15 But let me speak also to you, who publicly disgrace yourselves: to him who is acting despitefully, and doing wrong. Are you inflicting blows? Tell me; and kicking, and biting? Are you become a wild boar, and a wild ass? And are you not ashamed? Do you not blush at thus being changed into a wild beast, and betraying your own nobleness? For though you be poor, you are free; though you be a working man, you are a Christian.
Nay, for this very reason, that you are poor, you should be quiet. For fightings belong to the rich, not to the poor; to the rich, who have many causes to force them to war. But you, not having the pleasure of wealth, go about gathering to yourself the evils of wealth, enmities, and strifes, and fightings; and takest your brother by the throat, and go about to strangle him, and throwest him down publicly in the sight of all men: and do you not think that you are yourself rather disgraced, imitating the violent passions of the brutes; nay rather, becoming even worse than they? For they have all things in common; they herd one with another, and go about together: but we have nothing in common, but all in confusion: fightings, strifes, revilings, and enmities, and insults. And we neither reverence the heaven, unto which we are called all of us in common; nor the earth, which He has left free to us all in common; nor our very nature; but wrath and the love of money sweeps all away.
Have you not seen him who owed the ten thousand talents, and then, after he was forgiven that debt, took his fellow-servant by the throat for an hundred pence, what great evils he underwent, and how he was delivered over to an endless punishment? Have you not trembled at the example? Have you no fear, lest you too incur the same? For we likewise owe to our Lord many and great debts: nevertheless, He forbears, and suffers long, and neither urges us, as we do our fellow-servants, nor chokes and takes us by the throat; yet surely had he been minded to exact of us but the least part thereof, we had long ago perished.
Source: Homilies on the Gospel of St. Matthew (New Advent)