Text: Matthew 18:15-20
If there is any illusion we have to get past in the church, it’s the idea that the person preaching the sermon on Sunday is a greater expert at the Bible than the person in the seat.
The person preaching the sermon has a job to do, of course. He or she has studied the passage, prayed, and wrestled with the words. They’ve likely read some commentaries, and even looked at the passage in the original language. They’ve probably gone to school for this sort of thing. And the book of James says they will be judged more strictly than anybody else in the room when all is said and done.
But they still aren’t an expert. They are still not master of the text. When the sermon begins, and a great line is drawn between Jesus speaking through the Bible on one side, and the congregation gathered to hear the word on the other, the preacher stands on the side of the congregation.
He or she is not the teacher, and he or she is also probably not the best student.
This morning’s passage, for example, is about community—relationships—being preached to you by an introvert who would usually rather be left alone. And it’s a lectionary text, too, so lots of churches around the nation and world are looking at this same passage right now. Which means this morning, across the land, preachers of all different personalities and theologies are explaining this same text to their people. There’s the gregarious preacher and the timid preacher, the introvert and the extrovert. There’s the one who wants to talk about forgiveness and the one who wants to focus on the authority to bind and loose.
More than a few pastors of small congregations are making a big deal about how it only takes two or three people in a room for Jesus to show up.
And they are all probably avoiding the parts of the text they do bad at—whether that’s confronting sin, forgiving sinners, agreeing with people at church, or just plain believing that heaven actually responds to the things we say and do.
But the lives in the room that best reflect what’s going on in the text are probably not the lives of the preachers. It’s the lives of the people in the seats who live what they know of God’s word. While the preacher has spent all week trying to figure out how to make a sermon out of these words, the people just hear the words read Sunday morning and say to themselves, “Yeah, that’s true.”
Our passage this morning comes in the middle of a series of sayings from Jesus about community and relationships:
Who is the greatest in the community? The one who humbles themselves like a child (verses 1-5). Who has greater guilt? The naive believer who sins, or the more knowledgeable person who tempts them to sin (verses 6-9)? Don’t despise and overlook those whom you’re tempted to despise and overlook, Jesus warns, because their guardian angels stand before God (verse 10) and God desires that none of them should perish (verses 12-14).
And so, Jesus goes on to our text this morning, “If your brother or sister sins” against you (verse 15) “go and point out their fault, just between the two of you.”
I’ve met many people over the years who think our passage this morning is a how-to manual for excommunicating people whose behavior they don’t like. “We need to do Matthew 18 on that person,” I’ve heard people say, as though what Jesus is giving us here is a three-step plan on how to kick people out of church.
But what Jesus is saying, in the main part of our text, is—because “your Father in heaven is not willing that any of these little ones should perish” (verse 14)—that if your fellow believer sins against you, you should go and use every resource you have available to try and work it out. What Jesus is saying is, if you wind up in a conflict with someone at church, don’t go talk about it with your Bible study group or veil your frustration with them in a prayer request to the pastor. No. Go talk to them. Do the scary thing and go work it out.
If that doesn’t work, Jesus says, bring along one or two others (verse 16)—not to gang up on the person, but to bring more perspective to the issue.
No one could be condemned in the Old Testament without two or three witnesses to their sin, and these fellow believers you’re bringing along will serve the same purpose—not to be witnesses against this person exactly, because the offense is presumably a private affair, but to be witnesses now of your conversation. The assumption is that they will agree with you, once they hear you and the person hash things out. But the risk inherent in bringing witnesses to the conversation is that they may not see things the same way as you. They might agree with your opponent. They may decide you both have some repenting to do. But the goal, assuming you’re not being over-sensitive or unfair to this person, is to bring about their repentance—to reconcile you to one another again.
Or, as more literal translations read in verse 15, to “gain your brother,” or win them back.
The conflict or sin, of course, is presumably significant enough to bring people in on it. The sin is grievous, or the relationship has been really hurt. So you get others involved.
If that doesn’t work, Jesus says go to the church. Presumably this means going to the leadership, not just announcing somebody’s sin to the whole congregation on a Sunday morning. And if the sin is this grievous, or the relationship this damaged, and even the leadership can’t bring your sister or brother in Christ to a place of healing and reconciliation, then the person should be told to leave the church, Jesus says. They are to be thought of, not as an enemy, but as someone who is not really walking with God—a “pagan or a tax collector,” as Jesus puts it.
This is a really heavy thing, of course. And it shows how important community is to God. In our day and age, disagreements almost never get this far because you can just go to a different church down the street when things get bad—or quit going to church at all, if you like.
People’s lives are very independent in our culture. If a person is ostracized from a community, society’s sympathies will generally go the person ostracized, not the community. And sometimes this is right, of course. Churches can be toxic. Leadership can get weird.
But we also, as a culture, don’t care that much about broken relationships. When something falls apart, we generally just want to know who’s at fault.
Jesus’ teaching, on the other hand—if I understand it right—is primarily about putting these things back together.
The community, in Jesus’ teaching, isn’t ganging up on the sinner until they repent. They’re appealing to a loved one not to further tear things apart. And when the unrepentant sinner is, in the end, shown the door, it’s not so much because the church is trying to be religiously “pure” as it is because unrepentant sin (and the frame of mind that goes along with it) is so destructive to the people and relationships of a community.
And so it’s in this context that Jesus gives the same authority to the whole community as he gave Peter back in chapter 16: “Whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.”
To bind is to forbid, and to loose is to permit. To bind someone is to leave them to the fate of their sin. To loose is to set them free.
Everything else in our text shows that the church’s goal is to loose—to set sinners free with the power of God’s grace given to us in the gospel. Every person who turns from their sin and embraces the forgiveness of Jesus, we can—on God’s authority—declare free. That is always the desire.
Because, where reconciliation takes place and the hard work of putting relationships back together has been done, and where two or more can gather and agree in Jesus’ name, there he will be in our midst.
Let’s Pray
Mikael Ivaska 