual of discipline which for the church goers of his time was the backbone of religious experience. Today's Gospel confirms that even the Christian community in the first century had difficulty reconciling the diktat of the law with universal redemption. Even if it sounds like a day dream, Jesus is calling for a new form of existence even in our social set-up today. "Do it privately, just between yourselves," Jesus warns. This seems to be far, very far, from what we are fed by the hungry media.

There is so much that obscures Christ's presence in the world. Discerning where and how Christ is at work in us and in the world is our vocation. Our witness is weakest when our captivities to the ways of the world obscure the presence of Christ among us. Then we would have nothing new to bring to the world. We simply mirror the brokenness that is all around us.