Love Does Not Look Away

Homily: Twenty-Third Sunday in Ordinary Time (Year A) – Mass for the Care of Creation

Ezekiel 33:7-9 • Romans 13:8-10 • Matthew 18:15-20

6 September 2026

Fr. Ricky Cañet Montañez, AA

All of humanity has one home in this galaxy. That home is Earth. However, when we see or read about natural and human-caused disasters, we are appalled. Often, however, our concern ends there. Especially when tragedy happens far from where we live, we fail to recognize how it affects us. In Nepal, a catastrophic glacier collapse and landslide sent an enormous wall of water, rock, and mud down the Trishuli River, destroying communities and claiming many lives. In the Philippines, we continue to experience destructive floods and landslides. In Indonesia, forest and peatland fires have produced thick and dangerous haze that has spread to other countries. Across the world, we witness record heat, drought, wildfires, stronger storms, and devastating floods. We see the images, shake our heads, feel a moment of sympathy, and then scroll on to the next news story. Today’s readings tell us: Don’t just look. Take responsibility.

In our First Reading, God says to Ezekiel, “I have appointed you as a watchman” (Ezekiel 33:7). This is not a responsibility to take lightly. We cannot afford to sleep on the job. A watchman sees danger and warns others. Instead of looking away, he speaks up and responds to what he sees. In our Gospel, Jesus gives us another responsibility: “If your brother sins against you, go and tell him his fault between you and him alone” (Matthew 18:15). Jesus teaches that when a relationship is broken, we should not simply walk away. Nor should we gossip or pretend nothing happened. We go. We talk. We listen. We repair.

This is also a beautiful way of looking at our relationship with creation: we do not just clean the river. We restore the relationship. At its deepest level, the ecological crisis is also a crisis in our relationships. We have forgotten that creation is not simply something we own. It is a gift God has entrusted to us. We are not separate from nature; we are part of it. That is why Pope Francis, in Laudato Si’, speaks of the earth as our common home. Care for creation is not merely an environmental issue added to the Gospel. It is the Gospel’s command to love put into practice. If we love God, we must care for what God has created. If we love our neighbour, we cannot remain indifferent to what harms others. And if we love the generations who will come after us, we cannot consume everything as though they do not exist.

We seem to have made the word “neighbour” too small. Our neighbour is not only the person sitting beside us in church. It is also the person downstream, the farmer whose crops depend on the rain, the fisher whose livelihood depends on a healthy sea, and the child who will be born twenty years from now. Even someone we will never meet is our neighbour. When we damage creation, we also harm our relationship with one another.

St. Paul says it very simply: “Love does no evil to the neighbour” (Romans 13:10). Let us think about what that means. When we throw garbage into a river, it does not disappear. It goes somewhere, and someone downstream will have to deal with the consequences. When we waste water, someone with limited access to it may go without. When forests are destroyed, it is often the poor who suffer first. And as environmental conditions become more dangerous, those who have contributed the least to the crisis often bear its heaviest burdens.

When we see something wrong, let us not simply say, “Someone should do something.” Perhaps God is saying to us, “I appointed you as a watchman” (Ezekiel 33:7). Hence, we see. We speak. We act. We repair. Creation does not need more spectators. It needs watchmen. Thus, let us ponder these three questions: What relationship with God needs to be repaired? What relationship with another person needs to be healed? And what relationship with creation needs to be restored?

Brothers and sisters, we are all challenged not just to clean our rivers but to restore our broken relationships with creation. Let us repair what we have damaged, restore what we have neglected, and care for the gift God has placed in our hands. The earth is not simply our home. It is our common home. And we are its watchmen.