23rd Sunday of Ordinary Time (2023)

David Brooks is a moderately conservative political and cultural columnist for the New York Times and a pundit on NPR and the PBS News Hour. He wrote an article for this month’s Atlantic Monthly entitled “How America Got So Mean.” In his article, Brooks claims our country is experiencing a moral convulsion. Incidents of bad behavior and hatred are on the rise. Social trust has plummeted, and anxiety and despair are escalating.

All of us have heard numerous stories of incidents where travelers have been kicked off planes, diners escorted out of restaurants, and customers banished from stores because of their rudeness. These angry and hurtful attitudes undergird our current political dysfunction and threaten democracy in our country.

In the article, Brooks attributes the decline in civility to the demise of moral formation. He contends that the founding fathers of our country had a dim view of human nature and the innate ability of most people to put aside self-interest in favor of the common good. They recognized the need for education to establish a moral foundation for our society. For the first hundred and fifty years of our country’s history, our culture used schools, churches, and other institutions to promote moral formation. The educational system emphasized training hearts and bodies, and the importance of developing reasoning brains was secondary. They implemented this training through books and other instructional materials but mainly through the repetition of moral behavior. They believed training people in virtue was even more important than developing their intellectual abilities.

Brooks alleges that all changed after World War II when the emphasis of education shifted to developing children’s self-awareness. Education began to propose human nature was basically good and discounted the need for moral training. In those years, higher education shifted its purpose away from the humanistic ideal of culturizing the whole student and embraced the research ideal as its central purpose.

Brooks alleges this abandonment of education’s role in moral formation created “A culture that leaves people morally naked and alone without the skills to be decent to one another.” Brooks contends that we have developed a society where sadness, loneliness, and self-harm cause many to turn to bitterness. 

While Brooks’ commentary is basically secular, he included the importance of religious faith in constructing a civil society. He points out that while faith doesn’t automatically produce people with moral goodness, it exposes us to values that help us become morally good people.

Brooks encourages a return to a system to promote a more respectful and moral society. He cautions about an attempt to replicate the past. He doesn’t endorse a return to the Nineteenth Century ethical culture that often shamed people into conforming to a racist and sexist worldview.

Today and for the next several weeks, the gospel passages will come from that part of Matthew’s Gospel that Biblical scholars call Jesus’ Community Discourse. In this gospel section, Jesus preaches and shares several parables regarding how Christians are to implement God’s unchanging wisdom regarding how we should approach conflict with our brothers and sisters and interact with them successfully. Jesus will share the principles and attitudes we need to nurture if we want our interactions with others to reflect God’s love.

Christianity is not individualistic. Faith isn’t only something between God and us, but lived out in relationship with others. We practice Christianity in a community with brothers and sisters of similar beliefs to bring unity to the world as God desires. That isn’t effortless work but a very challenging call that needs love to fulfill it.

In today’s reading from his Letter to the Romans, St. Paul tells his listeners that to work towards unity means they must love others as God loves them. Our modern culture usually equates love with sentimentality. We view it as an emotional state. Biblical love is different. It isn’t about how God feels about us, but what God does for us. Biblical love is acting for the good of others. It is about working to bring healing to people we have never met. Biblical love is sacrificing for others even if they are different from us. The love of God is the desire for a relationship with every one of our sisters and brothers, even if they belong to another racial group, don’t have immigration papers, have different sexual preferences, or belong to another political party. Biblical love requires us to always work for the good of others.

Loving others isn’t easy. It is often challenging. Love doesn’t mean we overlook hurt and sinful behavior. Being a loving person doesn’t mean we allow for abuse of ourselves or others. Loving our neighbor isn’t admitting to a wrongheaded reluctance to confront violence and other harmful behavior. Being non-confrontational in the face of abuse isn’t loving.

Matthew’s Jesus instructs His disciples to reach out to the one who sins against them. He encourages them to spare no effort to help them admit their faults and make things right again. We need to hold the sinner accountable. Accountability doesn’t necessarily mean we seek to punish the hurtful person. It means we make sure they understand the consequences of their actions. Our motivation shouldn’t be to shame someone we feel has injured us but to help them not continue hurtful behavior.

Jesus says we do that by making plans to meet with the offender face to face. We can’t sit wallowing and brooding in our anger. That only leads to the development of a grudge and resentment. Instead, we must take the time to formulate a verbal recounting of our feelings after an incident. When we do that, we often realize the insignificance of our hurt and don’t let anger grasp us.

Jesus says we should personally approach the one who injured us to begin reconciliation. Letters and phone calls often embroil a conflict rather than ease it. When we discuss a dispute with someone face to face, we can gauge their response through our interaction. We can witness body language, which is very expressive in a private conversation. We don’t always react well to the written word because it can lack nuance and come across as cold. The same can happen in a telephone conversation that fails at revealing each party’s facial expressions. 

If personal reconciliation fails, then we need to work on collaboration. We don’t enlist the support of others in an attempt to gang up on the offender but rather to seek others’ wisdom. Consulting with others isn’t just to have a place to vent, although that might be an excellent starting point. Listen to our consultors’ insights after the emotional release of our frustration. Appreciate other’s input and try to implement it. The collaboration phase is the stage to lean on prayer, too. Ask Jesus’ guidance. What would Jesus do to help resolve the conflict?

If that doesn’t resolve the situation, the challenging point comes. It is when we must practice genuine love. At that point in Jesus’ preaching, He called us to treat the offender as if they were a Gentile or Tax Collector.

Wait a minute, does that mean we give up on the offender, wash our hands of them, and condemn them? How did Jesus react in such situations?

When faced with that challenge, we may have to separate ourselves from the hurtful person. When the scribes and Pharisees refused to listen to Jesus, he had to walk away, just commending them to God. For His well-being, He couldn’t allow them to sap His energy in a useless debate they refused to listen to. In similar circumstances, we may have to separate from another person. That doesn’t mean we stop loving them and being concerned about them. Jesus always remained concerned about the welfare of tax collectors, sinners, Gentiles, scribes, and Pharisees. He was always ready to welcome them when they sought His presence. That is how we need to treat the hurtful person. We need to do them no harm but good if need be. Be ready to welcome them back if they desire our forgiveness. We can never give up preparing to welcome them back to a right relationship with us.   

God called the prophet Ezekiel to be a watchman over the people. God told him it was his responsibility to warn them of the dangers they were facing, but it was the responsibility of the people to respond. God is warning us that our indifference to the moral deterioration of our society can’t continue. It is undermining our religious and civil lives. It threatens our democracy. We must stop listening to immoral voices that are perpetuating this condition.

In the final paragraph of his article, Brooks pointed out that he understands many people shy away from speaking about moralistic behavior because so many who do are hypocritical. Healthy moral energy doesn’t just happen, he says. Concerned individuals and communities must plant and nurture its seeds. Brooks says moral education succeeds when we teach it with humility.

We will soon enter the Liturgy of the Eucharist when our loving God sends the real presence of Christ to fill us with God’s grace to courageously do our part to build up God’s Kingdom in our midst. God will give us the power to help bring about a moral society. Open your heart to displace the anger, mistrust, and prejudice lurking in the shadows with God’s sacrificial love. Help the Church lift those who feel marginalized and ignored to feel included, seen, and respected rather than sad and lonely.