XXIII SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME

Taking Care of Our Brothers and Sisters

Readings: Ezek 33:7-9; Rom 13:8-10; Mt 18:15-20

The modern world generally lives under the banner of selfishness, isolation, and lack of interest in others. “Think of yourself”, “Mind your own business”, “Don’t stick your nose into other people’s business”, “Homo homini lupus”, “Mors tua, vita mea”, “Small company, happy life”, “When I’m dead, everyone is dead”…: these are the current “maxims” of contemporary morality. God’s logic is completely different: our God is the God of relationship, He is the God of “justice” (in Hebrew “sedaqah” and in Greek “dikaiosyne”), which in the Bible means nothing other than His desire to be communication, communion, and solidarity.

God creates man so that he too may be relationship, with all of creation and above all with his fellow human beings. From Genesis, the mutual brotherhood of humanity is recalled: in the story of Cain and Abel (Gen 4:1-16), the key word “brother” (“‘ah”) occurs no fewer than seven times. And it is emphasized that each person is his brother’s keeper: everyone is responsible before God for the problems, suffering, and tragedies of others. Because “the voice of your brother’s blood cries out to me from the ground” (Gen 4:10), says the Lord: to Him we will have to account for all those who die of hunger, loneliness, curable diseases, poverty, and violence due to social, racial, economic, political, and religious conflicts: every person is my brother! Cain is driven away to a desert land (Gen 4:12,14); nevertheless, he too is a brother, and therefore he will bear a mark that will protect him from vengeance (Gen 4:15).

The awareness of being a people of brothers regulates social relations in Israel: Deuteronomy takes up all the provisions of Exodus, reinterpreting them in terms of brotherhood (Deut 15:1-15). Leviticus states: “You shall not hate your brother…, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Lev 19:17-18). The “brother” is not only the member of the same family, clan, or people, but also the foreigner (Lev 19:34).

Ezekiel reminds us, in the first Reading (Ezek 33:7-9), that every believer is responsible before God for the fate of brothers and sisters, and for them is made a watchman (“sopeh”), to announce to them the Word of the Lord. And Paul affirms that our entire faith must translate into entering the logic of the God of relationship: “love is the full fulfillment of the whole Law” (second Reading: Rom 13:10).

The Gospel (Mt 18:15-20) invites us to every effort to mend deep relationships with our brothers and sisters, making us ministers of true reconciliation and forgiveness. Faced with the worldly attitude of “Who cares!”, the Gospel calls us to what would become Don Milani’s motto: “I care”, “I take care of it”, “I am interested”.

The source of that miracle which is the transformation of our deserts of solitude and selfishness into the lush meadows of relationship and charity is Christ himself, always present wherever two or three are gathered in his name (Mt 18:20). And every Eucharist, a very special encounter with him, must impel us to create deep bonds of fraternity not only at a personal level but also at a community and social level. “The Eucharist is a reconciliation with God that is realized through a reconciliation among us and with things. The bread and wine are the «symbol of the goods of the earth and the work of human hands»: the symbol of oil, coal, copper, gold, bananas, sugar, coffee, manufactured goods, machinery, that is, all those goods that are the primary cause of our separations, of deep inequality between peoples, between nations, between man and man, the symbols of non-fraternity, of exclusion. The great theme that all generations find assigned to them as an essential task to perform…, is precisely the Eucharistic theme: the theme of equality among all people, of relationship and reconciliation” (A. Paoli).