23rd Sunday OT, A

So this Sunday's gospel is taken from chapter 18 of the Gospel of Matthew, a chapter in which Jesus continues to teach his disciples through the use of parables.

We know from the previous chapter, chapter 17, that Jesus and his disciples are in Capernaum.

We read, when they reached Capernaum, the collectors of the temple tax came to Peter and said, does your teacher not pay the temple tax? It's opposite that the tax collectors describe Jesus as a teacher because the role of teacher is very prominent in this next chapter, chapter 18.

The teaching in this chapter begins with a focus on the protection of the weakest members of the people of God, those on the margins of society, ignored and despised, or who are in danger of wandering far from God.

So the chapter begins with the disciples asking Jesus, who is the greatest? And in answer, he puts before them a small child and says, truly, I tell you, unless you change and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.

Then we have a teaching on avoiding temptations to sin, not only personally avoiding temptations to sin, but also avoiding being a temptation to others.

Jesus says, if any of you put a stumbling block before one of these little ones who believe in me, it would be better for you if a great millstone were fastened around your neck and you were drowned in the depths of the sea.

Woe to the world because of stumbling blocks.

And this leads into the parable of the lost sheep.

Jesus asks his disciples, if a shepherd has a hundred sheep and one of them has gone astray, does he not leave the 99 on the mountains and go in search of the one that went astray? The answer is, of course, yes.

The shepherd here is, in fact, God, who goes after each one of us, his stray sheep, to bring us into eternal life.

We see here that there's a communal aspect to all that Jesus is teaching, both the exhortation and the parable.

Jesus isn't talking about believers as isolated individuals, but as part of a community where the actions of one can affect the wellbeing of another.

And the safety of one is a matter of great importance for the community as a whole.

He's interested in the preservation of unity and the upholding of moral conduct within the people of God.

And this emphasis on the communal aspect of our moral actions, which we see in the teaching on stumbling blocks and the parable of the lost sheep, gets carried on into the next section of Matthew chapter 18, which is our gospel for this Sunday.

Matthew, in this chapter of his gospel, has chosen to present to us a collection of Jesus's teachings which all have this in common.

They're all about preserving unity and upholding moral conduct within the community of believers.

They're about how no one in the people of God is an isolated individual.

They're about how the conduct of each believer is of importance to the well-being of the community as a whole.

So why would Matthew choose to present to us these teachings of Jesus in this very deliberate, systematic way? Well, to answer those questions, we've got to examine the literal sense of this passage from a slightly different angle.

When the church encourages us to look at the literal sense of a scripture passage, it's not just talking about the who, the what, the when and the how, the facts on the page.

the church is also encouraging us to find out more about the human author of the text, to discover what his intention might have been in setting down these particular facts on the page, this particular who, what, when and how.

This is how the catechism puts it.

In paragraph 109 of the Catechism, we read, In sacred scripture, God speaks to man in a human way.