24th Sunday in Ordinary Time

Readings: Sirach 27:30-28:7; Romans 14:7-9; Matthew 18:21-35

The unmerciful servant in today’s Gospel,
who holds his fellow servant 
to a strict accounting of his debts,
despite having his own debts forgiven by his master,
engages in actions that are, at the same time,
so malicious and so self-defeating
that they seem to border on the inexplicable.

My wife always tells me that, when confronted
with someone’s seemingly inexplicable actions,
whether inexplicably stupid or inexplicably cruel,
you should ask yourself, 
“in what world does this make sense?”
People don’t act without a reason,
even if their reasoning seems nonsensical
from within our understanding of the world.
And while seeing how someone understands the world
does not condone their bad actions,
is can, perhaps, help make us 
a bit more compassionate toward them.
So it is worth asking ourselves,
in what world do the actions 
of the unmerciful servant make sense?

Notice that what he asks for from his master
is simply an extension on his loan,
so that he has time to pay it back,
but what he gets from the master
is complete forgiveness of his debt.
But it is as if he simply can’t accept 
that someone would really forgive another’s debt,
that his master isn’t going to show up later
and demand repayment,
so he immediately goes about trying to collect 
the debts that are owed to him by others,
so that when his master shows up 
demanding repayment,
as the servant is convinced he inevitably will,
he will have the means to pay back what he owes
and avoid the cruel penalty that the master
would undoubtedly inflict.
The unforgiving servant’s action make sense
in a world in which no one 
is ever truly compassionate,
no one is ever truly forgiving;
his actions make sense 
in a world in which the best we can hope for
is to buy a little time in order to grab what we can
from those who are weaker than us
so that we can pay off those who are stronger.

The book of Sirach tells us,
“Wrath and anger are hateful things,
yet the sinner hugs them tight.”
Actions that are malicious and self-defeating,
can seem like reasonable options in a world without mercy.
The unforgiving servant lives in a cruel and ugly world,
a world in which we must live only for ourselves,
we must trust only ourselves,
we must look out only for ourselves,
because nobody else is going to look out for us.
He lives in the same world than many today live in:
a world of zero-sum competition
in which another’s gain is always my loss;
a world in which there is never true forgiveness
but only debt-extension, 
usually with compounded interest;
a world in which I have no choice 
but to be merciless
if I want to survive, 
whether in business 
or politics
or international affairs.

But Jesus offers us a different world to live in. 
Jesus offers us a world 
in which we are not left on our own
to survive as best we can.
Rather, Jesus offers us a world in which
the master is moved with compassion
and forgives our debts.
He offers us a world in which 
we do not need to fight and claw to survive,
we do not need to trample down those in our way,
we do not need to forego mercy and compassion
lest someone take advantage of us.

It is not some fantasy world he offers, however.
People will still try to take advantage of you.
You will still have to deal with people who see the world 
in the cruel and ugly way that the unforgiving servant sees it.
Your mercy will not always be met with mercy.
But, as St. Paul reminds us,
we are not left on our own:
“None of us lives for oneself, 
and no one dies for oneself.”
If we belong to Christ,
if we seek to live in the world of mercy he offers,
we do not need to fight and claw for survival,
“For if we live, we live for the Lord,
and if we die, we die for the Lord;
so then, whether we live or die, we are the Lord’s.”
If we are the Lord’s whether we live or die,
then we can take the risk of accepting mercy
and take the risk of showing mercy.

But what about the end of the parable,
when the unmerciful servant is
“handed… over to the torturers
until he should pay back the whole debt”?
Does this mean that, at the end of the day,
God’s mercy comes to an end?
Not necessarily.
I believe that the world of the unmerciful servant
the word of cruelty and ugliness,
wrath and anger,
is itself a painful, torturous world in which to live, 
and the unmerciful servant is tormented
by his own inability 
to accept the mercy of his master.
God wants to free us from that torment.
But, having trapped himself in that world,
the unmerciful servant’s torment will not cease
until he learns to see and accept
the mercy offered to him at every moment.

Let us pray for those who live 
in an ugly, cruel world
of debt without mercy,
that their torment may be lifted.
Let us pray for those who suffer
the wrath and anger of those
who live trapped 
in a cruel and ugly world.
Let us pray for ourselves,
that we may be made free
to live for the Lord
and to die for the Lord.
And may God have mercy on us all.
 

23rd Week in Ordinary Time II--Wednesday (Peter Claver)

Readings: Isaiah 58:6-11; Matthew 25:31-40

We’re all familiar with the so-called Golden Rule:
as Jesus phrases it in Matthew’s Gospel,
“Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” (Mt. 7:12).
But this is not a teaching unique to Christianity.
We find equivalent statements
in religions and philosophies from around the world.
The prophet Muhammad is reported to have said,
“As you would have people do to you, do to them;
and what you dislike to be done to you, don’t do to them.”
In the Buddhist sacred writings we are told,
“Hurt not others in ways that you yourself would find hurtful.”
And Immanuel Kant’s categorical imperative,
even though he himself thought it far superior
in philosophical rigor to the Golden Rule,
ends up sounding pretty similar:
“Treat others how you wish to be treated.”
We might say that something like the Golden Rule
is part of the common moral inheritance of the human race.
It is rooted in our capacity to see ourselves in others,
to see the common bonds of our humanity,
to imagine ourselves in another person’s shoes.

But today’s Gospel offers us something else,
something that goes beyond the Golden Rule.
Rather than telling his followers
“do unto others as you would have them do unto you,”
Jesus says, “do unto others as you would do unto me.”
For, as he say to his disciples, “whatever you do
for one of the least brothers of mine you do for me.”
We are not simply to see ourselves in others;
we are to see Christ.
 
