23 SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME   - CYCLE  A – 2020

ü  Ezekiel has been called to be the watchman for the house of Israel. 

ü  Jesus invites us to help and love one another within our community.  

ü  Paul invites us not to owe anything to anyone except love.  

 

FIRST READING   Ez 33:7-9

v Who is  Ezekiel?  

o   The book of Ezekiel is found within the group of books called “Major Prophets.” 

o   The author  is a priest who lived in Jerusalem. 

o   And was deported to Babylon with the first group of exiles in 597 BC. 

v The book   

o   The literary composition of this book makes us think that it has been written by only one person, which is not the case in many books of the Old Testament.  

o   The emphasis is not put on the oracles or the symbolic actions that this man has to do but on the Person who gives the command to accomplish them, that is to say in God. 

o   There is a continuous presence of the Lord in these oracles, and in the life of this man. God gives him the command to do gestures and say words, and at the same time God also tells him what the reaction of the people will be.  

o   We find in the structure of this book the following elements: 

§  A vision at the beginning which gives the tone to the whole book 

§  The fall of Jerusalem, this is found at the center of the book.  

§  After that we have a series of chapters condemning and announcing the salvation for Israel.     

§  Between the announcements of condemnation and the oracles of salvation for Israel, we find other oracles related to the nations.  

§  At the conclusion of the book there is the vision of the new organization of the country and of the temple. 

v The Message

o    There are many disturbing problems, but there is a central point of interest   

§  Give hope to a national and religious community that is suffering a crisis.   

§  Which is not only the consequence of the ambition of other powerful nations 

§  But Israel has a great responsibility in all of this due to its behavior, because    

§  The destiny of the peoples is based on its own responsibility, which is translated into just or unjust behaviors in the different areas of life: religion and politics.   

LET US REFLECT ON TODAY’S READING

Ø  Son of man I have appointed you as the watchman for the house of Israel.   

Ø  When you hear me  say something, you have to repeat it 

Ø  If I say something addressed to the sinner to change his behavior and you do not repeat it to him, he will remain in his wickedness that is leading him to death, but you will be responsible of his death due to his sin. 

Ø  If I say something for the wicked to change and he does not pay attention to you, he will be responsible of the consequences of this refusal, but you will not be responsible, you will be saved.    

Ø  It seems that the prophet is trying to tell us that we are responsible of one another, that we need to care about the behavior of our brothers and sisters who journey with us in life, not to judge them, but to announce to them where salvation is found. 

Ø  If we do not do it we will be responsible that the evil continue to grow and that our brothers and sisters do not know the salvation which the Lord has brought to us

Ø  The prophet in this book wants that the people realize   the responsibility and  the consequences of our actions, especially of our response to the call of God.   

Ø  We are not called to lord over our brothers and sisters or to condemn them, but to love. This love has to be a fire inside of us which makes us realize how much we hurt ourselves, how much our brothers and sisters hurt themselves with our sins, sins that do not allow us to discover the love which God has for each one of us. 

Ø   Society, generally, invites us to be indifferent, not to worry about someone else’s life.  But, according to our faith we know that we are all mutually responsible.    

Ø  This is affirmed in different places of the Bible, let us remember the question that God asked to Cain: where is your brother Abel?  And he repeats to us today: where is your  brother, your sister?   

Ø  Do you ha we helped them to  encounter me? Have you respected them as sacred, and have you respected and cared for them as we take care of what is fragile and precious?  

Ø  When you thought you had to tell some wrongdoing you have observed, what has moved you to do so?  

Ø  Pope Francis says that the two conditions to be able to do that, is to acknowledge first that we are all sinners, and second that we are all in need of the mercy of God. 

Ø  As St. Anthony M. Claret said, each person is the image of God, of our Father, and how can I allow this image to be trampled down, dirty and destroyed by our sins?   

RESPONSORIAL PSALM:  Ps  95: 1-2. 6-7. 8-9 

IF TODAY YOU HEAR HIS VOICE, HARDEN NOT YOUR HEARTS

Come let us sing joyfully to the Lord   

Let us acclaim the rock of our salvation!   

Let us come into his presence with thanksgiving  

Let us joyfully sing psalms to him.    

IF TODAY YOU HEAR HIS VOICE, HARDEN NOT YOUR HEARTS

Come, let us bow down in worship   

Let  us kneel before the Lord who made us  

For he is our God   

And we are the people he shepherds, the flock he guides.    

IF TODAY YOU HEAR HIS VOICE, HARDEN NOT YOUR HEARTS

Oh, that today you would hear his voice   

“Harden not your hearts as at Meribah   

As in the day of Massah in the desert   

Where your fathers tempted me;  

They tested me though they had seen my works.”

