Sharpening Each Other: 23rd Sunday OT

Jesus says that whenever two or three gather in His name, He’s with them. I think we’re meant to understand that larger groups work too; He’s emphasizing that even if it’s only two or three, He’ll be present. What’s a little surprising about this is that He does seem to be excluding a group of one.

Is Jesus not present with you if you’re alone? That sounds preposterous; of course He is. But why does He say He’ll be present whenever two or three gather? I think we’d have to agree that Jesus is always with us, regardless of what other company we’re in. But I think we’d also have to agree that there’s a way Jesus is among us when we’re in community that He just isn’t when we’re solitary. To put it another way, there’s a big part of a relationship with Jesus Christ that you simply can’t have without other people. Trying to do Christianity in solitude is like trying to play baseball in solitude: throwing the ball and planning to outrun it to take a swing, and then outrun it again with a catcher’s mitt if you whiff. If you can do that, maybe you’ve got a shot at doing Christianity alone too.


Proverbs 27:17 is the verse from Proverbs that I see quoted most often. “As iron sharpens iron, so man sharpens his fellow man.” Companionship in our Faith is just critical; you couldn’t overstate the importance. The better our companions, the better we are. The better our connections with true Christian companions, the more we advance ourselves.

There have been times in my life that I had very structured accountability relationships. The last version of this was with my friend Jeff. It was his idea and I was all for it, and we came up with a list of questions that we’d ask each other over the phone every week at a certain time. The questions included things as ordinary as “how many times did you cook this week?”, which Jeff put in there because it was something he wanted to do more of to be healthier. But the questions went deep, and it was no-hold-barred. We really went for it. We thought of the questions we’d be most embarrassed to be asked, most embarrassed to have to answer the wrong way, and those were the questions we added. I’ll tell you, it was fantastic. It really helped to resist our various temptations when we knew we’d have to tell somebody about it in a few days. It also helped with humility, believe me.

I was listening to one of the Lighthouse CD’s from the back there, the one by Mike Sweeney, and Mike was describing exactly the same kind of thing and how important it had been for him. So I don’t know how popular this kind of accountability relationship is, but if you want to really kick it up a notch in your moral and spiritual life, Mike Sweeney and I strongly recommend this practice. Find one companion, or a very small group, and let ‘er rip. If you don’t know anyone you could really imagine doing that with, maybe pray for God to arrange something.

But getting back to the bigger picture of companionship in Christ, both Ezekiel and Matthew touch on one of the trickiest bits of it: correction. How to correct someone in Christian charity. Both of the readings make it pretty clear that it’s easy to get it wrong, not that you needed to be told that. The fact is, it seems nearly impossible to get it right.

It’s so hard to correct someone well that we’re sorely tempted to not even try, but this is exactly what Ezekiel is saying we mustn’t do. If someone is sinning, and you’re in a position to correct them but don’t, then you are responsible along with them. There are limits to this. We aren’t called to go around correcting everyone about everything, of course not. But Ezekiel is clear: there are times when failing to call someone on their choices is a sharing in the sin. 

Matthew’s Gospel relates the teaching of Christ on how to do it, and this is where we find something that’s really helpful. It’s actually a three-step process that he describes, and it couldn’t be more practical. First, just confront the person in private. Right? How about that? Just imagine how much better the world would be if we just followed even this first step. Step one is not to find a passive-aggressive way to show your displeasure, or to call your friend and say “can you believe this?” even if you’re pretending to be asking guidance or something, but really you just need to vent and gossip. Step one is not to put something snarky or vaguely aggrieved on Facebook about how “some people need to learn that blah blah blah.” Nope… talk to the person. One on one.

Step two is to gang up on them, but only a little. Take one or two others along. That really may make the difference. Put yourself in the place of the one being confronted: it’s a lot easier to dismiss what one person is telling you. But if there are people agreeing, it’s harder to just say they’re crazy. It’s harder to brush it off. To put it in modern terms, this is something we might call an ‘intervention.’

The next step is to take it to the community. This one is a little harder to understand in a practical way; I’ll admit I’m not sure what to tell you about it. I suppose it just depends on the particulars. You can imagine someone really in trouble, who won’t listen to anyone, who finally realizes that, wow, everybody is really together in saying this is wrong… are they all crazy? Maybe I really am off-base. But it’s sort of hard to picture how this would work. I mean, I’m not going to call somebody up here before Mass and say, “Ed, we all think you drive too fast through the neighborhood.” That would be a Mass you’d remember, though. But maybe in the right situation there is a way to let someone know that they really are kind of dividing themselves from the community, that they really are on the wrong side of this thing according to pretty much everyone. If you do find a way to make that clear, it’ll be hard to ignore.

If they do ignore it, if they even ignore the church, Jesus says, treat them like a pagan or a tax collector. Does that mean shun them, look down on them, cut them off? No way! We know how Jesus treated pagans and tax collectors. He went to dinner at their houses. He hung out with them. He taught them. He didn’t treat them as inferiors or pariahs. He did treat them as people who needed the truth, who needed conversion, who he wanted to bring into the life of the Kingdom.

The extreme case of this that you see in action today is excommunication. This is exactly what excommunication is: someone has refused to listen to the Church, and is therefore treated as a pagan or tax collector. Treated as someone we hope to convert, someone Christ died for just like us, someone we hope will come into the fold.

The real test of all this is what Paul is talking about it Romans 13. “Love your neighbor as yourself” sums up every commandment. If you love someone, you care what they do. If I tell you I’ve decided to take up smoking crack, and you’re okay with that, then you don’t love me.

There comes a time when loving your neighbor means telling your neighbor that he or she is in the wrong. Ezekiel makes it clear that failure to do this is a serious fault. Paul makes it clear that all our obligations to each other are based in love. And Jesus himself gives us a quite practical sort of guide to going about it.

None of that makes it easy to carry out this very difficult act of love. It’s difficult to know whether it’s your place to address it. It’s difficult to bring it up. It’s difficult to know how to go about it. It’s difficult, sometimes, to move forward in the relationship afterwards. Just stay focused on the great commandment, and make sure that what is done and said is done and said in true Christian charity, for the good of the other, out of authentic love.

Success doesn’t always mean an immediate conversion. Success might mean that years later, realizing that they’d been on the wrong track, realizing that plenty of people were willing to help them along the wrong track, they might just remember with gratitude that you cared about them enough to tell the truth. That might mean a great deal.

Second, what’s the best chance for success? It probably isn’t an angry tirade. It probably isn’t coming across as disgusted and superior. You want to get across that this is coming from care. You aren’t saying this to end a relationship, but to honor one.

Let’s flip that around, too, for the times when we’re in the position of the one being corrected. Who among us would claim to be good at gracefully accepting correction? Why not give someone the benefit of the doubt, if there is any doubt, and assume that they’re interested in our good? That they’re motivated by caring about us? We never know certainly about someone’s motives, but it’s a lot better to assume the best than the worst.


I’m grateful to everyone who’s ever complimented me, praised me, made me feel good about what I was doing and how. But I’m even more grateful to those who’ve corrected me when I needed it. I might not have acted grateful at the moment. I might not have felt grateful for a while. But the harder it was to accept, well, probably the more I needed to hear it. Be grateful to the people who help you feel good, and may God bless and reward them, those wonderful folks. But be even more grateful to the people who help you to be good.

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