TEXT: The Holy Gospel According to St. Matthew 18:15-20

St. Jerome has told us that, "Love has no rule,"  ("amor ordinem nescit"), Letter to Chromatius (4-5 century).

St. Bernard has told us, "Love is the gift of the Holy Ghost by which those who have already attained the first step of truth through humility under the Son’s training may advance to the second through sympathy for neighbor under the Holy Ghost’s teaching."  The Steps of Humility, 7.

Jesus tells us,

15   "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.

We are the Body of Christ, the People of God.  We are brothers and sisters together in Christ.  Love must flow from God through us, because we are new creations in Christ Jesus.  We do not live by the rules of the world, where we exact what we do through self interest.  We live by a higher "law."  That is the law of love which we learned from Jesus.

The Holy Spirit, indeed, teaches us more and ever so much more, as we grow in the grace and the knowledge of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.

Therefore,  "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."  It is the will of God that we gain our brother, that we address the sins and faults we have with one another so that true reconciliation may become the norm of living in a world that does not always seek reconciliation in Christ.  We, as Christians, are to be examples of how "God so loved the world," in a world that seeks to see the leadership of those who are new creations in Christ.

It is love lived out that men seek to see, because we see so little of the genuine in the world’s ways.

Yet, there is the hardness of heart, when we follow the world’s ways, instead of the Way, the Truth and the Life.

16 But if he does not listen, take one or two others along with you, that every word may be confirmed by the evidence of two or three witnesses.
17 If he refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church; and if he refuses to listen even to the church, let him be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector.

How sadly Jesus uttered these words.

Let them be "as" we think of those we loathe to see coming toward us, the tax collector, or those who deny the One true God and follow the world.  God calls us to the obedience of faith.  God calls us to love the community of the faithful, as we love God alone.

The community is the People of God, the Church.  It binds on earth, because God has made it so.  In the Church is the apostolic authority given by Jesus to Peter, the apostles, then, passed down by the laying on of hands.  We are not "free agents" to do as we please without regard to the People of God, the Church.  God calls us to love God and one another in Christ.

18 Truly, 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.

To love God and the Church is to reconcile ourselves with God in the Church and through the Church’s sacraments.  God creates us in Christ Jesus for a purpose.  Our purpose is to love God who so loved us and love one another as God so loves.

St. Francis de Sales said -- "Love is the movement, effusion and advancement of the heart toward the good."  Treatise on the Love of God, I, 7

GOD CALLS the People of God to the vocation of Love, to Jesus, to union with God, toward the Good God who loves and desires for us to love with all the heart and mind, completely!

With such union with God and one another in Love, we agree.

19  Again I say to you, if two of you agree on earth about anything they ask, it will be done for them by my Father in heaven.
20 For where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I in the midst of them."

May we, evermore until Christ returns, become the lovers of God, where the world sees God in the midst of us, even where two or three are gathered in the Holy Name of Jesus.

Maria, pray for us that we might be like you in this regard, adoration of our Lord, Jesus in the arms of Love’s adoring Mother.



Deus et Sanctissima.