IF TODAY YOU HEAR HIS VOICE, HARDEN NOT YOUR HEARTS 

ü  This psalm is an invitation to acclaim, to sing with enthusiasm to our God because he has saved us.  

ü  Let us go with joy, enter with acclamations, bend our knees, acclaim with music… because he is our God   

ü  And we are his people, the people he guides.  

ü  The sheep of his flock, why sheep? Because in Israel the king is the shepherd, David the great king of Israel, the king who had the heart like the heart of God, had been a shepherd.   

ü  The shepherd makes us thing about a tender and continuous care for the sheep

ü  This responsorial psalm ends with the stanza which invites us to remember what had happened in the past to those who abandoned the Lord, so that we might  not repeat this situation now.   

GOSPEL  Mt 18:15-20

v In this gospel we find two themes related to the life in community, the community of the followers of Jesus.  

v The first theme: fraternal correction.    

o   All that we can do to help each other when we are destroying ourselves by our sins.  

o   To seek all the possible ways: between the two of us, with the few others, with the community…  

o   The Lord is not telling us to supervise the behavior of our brothers and sisters to be scandalized by it and so condemn them because we think that we are better than the rest

o   We are called by the Lord to live the one commandment he has given us “the new commandment”  

o   And which one is it? He said to us before his death “love one another as I have loved you” and we also know that someplace else he said “I have not come to condemn but to save.”  

o   We cannot save anyone, but we can help others to find the way which leads to the intimacy with the One who can save, which is the Lord Jesus.  

v The second theme: when two or three gather in the name of Jesus, Jesus himself is in their midst, in our gathering  

o   We gather together in the name of the Lord, this means that it is not any gathering, but one in his name.  

o   It is a gathering to pray, to ask the Lord something.  

o   The Father will give it to you   

o   Because where two or three are gathered in my name, there I am in the midst of them, and the Father always listens to me.  

o   Every Sunday we gather in his name, these are consoling words. How these words have the power to fill us with enthusiasm every Sunday when we come to celebrate the Eucharist.   There is so much to ask for, for the human race, for ourselves, for our brothers and sisters who journey with us toward the Father 

SECOND READING  Rm 13:8-10

v Paul invites us to love one another. This coming Sunday the theme of the second reading coincides with the other two readings.   

v Owe nothing to anyone, except to love one another. 

v Because all the commandments: you shall not commit adultery, you shall not kill, you shall not steal, you shall not covet and any other commandment  

v Are summed up in this saying “you shall love your neighbor as yourself.” 

v Love is the fulfillment of the law     

v In what a beautiful way Paul compares the new law to the old one given by God on Mount Sinai.  

v The old law was summed up in: love God above everything else and your neighbor as yourself. 

v Jesus pronounces again this same law and invites us to love one another as He has loved us. 

v In his love Jesus is moved by his unconditional love as son toward the Father, and as brother toward each one of us; and he invites us to do the same.  

v We only have to remember, to love one another, because this entails also the love toward the Father, because without his love in us, we could not love as Jesus has loved. 

    CLARETIAN CORNER 

 María Antonia understood  progressively that the Lord wanted the renewal of the Church and, within it, of the religious life, through the road of evangelical poverty.  Even before meeting  Claret, in her Initial Experience she understood that God was calling her to a especial mission in this Renewal.  

After this experience M. Paris undergoes a normal process of an ever deeper understanding of what the Lord had revealed to her.  She understands that the Renewal is not only about the foundation of the new Order, but something larger and deeper.  It is the whole Church that has to be renewed, be converted to return to her original fervor. The situation of the Church of her time will become her burden, her deepest worry.  

In the Plan for the Renewal she will insist in the need of conversion. This conversion has to lead us, all the members of the Church,  to conform our  life to the Gospel, following the example of the first community, in poverty and fidelity for the proclamation of the Gospel.  

In Claret the idea of conversion is born from his experience of the always, always, always, of his childhood which  he applied  to others in his childhood and to him in his youth: What profit does a man have in conquering the world if he loses his soul?, until he will discover his personal vocation as an Apostolic Missionary for the Church.  He will always act from this idea of conversion. 

The two Documents have a different but convergent orientation. What in María Antonia are “Points” that call to conversion-reformation, in Claret is a Plan to accomplish the Project of conversion, which is simply what he has being doing in his Archdiocese in Cuba. (Paris and Claret Two Pens Moved by the Same Spirit.)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

MUÑOZ, M. Hortensia & TUTZO, Regina  Claretian Missionary Sisters

PAGOLA, José A.   El camino abierto por Jesús. PPC 2012  

STOCK, Klemens. La Liturgia de la Palabra. Ciclo A (Mateo)  2007

SAGRADA BIBLIA. Official version of the  Spanish Conference of Bishops.   2010