Twenty-third Sunday in Ordinary Time

I am not sure that Jesus would recognize us anymore. I am not sure that he would recognize us as the community that he founded.

To be clear, I am not saying that he would fail to recognize the Church. He would recognize her worship, her structure, and her teaching. These are gifts he entrusted to her, and she has preserved them through the millennia. But would he recognize the way we live together as members of that Church?

Look at the community he describes in today’s Gospel. It is a community of love and care. Real, authentic love: the desire that the other person become holy and receive eternal life. It is a community bound together by Christ himself and by obedience to his commands.

And when one member sins, that love takes the sin seriously. The other members do not celebrate it. They do not ignore it. They confront it because they desire the person’s holiness and salvation.

Jesus gives us a process, and it begins with one person speaking privately to another. If the person will not listen, one or two others are brought in. If he still refuses to listen, the matter is brought to the Church, to the community Christ himself has called together. At every stage, the desire is the same: that this person repent, grow in holiness, and live in communion with the others.

And if he refuses to listen even to the Church, that refusal must be taken seriously. He is treated as someone outside the community because he has rejected the truth that binds it together. The purpose is not to satisfy a desire to punish. It is to recognize that he has rejected the communion being offered to him. A community that takes salvation seriously cannot act as though that rejection means nothing.

This is the community Christ describes: a people bound together by love, striving for holiness and eternal life. And that shared life is central to the lives of its members. They build their lives around the Church. Here they find relationships and friendships. Here they find growth in the spiritual life. Here they find support in becoming the people God calls them to be. The Church is where their life together takes shape.

We do not live that way. We live for ourselves. We treat ourselves as the highest and final authority. We look at this command Christ gives us and decide that it is harsh, that it is not merciful. We decide that we will be more compassionate than even he is. More compassionate than the one who was nailed to a cross for our salvation. That is what we tell ourselves. But it is a lie. We cannot place ourselves above the Lord and then call it love.

He is our King. He is our Creator. He is our God. And when he walked this earth, he established a Church. He gathered a community that he continues to protect and will never abandon. Cf. Matt 16:18; 28:20. Through assaults from within and without, he has preserved the faith he entrusted to her.

The community Christ established is the sure and certain way to salvation. She should be at the center of our lives. Her teaching should shape our choices, her life should shape our relationships, and her call to holiness should reach into every part of our day. When we rise, when we go out, and when we return to bed, the Church should be with us and guiding us.

That is why I fear that, if the Lord looked upon us today, he would recognize his Church but might not recognize us. We claim to belong to the community he founded, yet so often we refuse to live the life he gave it. We resist obedience. We resist accountability. We resist becoming a people who strive together for love and holiness, who spur one another on to become more and more like Christ. Cf. Heb 10:24–25.

And then we endlessly complain about the world. We wail and bemoan everything that has gone wrong, while ignoring what God has already given us: his Church, and the life of fidelity to every word he has entrusted to her to hand on in every age.

If we truly want this world to be better, if we truly want eternal life for ourselves, for our families and friends, and for everyone we meet, then we must live the life Christ has offered us. He has given us his Church to lead us to salvation. We cannot set aside his words and expect our own wills to take us there.

Let us become the community he calls us to be: faithful to his words, willing to hold one another accountable, and committed to one another’s holiness. Let us truly live the love Christ has given us, allowing his will to shape our life together. Let us seek his will, not our own.