Unity Through Fraternal Correction, 19th Wednesday (I), August 16, 2023

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Wednesday of the 19th Week of Ordinary Time, Year I
Memorial of St. Stephen of Hungary
August 16, 2023
Dt 34:1-12, Ps 66, Mt 18:15-20

To listen to an audio of today’s homily, please click here: 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• Today we come to the end of the dramatic life of Moses. He was God’s instrument not only to liberate God’s people from slavery in Egypt and lead them through the desert to the promised land but to keep them united in the Covenant with God and in love for each other through the desert. That was, as we’ve seen over the last month at daily Mass, very challenging work. Moses often had to correct the people on God’s behalf, to remind them of how they were sinning, how sin destroys communion, and to inspire them to care for those in need, especially those vulnerable to be overlooked, like widow, the orphan and the stranger.
• What Moses did was a prophecy of the work of Jesus, who came down to unite us in a family, to bring us through the communion of saints somehow, mysteriously, according to our condition as creatures, into the communion of the Blessed Trinity, Father, Son and the Holy Spirit. And to do that, he similarly needed to correct us, to help us repent and believe, and to show us how to follow him toward communion with the Father and with others. He prayed during the Last Supper that we might be one as the Father and He are one, so that the world might believe that the Father sent the Son and loves us like he loves the Son (Jn 17). When he ascended, he left that Mission of constructively correcting and unifying the human race to the Church.
• That’s what we see in today’s Gospel. Jesus shows us the power of unity, telling us that whenever just two or three gather in his name, he’ll be present in the midst; when we pray united in his name to the Father, the Father will hear it; when we in his name bind something on earth it will be bound even in heaven and when we loose something on earth in his name, it will be loosed in heaven. To pray in Jesus’ name means to pray conscious of the fact that God is-with-us (the name Emmanuel) to save us (the name Jesus), to unite us, to rescue us from rupture and division, to help us to follow him and to become his icon in the middle of the world carrying out God’s plan to restore and unite all things. The devil’s plan, on the other hand, is always to divide. The word diabolos in Greek signifies one who attempts to throw off course. The consequences of sin are always a triple division, a division with God, with others, and within ourselves. The devil’s work is to get us to try to make a name for ourselves individually, rather than hallow and pray in God’s name and reveal by our communion that we know we have but one Father.
• Jesus also tells us what we wants us to do when we’ve succumbed to the temptations of the great Divider and experienced the division the devil seeks to provoke. It’s what the Church traditionally has called “fraternal correction.” It’s key for us to grasp Jesus isn’t giving this as “good advice” but as a series of imperatives. He commands us to do fraternal correction, because it’s crucial within his saving plans. This form of love and spiritual work of mercy essential to the restoration of unity. Today we can ponder the steps he gives us and why each is important.
• The first step involves a one-on-one encounter. Jesus says, “If your brother sins against you, go and tell him his fault between you and him alone. If he listens to you, you have won over your brother.” Notice that Jesus says, “If your brother sins against you.” He’s telling us if we’ve been hurt by a brother, he does not want us to sit in the corner stewing and sulking as the aggrieved party, but to take the initiative to let the other know the way he has sinned and provide an occasion for reconciliation and the restoration of unity. Jesus doesn’t command us, “Wait until your brother comes to his senses, repents and crawls back to implore your mercy.” He wants us to make the move. This is, of course, what God has done for us in Christ. Even though we sinned against him, he took the initiative in coming to bring about a reconciliation. We’re presently living in an age in which some people think that the greatest commandment is to be “nice,” to “live and let live,” to be “tolerant” of others’ sins, and never to confront someone lest we risk making them feel unhappy, which treats cowardice in failing to help someone correct a bad habit as a virtue of “not disturbing the peace,” forgetting that we’ll never have peace as long as someone is dividing himself from God, us, and within himself. We’ve got to overcome our aversion to conflict and take the risk. We can say two other things here.
  • First, if we are the party who has wronged the other, Jesus presumes that we would go to our brother one-on-one and confess our fault and beg for forgiveness and reconciliation. We shouldn’t always wait for the aggrieved to make the move. Part of repentance is saying sorry.
  • Second, Jesus presumes that if we’re going to our brother, we have already followed the advice he gave us earlier in the Sermon on the Mount: “How can you say to your brother, ‘Let me remove that splinter from your eye,’ while the wooden beam is in your eye? You hypocrite, remove the wooden beam from your eye first; then you will see clearly to remove the splinter from your brother’s eye.” Jesus wants us going to correct our brother out of charity not in order to make ourselves feel better by lifting ourselves up by stepping on them. He wants us not to criticize them for a fault we see in ourselves, but, first to work on our own conversion before we go and call others to conversion. Sometimes removing the plank doesn’t mean totally overcoming the bad habit, but minimally recognizing we have it. If we’re in that circumstance, we can say to our brother that we’re guilty of the same fault, which has made us even more sensitive as to how it can harm both the doer and others. What we can’t do is to deflect the attention for correcting ourselves by correcting others, for that never really works on either end.
