(Stayed tuned at the end of the homily for a hymn from a Traditional Latin Mass wedding at St. Mary's)

Have you ever wondered why relationships are so dang hard?  The answer is easy – human relationships are hard because God has placed sinners beside sinners, so that we might learn the strange art of grace. We come seeking love and find ourselves confronted with pride, impatience, selfishness—and, most painfully, our own. The faults of another can become a kind of divine mirror, showing us what we would rather leave unseen. Yet this, too, may be mercy. For God is not merely interested in making us comfortable with one another, but in making us holy. He uses the friction of imperfect love to uncover the hidden chambers of the heart, teaching us to confess where we have sinned, to forgive where we have been wounded, and to receive mercy where we have failed. Thus the difficult person may become, by God’s providence, an unwelcome but faithful instrument of our sanctification.

When Christ says, “If your brother sins against you,” He speaks to the very condition of life in a fallen world: wherever sinners dwell together, there will be wounds, offenses, and the daily necessity of forgiveness. But the Gospel does not merely teach us how to endure one another; it calls us to participate in the very love by which God has redeemed us. At the Cross, Christ did not wait for us to become worthy of His love—He gave Himself for us while we were still sinners. Thus, when we love the neighbor who has wounded us, we are not simply practicing moral restraint; by grace, we are being conformed to Christ. “You shall love your neighbor as yourself” means that the other’s good must become a matter of our own concern, even when love is costly. For love “does no evil to the neighbor”; indeed, it fulfills the law because the whole law finds its deepest meaning in the self-emptying love of Christ. The answer to the friction of human relationships is therefore not withdrawal, retaliation, or the keeping of accounts, but the Cross-shaped freedom to forgive, to seek the good of the other, and to love as we ourselves have been loved.