Episode Transcript
[00:00:12] Speaker A: Welcome to the Blessed Sacrament Homilies podcast, where our mission is to help everyone recognize and experience the presence of God. We hope you are nourished and encouraged by the Word. Thank you for joining us.
[00:00:26] Speaker B: The Lord be with you and with your spirit. A reading from the Holy Gospel according to Matthew. Glory to you, O Lord Jesus said to his disciples, 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.
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.
If he refuses to listen to them, tell the Church. If he refuses to listen even to the Church, then treat him as you would a Gentile or a tax collector.
Amen. I say to you, whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.
Again, Amen. I say to you, if two of you agree on earth about anything for which they are to pray, it shall be granted to them by my Heavenly Father.
For where two or three are gathered together in My name, there am I in the midst of them. The Gospel of the Lord.
Praise to you, Lord Jesus Christ.
I've learned over the years that one of the best techniques for describing our experience of what God is like in our lives is to draw a contrast with something that is close to the opposite of what God is like.
And I can think of no more accurate description to contrast God with than what I'm like.
So I want to do that now.
God in Christ was always infinitely patient in how he taught us.
He would teach us not just by word, but by example, so that gradually we would begin to understand what is our best nature, how we best live out our lives, relate with one another, treat one another, and live together in harmony with one another.
And here's where I'm the opposite. If I understand something, I have a real, real difficult time trying to understand why other people can't understand it.
And my patience level, unlike God's infinite, is very finite.
So I am quick to become frustrated and quick to show my impatient. Why can't they just get this now?
That truth rarely, if ever helps anybody.
It doesn't help the person I'm working with.
It doesn't help my blood pressure.
It does nothing.
But again, God in Christ was the opposite.
And in today's Scriptures we hear some examples of how he taught and what he expected.
In the Gospel, we see how we can deal with disagreements, discrepancies and arguments with our brothers and sisters that we do it with patience, but also allowing other people's understanding to enter in.
We talk things out, and in talking things out, we can begin to work them out.
But there's another part of that story. And what does he say at the end of it? He said, if you can't come to an agreement, treat them as you would a Gentile or a tax collector. Well, what did he mean by that?
He meant something that's actually quite simple, because what does he tell us to do?
Love our neighbor as ourselves. So even the Gentile or the tax collector, we can't leave with frustration and anger toward them.
We still are required to love them.
And in the reading from the Romans, that's where that all comes into play.
The heart of what the Christian life is is to love our neighbor and to love ourselves.
Both of those things are central.
To love our neighbor means that we are willing to look past our neighbor's faults and see them as God sees them.
And to love ourselves is equally true.
We have to be willing to look past our own faults because we all have them.
That doesn't mean we don't try to change. That doesn't mean we don't try to get better.
But we never get to a point where we give up on either our neighbor or ourselves.
We recognize that if God is infinitely patient with me, I need to be patient with myself.
