Twenty-third Sunday in Ordinary Time

God makes Ezekiel a watchman - someone whose job is to see what's coming and say so, even when nobody wants to hear it. If you warn the wicked man and he doesn't listen, God says, you've saved your own soul either way. The warning itself is the obligation. What happens after it isn't yours to carry.

That's worth remembering if you've spent years worrying over words you did or didn't say to someone you loved - whether you warned them clearly enough, whether you should have pushed harder, whether their choices afterward were somehow your failure. Ezekiel's job was to speak plainly. Not to control what came next.

Jesus gives the same instruction in a smaller key: if your brother sins against you, go to him directly, privately, just the two of you. It's a hard practice at any age, and it doesn't get automatically easier with time - if anything, old grievances calcify precisely because the direct conversation never happened when it should have, and now it feels too late to start.

It's rarely too late. Paul says the whole law comes down to one debt that never gets paid off: love your neighbor as yourself. If there's someone you've been meaning to go to directly - a sibling, an old friend, someone in the family you've let the silence handle instead of the conversation - today's readings are a nudge that it isn't too late to go and tell them, quietly, what's actually true.