Deacon Dan Rouse of the Archdiocese of Dubuque previews Sunday's Gospel, Matthew 18:15-20, where Jesus lays out a gradual process for restoring a broken relationship. Deacon Dan names the three ways most of us actually handle conflict — fight, flight, or quietly ignoring it — and explains why none of them work and why prayer has to come first. Drawing on Saint Vincent de Paul, a saint who struggled his whole life with harshness and sharp mood swings, he leaves listeners with a harder question than who has wronged them.
Deacon Dan Rouse of Saint Patrick's Parish in Cedar Rapids (Archdiocese of Dubuque) offers this week's Sunday Gospel reflection on Matthew 18:15-20 — the passage where Jesus gives a step-by-step process for confronting someone who has sinned against you.
Deacon Dan begins with what the passage is not: it isn't a literal mandate to be applied identically to every situation regardless of the offense or the relationship, and it carries no permission to get even, no guidelines for revenge, and no license to shame or humiliate anyone. The whole process is meant to be carried out in love, with the focus on the behavior and the restoration of the relationship rather than on the person.
He then walks through the three ways people typically respond to being wronged, and why each one fails. Fight: charging in with directness and anger makes things worse, because the target becomes the person instead of the behavior. Flight: avoiding someone who hurt you usually lets the situation deteriorate, and it keeps you from acting charitably toward a person whose good you're still called to will. Ignoring it: carrying on as though everything is fine while resentment quietly builds, until those buried feelings surface anyway — often as anger, which lands you right back at the first response.
The first move, Deacon Dan says, should always be prayer. In his own experience, turning a difficult situation over to the Lord before the conversation means the conversation itself tends to go far better than the version he had already played out in his head.
He closes with Saint Vincent de Paul — the French priest known for extraordinary works of mercy and service to the poor, who founded the Congregation of the Mission in 1625 and later the Daughters of Charity — and with the part of Vincent's story people tend to skip: he struggled badly with harshness and strong mood swings, and for a long stretch believed that was simply who he was and couldn't be changed. It took a period of intense prayer and throwing himself on God's mercy for him to recognize that only God's power could change what he couldn't change himself.
Giving and receiving correction is one of the hardest things a person can do, and true reconciliation requires both: giving it charitably and receiving it humbly. Our motivation, Deacon Dan says, is that we share a common identity as the Body of Christ — and we don't reconcile ourselves by our own power. So the question for this Sunday isn't only who has wronged us. It's whether we've wronged someone, and whether there's something in our own behavior that needs to change.
Read the full Sunday readings at USCCB.
Heard on the Catholic Morning Show, weekdays at 7 a.m. Central on Iowa Catholic Radio. More at IowaCatholicRadio.com.
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