23rd Sunday in Ordinary Time (Year A, RCL)

What comes first—your actions or your beliefs? Here's Paul's answer: neither one. What comes first is the love of God.

Yoder defined violence in terms of violating someone's dignity. This sounds ready made as a description of his own abusive behavior.

If the watchman doesn't "sound the trumpet" and dissuade the wicked from their ways, the Lord promises to hold the watchman accountable.

Christ as weapon, Paul?

There are great gifts—both theological and musical—in the songs being sung in Japan and Peru and Zimbabwe. If those of us in the Northern Hemisphere do not within the next ten years sing the songs of Asia, Africa and South America in worship, our exclusion of them will be deemed racist. It will be seen as a case of musical apartheid.By joining other Christians in song, we in the body of Christ share the joy and the pain of fellow members, most of whom are black and poor, not white and affluent.

These six verses of Matthew do not mean that if two or three people agree on something, then they can ignore others and do whatever they want.

Jesus knew forgiveness would always need special emphasis.