Rather than being, like the Golden Rule,
a moral intuition shared by many peoples and culture,
what Jesus teaches us today
is something unique to Christianity:
that in serving our brother or sister in need
we are offering service to God himself.
For in Christ God has taken on suffering flesh
and so identified himself with every living person,
especially those who suffer hunger or thirst,
estrangement or deprivation,
captivity or illness.

It was this command to see Christ in others
that led St. Peter Claver to undertake
his extraordinary ministry to the enslaved Africans
who were brought to the New World.
He would meet the slave ships
that arrived in the port of Cartagena
to minister to the human cargo of those ship,
many of whom were naked, sick, and dying,
sometimes literally giving them the clothes off his back.
What the world would treat as chattel to be sold,
Peter Claver treated as deserving of
the same human dignity that he himself desired.
But even more than that,
he treated them as sacred icons
in which he could see the face of Christ.
The lives of these Black slaves mattered to him
because they mattered to Christ
and Christ mattered to him.
Let us ask for St. Peter Claver to pray for us
that we too might find the face of Christ
in the face of those who suffer,
especially those who suffer
racial hatred and discrimination.
And may God have mercy on us all.

23rd Sunday in Ordinary Time

Readings: Ezekiel 33:7-9; Romans 13:8-10; Matthew 18:15-20

Our Gospel today seems particularly relevant,
since it gives something like a plan of action
for dealing with conflict and controversy,
and I think it is pretty non-controversial
to say we live in conflict-ridden times.
Jesus says that if you perceive
that someone has wronged you,
rather than seek to publicly shame them,
you should go to them one-on-one
to confront them with the truth
of the harm they have done.
If that doesn’t work,
bring a couple of other people along
so that, “every fact may be established.”
Finally, if the other person will not face up
to the truth of the harm they have brought about
then you, as it were, go public,
bring the matter before the Church community.
If your opponent does not repent and reconcile,
then they can no longer be part of the community,
and must be treated as “a Gentile or a tax collector.”

Note that this is not merely a mechanism
for resolving disagreements;
the scenario imagined is not simply one
in which two members of the community are at odds
and are seeking to reach a compromise.
Rather, it is one in which one party has wronged the other
and must be made to see the wrongness of their ways.
The issue is not simply reconciliation,
but repentance and truth-telling.
For there can be no reconciliation without truth-telling,
without a truthful account of past harms inflicted.

But telling the truth is a tricky thing.
On the one hand, it can be difficult
to speak a hard truth;
we would often prefer
to let the unreconciled elephant-in-the-room
go unremarked
rather than to deal with the messy fallout
of, if I may add another metaphor,
opening up a can of worms
we may not be able to close.
On the other hand,
I suspect we all know people
who wield truth like a weapon,
not as a means to reconciliation
but as a means
of bludgeoning others into submission,
exacerbating conflict and alienation,
perhaps even destroying the wrong-doer.
So how do we walk that line
between elephant-ignoring
and truth-weaponizing?

Paul tells us, “Owe nothing to anyone,
except to love one another,
for the one who loves another
has fulfilled the law.”
We owe one another the truth
and so we must sometimes risk the possibility
of opening a can of worms we cannot close,
but only if it is a truth spoken in love,
only if even a hard truth is spoken
out of a genuine desire
to find on the other side of the painful process
of reckoning with harms, past and present
healing and wholeness for all parties involved.
“Love does no evil to the neighbor.”
Note that the process Jesus outlines in the Gospel
is one that is very careful to save and not destroy
the person who has committed the offense.
Which is not to say
that the truth spoken in love never hurts.
Anyone who has ever undergone physical or psychological therapy
knows that pain can be a necessary part of the healing process.
Painful truth spoken in love is the spiritual therapy
that can lead to that healing that we call reconciliation.

We can see the connection of truth and reconciliation
in our on-going national struggle to deal with race
and the legacy of slavery.
We can see the temptations of elephant-ignoring
and of truth-weaponizing,
of pretending that we have put the past behind us
and of wielding truth as a cudgel
simply to balance the scales pain.
But between these twin temptations lies the narrow way
of reckoning with the truth as an instrument of love
and a means of reconciliation,
a pursuit of reconciliation that is not simply
an attempt to declare victory and go home
but involves concrete works of repair
to overcome the effects of the legacy of racism.

Over the years I have found myself
forced to rethink many things I was taught
in my upbringing in the American South,
things about the past and about the present,
things about the nobility of causes and heroes,
things about the fairness of current structures,
beliefs that, in the name of truth,
I have had to abandon.
And, though this was sometimes painful,
I owe a debt of gratitude to those who over the years
have loved me enough to inflict that pain,
who continue to confront me with the truth—
the truth that must be faced as the first step
toward true reconciliation and repair.

Of course, we Christians recognize
that the work of reconciliation and repair
is no mere human work;
indeed we recognize that our human efforts
are simply not adequate to the task
of bringing about true reconciliation,
of repairing a history of damaged relations,
whether between races or classes or nations,
and even less so the broken bond
between humanity and God
that lies at the root of all our brokenness.
Reconciliation on all levels is the work of grace,
which comes to us through Christ.
As Paul writes to the Corinthians (2 Cor. 5:19),
“God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself,
not counting their trespasses against them,
and entrusting the message of reconciliation to us.”
The truth that we must proclaim is not simply
the truth of past and present harms,
but the truth of God’s on-going work of reconciliation,
a work that is rooted in and grows from
the painful moment of truth-telling that is the cross,
in which we see displayed the reality of divine love
against the backdrop of human evil.

Let us pray that God would give us
the grace to know the truth
and to bear that truth in love
to a world in search of reconciliation and repair.
And may God have mercy on us all.