06/09/2026
"If your brother sins against you, go and tell him his fault, between you and him alone. If he listens to you, you have gained your brother." (Matthew 18:15)
Notice what Jesus does not say. He does not say: be patient, forgive him quietly, and leave it alone. He does not say: it is not your business, keep your own counsel, maintain the peace. He says: go. Actively. Personally. Privately. And the goal he names is not your own vindication, not even justice in the abstract, but something more costly and more beautiful: you have gained your brother.
This is the theme the Church places before us today — and it is a considerably more demanding one than the word "forgiveness" tends to suggest. What today's readings are actually about is the radical, inconvenient, easily avoided moral responsibility we bear for one another. Not the responsibility of judgment. Not the responsibility of policing. But the responsibility of a love that refuses to leave the other person alone in their harm.
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Ezekiel is appointed a watchman. The image comes from the ancient city wall — the person whose role was to scan the horizon and sound the alarm when danger was approaching. And God's word to him is clear, and sobering:
"If I say to the wicked, 'You shall surely die,' and you do not warn them or speak out to dissuade the wicked from their wicked ways in order to save their lives, those wicked persons shall die in their sins, but I will hold you responsible for their blood."
— Ezekiel 33:8
This is one of the most morally uncomfortable passages in the Old Testament, and it is uncomfortable in a specific direction: it tells us that silence is not neutrality. The watchman who sees the danger and says nothing — not out of malice, but out of conflict-avoidance, or a desire not to interfere, or a simple preference for the quiet life — that watchman is guilty. Not as guilty as the person who committed the sin, but guilty nonetheless. The blood is on his hand.
We live in a culture that has made minding your own business into a supreme virtue. Non-judgmentalism — the refusal to name another person's actions as harmful — is often presented as the highest form of respect for their autonomy. And there is something genuinely important in the tradition of allowing people the space to make their own choices, of not reducing every relationship to an opportunity for moral instruction, of recognising that we are frequently wrong about what we think we see in others.
But Ezekiel draws a line that cannot be erased by cultural preference: when you can see that someone is heading toward genuine harm — moral, spiritual, relational harm of the kind that matters for their flourishing and ultimately for their salvation — and you say nothing, the silence is itself an act. A choice. With consequences that God will hold you accountable for.
This is not a comfortable teaching. It was not meant to be.
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But before we use Ezekiel to justify the kind of self-righteous interference that makes religious people insufferable, we need to read Matthew 18 with careful attention — because the process Jesus outlines is a far more demanding and humbling thing than simply speaking our minds.
The first instruction is the hardest: "go and tell him his fault between you and him alone." Not in a group. Not on social media. Not in a conversation with mutual friends where you can rehearse your grievances to a sympathetic audience. Alone. Face to face. With the person themselves. In private, which means your words cannot be performed for anyone else's benefit, cannot be designed to establish your position in the community's esteem, cannot be anything other than a direct and personal act of care for the one who has hurt you or who is harming themselves.
This is, in practice, the step almost never taken. It is far easier — and far more comfortable — to mention it to someone else, to withdraw silently from the relationship, to lower your opinion of the person and adjust your behaviour accordingly without ever naming what has changed. These responses feel like minding your own business. Matthew 18 names them as failures of love.
The reason the private approach is so hard is precisely the reason it is the right one: it requires you to be genuinely invested in the outcome. You cannot go privately unless you actually want the relationship restored. You cannot look someone in the eye and name their fault unless you care enough about them to accept the risk that they will reject you, resent you, or deny everything. The private conversation demands a kind of love that is willing to be hurt in the attempt to help.
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And notice the goal Jesus names at every step. Not: so that you can be shown to be right. Not: so that justice can be seen to be done. But: "you have gained your brother." The whole process is oriented toward restoration. The brother or sister is not a problem to be managed or a sinner to be condemned. They are someone to be gained — recovered, brought back, restored to the relationship that their sin has damaged.
Even when the process fails — when the person refuses to listen privately, refuses before witnesses, refuses even the Church — the language is not condemnation but grief. "Let them be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector." And how did Jesus treat Gentiles and tax collectors? He ate with them. He called them. He did not write them off. The final step in the process is not excommunication from the person's heart but the honest acknowledgement that the relationship, for now, cannot be what it was — and the continued openness to restoration if the person turns.
The binding and loosing that follows — "whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven" — is not a grant of arbitrary power to exclude or condemn. It is the authority to name reality: to name when a relationship has been genuinely broken and when it has been genuinely restored. The community that exercises this authority in the spirit Matthew describes — humbly, privately first, always oriented toward gaining the brother — is the community in whose midst Christ promises to be present: "where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I among them."
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Paul gives us the one ground from which all of this can be done without becoming self-righteous, punitive, or spiritually proud:
"Owe nothing to anyone, except to love one another; for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law… Love does no evil to the neighbour; hence, love is the fulfilment of the law."
— Romans 13:8, 10
The debt of love never runs out. It is the one obligation that is never discharged — not because God is demanding but because love, by its nature, is always finding new ways to express itself, new needs to respond to, new forms of service to offer. And Paul's summary — love does no evil to the neighbour — is the criterion by which all fraternal correction must be tested. If what I am about to say to my brother is motivated by my wounded pride, my desire to be right, my need to establish my moral superiority — it is not love. It will do evil even if every word is factually accurate.
But if I go privately, with genuine fear and trembling, genuinely hoping he will listen, genuinely dreading the awkwardness and the risk, genuinely willing to be wrong about what I think I have seen — if I go like that, driven by nothing more than the unwillingness to let this person I love continue on a road that leads somewhere harmful — then what I am doing is what Paul calls love. The fulfilment of the law. The one debt that never runs out.
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Psalm 95 names the interior condition that the whole of today's readings requires — on both sides of the conversation:
"If today you hear his voice, harden not your hearts."
The hardened heart is what makes fraternal correction impossible. On the side of the one who should speak: the heart hardened by conflict-avoidance, by the comfortable fiction that it is none of their business, by the fear of being disliked. On the side of the one who should hear: the heart hardened by pride, by defensiveness, by the refusal to be named. The Psalm is the prayer of the soft heart — the heart that is still permeable, still capable of being reached, still willing to hear a voice that is saying something it would rather not hear.
The community gathered in Christ's name today — this community, at this Mass — is the community whose vocation it is to practice this love. Not the love that leaves each other alone. Not the love that is too polite to speak. But the love that goes, privately, in fear and genuine care, and says: I cannot watch you go this way and say nothing. Because you are my brother. Because you are my sister. Because you have been gained for me by the same blood that has gained me for you.
And I am not willing to lose you.
A most blessed 23rd Sunday to all. May we find, in today's Mass, the love that is willing to go — and the heart that is willing to hear. 🙏
