Two-Minute Homily by Fr Adrian Sharp for the Twenty-Third Sunday in Ordinary Time 2023.
“True Christian love is not an emotion or a feeling. It is something we choose to do, empowered by God’s grace, realising that without the Lord we can do nothing.”
- Two-Minute Homily Transcript
Two-Minute Homily Transcript
Author: Archdiocese of Brisbane
The Word of God today reminds us particularly of our responsibilities towards others as Christians. The Prophet Ezekiel reminds us of the responsibility that we have at times to speak up. He speaks of himself being appointed by the Lord as a “sentry to the House of Israel.” The role of a sentry, or watchman, was to warn of danger. This reminds us of our Christian responsibility, and indeed our moral duty, to speak the truth about right and wrong, whether to society collectively or to individuals. There are various ways that we’re called do that, but as Christians we can’t sit back and be silent when there are attacks on innocent life, or when society is heading in the wrong moral direction, or when we see people we know damaging themselves. The Lord says, through Ezekiel, that we have a duty to speak. We have a responsibility to speak the truth to each other.Saint Paul then presents us with the duty to respect each other. Here he names some of the obligations that are summed up in the command to love our neighbour as our self; he lists, do not commit adultery, do not kill, do not steal, do not covet, and so on. We could restate these in the positive, we have the responsibility to respect other people’s life, to respect other people’s marriages, to respect other people’s property, and to respect other people’s integrity. And then today’s gospel reminds us of our responsibility to heal. The Church, at her beginning, had to deal with the fact that conflicts would emerge between believers; even between good people, there would be disagreements.
So, whilst we might be disenchanted at first at the realisation that the Church community is not perfect, we can take consolation from the fact that Our Lord has provided us a way to deal with conflict. The Church is, as Pope Francis has reminded us often, a field-hospital for the wounded or, as others have put it, a school for sinners, a place where we can seek and find healing, and strive for the holiness that we are called to. And so, let’s ask the Lord to help us to fulfil our responsibilities to speak, to respect and to heal. True Christian love is not an emotion or a feeling, but a responsibility and an obligation. It is something we choose to do, empowered by God’s grace realising that without the Lord we can do nothing.