This Sunday, Stop Silently Watching Sinners Wound Themselves

This Sunday’s readings amount to a giant rebuke to the greatest sin of our day: the loss of the sense of sin.

Here are seven takeaways for the Twenty-third Sunday of Ordinary Time Year A drawn from Sunday Readings columns at this site and the Extraordinary Story podcast.

First: Last week, with Peter, we learned that we have to stop correcting Jesus. This week we get an even harder command: We have to start correcting our friends.

“If your brother sins against you, go and tell him his fault between you and him alone,” Jesus says.

We would rather do anything but that. We would rather tolerate the wrong, or drop all contact with the person — or, if we’re mad enough, maybe signal our disapproval passive-aggressively. If we must confront the sinner, we would prefer to do it by email. But generally, we would be willing to talk to any number of people about the sin we suffered. Anybody except the sinner.

But, “If he listens to you,” says Jesus, “you have won over your brother.”

That is the goal — to gain a brother or sister. Not to avenge a wrong, not to shame the sinner, not to right an injustice, even. This is why it is done in private. The goal is to decrease sin’s grip on the world — and increase Christ’s — by one soul.

Second: This is part of a comprehensive overhaul of our attitude toward sinners that Jesus advocates.

This Gospel passage comes from Matthew, Chapter 18, which paints a detailed picture of Jesus’s hatred for sin.

• First, he says, “Whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin” would be better off thrown into the sea with a millstone.
• Next, he adds, “Woe to the man by whom temptation comes!”
• Then he advises, “Leave the ninety-nine on the hills and go in search of the one that went astray.”

Clearly Jesus really, really hates sin. But notice that none of the advice here is directed at sinners. It is directed at those who live with sinners. That is what he is saying in Sunday’s Gospel too. “He does not say ‘accuse him’ or ‘punish him’ or ‘take him to court,’” St. John Chrysostom points out. “He says ‘correct him.’ … Help him see his indiscretion. Tell him what you have suffered from him.”

Third: Where sin is involved, Jesus agrees with the old adage, “Silence is consent.”

As the prophet Ezekiel makes clear in this Sunday’s First Reading, “the wicked shall die for his guilt, but [the Lord] will hold you responsible for his death,” if you never warned him. Jesus says the same thing: Abetting sin will earn you a millstone. If you stick with the 99 and refuse to rescue the sinner, that sin is on you.

More than that, St. Augustine says that to fail to correct a sinner is itself a sin:

“If you fail to do so, you are worse than he is. He has done someone harm, and by doing harm he has stricken himself with a grievous wound. Will you then completely disregard his predicament? If so, you are worse in your silence than he in his abuse.”

We all know the Seven Corporal Works of Mercy, but the Seven Spiritual Works of Mercy are just as important:“Counsel the doubtful, instruct the ignorant, admonish sinners, comfort the afflicted, forgive offenses, bear wrongs patiently, and pray for the living and the dead.”

Dorothy Day saw all of these as the daily stuff of a Christian life. “Everything a baptized person does every day should be directly or indirectly related to the Corporal and Spiritual Works of Mercy.” Including admonishing the sinner.

The Baltimore Catechism asks and answers the important question: “When are we bound to admonish the sinner?”

“We are bound to admonish the sinner when the following conditions are fulfilled:
1. When his fault is a mortal sin;
2. When we have authority or influence over him, and
3. When there is reason to believe that our warning will not make him worse instead of better.”

That means that we must admonish many of our family and friends, we should admonish certain people in our social circles, and we could admonish anyone who might respect our opinion.

Fourth: Think of what would change in the world if we followed Jesus’s advice.

Imagine a world where more people stood up to bullies, steered people away from dead-end decisions, and insisted on truth in charity instead of giving in to comforting lies.

In Sunday’s Second Reading, St. Paul says we “owe nothing to anyone, except to love one another,” and stresses several commandments: “You shall not commit adultery; you shall not kill; you shall not steal; you shall not covet.”

Imagine we imitated him in that. Imagine we warned that sex outside of marriage leaves you broken, admitted that abortion leaves one dead and one wounded, insisted that consumerism steals from the poor, and tried to outdo each other in honor instead of possessions.

“Love does no evil to the neighbor,” St. Paul says in the Second Reading.

If sins were poisons that killed people, it would be obvious what we are doing when we tolerate sin. But sins are poisonous, spiritually and eternally, because, as the Catechism puts it (No. 1861), mortal sin “causes exclusion from Christ’s kingdom and the eternal death of hell, for our freedom has the power to make choices for ever, with no turning back.”

As the Fatima shepherd girl Jacinta said, “How sorry I am for sinners! If I could only show them hell!” And, “I want to suffer for the conversion of sinners.”

Fifth: Next, Jesus adds a safeguard for both the admonisher and the sinner.

“If he does not listen, take one or two others along with you, so that ‘every fact may be established on the testimony of two or three witnesses,’” says Jesus, using the Mosaic Law’s standard.

This is necessary for the two people who might very well be obstinately in the wrong here — the sinner or the accuser. Often, when you seek out a potential witness, you will hear the advice, “Don’t you think you’re blowing this out of proportion?” And often, you are.

But if there is a real sin involved, and it is bad enough that it deserves a rescue mission, even one as awkward as involving other witnesses, it is worth it. Sin is that dangerous.

St. Jerome makes a further distinction that is important: “If our brother has sinned against us and damaged us in anything, we have the power of dismissing it, in fact the obligation to do so,” he says. But “if anyone sins against God, it is not in our control.” It’s not our place to dismiss that sin. God has to. So then it becomes necessary for us to do the hard thing and bring that person to repentance.

The problem is, we get this exactly backwards, says St. Jerome. We “are lenient over a sin against God but act out our hatred when we ourselves are insulted.” We demand total respect for ourselves — but tolerate grave disrespect for God.

Sixth: That’s why Jesus gives enormous authority to the Church.

If the sinner refuses to listen to your witnesses, says Jesus, “tell the church.”

What does that mean, practically? It means that the Church has a duty to be aware of and act against sin in a community. In fact, for the Church, “whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.” That means the Church has the power to loose people from sin.

This was clear recently when the Vatican warned  that a planned consecration of bishops by the Society of St. Pius X would be a  schismatic act, resulting in automatic excommunication for those involved. Pope Leo XIV even begged the Society not to do it, saying:

“In this spirit, and filled with Christian affection, I plead with you and ask you with all my heart: Please turn back.”

The Society refused. But Pope Leo gave us a valuable lesson: If necessary, we shouldn’t be above begging people not to sin.

Seventh: Not everyone will follow, but each of us is meant to be the light that leads people out of darkness.

Jesus says at the end of the Gospel: “For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them.”

Jesus is present in many ways, says the Catechism (No. 1373):

He is present “in his word, in his Church’s prayer, ‘where two or three are gathered in my name,’ in the poor, the sick, and the imprisoned, in the sacraments of which he is the author, in the sacrifice of the Mass, and in the person of the minister.”

In other words, he is there in those we have sinned against and in those whose sins we witnessed. He is there in the confessional waiting to forgive our sins, and he is there in the priest serving as his minister of mercy.

“But he is present . . . most especially in the Eucharistic species,” the Catechism adds.

In the Eucharist, he is present body, blood, soul and divinity — the whole Christ — where he wants to unite with us at communion so that that we can go out and bring his mercy to the sinners he loves.

Image: PickPik

By Tom Hoopes