• Jesus tells us clearly that such a one-on-one intervention may not always work. We may not “win over our brother” to unity. He may remain divided. Jesus doesn’t say that we can then wipe our hands of the situation and say, “Well, I tried…” No, winning our brother back to communion is so important that Jesus then turns to a second step: “If he does not listen, take one or two others along with you” to make the same correction. Jesus doesn’t want us spreading it to everyone, ruining our brother’s reputation, but he recognizes that sometimes the person won’t change at just one person’s word, but may change if two or three people he or she respects comes, because then it might seem so personal. (At the same time, what may happen when we go to a couple of other respected people is that they may think we’re making too much out of it.)
• But Jesus prepares us not to quit even if the second step fails. Love for bringing our erring sister back to communion leads us to the third step: “If he refuses to listen to them, tell the Church.” We bring it to the leaders of the community to ask for their assistance, hoping that our brother will recognize it’s serious if representatives of the whole community come to them. It’s also a direct request for the prayers of the whole community.
• If the person refuses to correct even at the assistance of the leaders and members of the Church, if the person thinks he knows better than the Church and the Holy Spirit working through the clergy and all the faith, Jesus gives us a fourth step: “If he refuses to listen even to the Church, then treat him as you would a Gentile or a tax collector.” If all the steps fail, Jesus tells us to recognize that they’re not in communion, just as the Gentiles and tax-collectors were not in communion with the Jews. But treating them like a Gentile and tax-collector doesn’t mean writing them off. Jesus, after all, was a “friend of tax collectors and sinners” and sought to bring the light to all the Gentiles. To treat them in such a way means acknowledging clearly they’re not living as a member of the community, but at the same time insistently praying for their conversion, acknowledging that they’re obstinately refusing to convert.
• We know that this procedure of loving fraternal correction happens often with those who are addicted to drugs or booze. At first one of us individually tries to help our brother admit that he has a problem. If that fails, we try to talk to him with a couple of others. If that fails, normally we do an intervention, when ten or twelve people the person respects all convene to convince the person that we’re not all deceived and that we all recognize he has a problem and out of love want to help him get help. This is a real act of love for the person who is addicted and many of us have been involved in those types of interventions. The person often doesn’t like to hear it, but he recognizes that the people in the room love him and he grasps that he can’t remain in denial about his illness. We need to be willing to do this when we’re addicted to serious sins just like family members and friends do it for loved ones who are addicted to alcohol or narcotics.
• Today the Church celebrates the memorial of Saint Stephen of Hungary, who is a great saint of unity who, as king, often similarly needed to bring about restored unity through correcting faults and abuses. As a boy he converted to Christianity and when he ascended to the throne, he sought to share this gift with the people entrusted to him. He brought in monks to build monasteries and to begin proposing the Gospel to his people, so that they might come to God and live in communion with him and the Church. But where we see it most is in his relationship with his son, Emeric, whom he assumed would ascend the throne after him but who died in a hunting accident young in life and was buried by his father. While Emeric never ended up assuming an earthly kingdom, he received the far more important Kingdom with faith, so much so that he was canonized together with his father. In St. Stephen’s “Admonitions” to his son, Emeric, which are basically a guide book about how to rule well as king, he constantly sought to bring Emeric to God and to persuade Emeric to bring the people entrusted to them to God. We’ll focus only on what he said about fraternal correction and the remedying of disorder: “Dearest son, even now in our kingdom the Church is proclaimed as young and newly planted; and for that reason she needs more prudent and trustworthy guardians lest a benefit that the divine mercy bestowed on us undeservedly should be destroyed and annihilated through your idleness, indolence or neglect.” As both a Christian and the ruler of a realm, he grasped that a divided kingdom cannot stand, and he didn’t neglect nor want Emeric to neglect this basic responsibility. His capacity to give fraternal correction out of love in the Lord’s name, and to receive it, is one of the reasons why generations then and since — as well as the Church — have justly honored him as a saint.
• Wherever two or three are gathered in Jesus’ name, he promises to be among us. Today we’ve gathered in his name and he comes in the continuation of the Last Supper to try to fulfill his prayer to the Father than we might all be one. By entering into a Holy Communion with Him, he seeks to make us one Body, one Spirit with each other. Let us ask him to fill us with so great a desire for this unity that we may seek to do all things in his name with others and to go out to bring others into this same life-saving, holy communion. That is the means by which, as we look toward the eternal promised land as Moses looked at the earthly holy land, we may in fact cross over to it with St. Stephen and all our brothers and sisters whom the devil is trying to divide now and forever from God and us.

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

Reading 1
DT 34:1-12

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