Learning to Love is the Work
Proper 18A | Matthew 18:15-20
This week we leave Satan and dying Messiahs behind and jump into the middle of a teaching about dealing with sin. A teaching that is so prescriptive it feels like there’s got to be a catch. And there is. Just . . . well, let’s dig into it first.
So, this teaching about how the community is supposed to handle sin. It goes like this. First go to the person. If that doesn’t work, get a few people. If that doesn’t work either, bring it to the whole community. If that doesn’t work, acknowledge that the relationship has changed.
Notice that the teaching switches at this point. He doesn’t say what to do in the end, but speaks in big terms: “whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.” Which should sound eerily familiar. Like something Jesus said to Peter a couple of chapters ago.
Christians of all kinds have come to wildly different conclusions about this passage. Which, if we were being honest with ourselves, calls into question just how clear and prescriptive Jesus is actually being here.
For the Sake of Depravity
One of the common interpretations of this passage in reformed and total depravity circles is to see this as a kind of three strikes and you’re out approach to community. So a church might use this as a template for discipline within the congregation. The pastor meets with the sinner, then the executive team, then the whole congregation.
Then what happens? Well, that’s the part Jesus isn’t prescriptive about, but talks about binding and loosing. And they might think about the earlier teaching of knocking the dust from their feet, so they come to a reasonable conclusion: it’s time to move on without them. This is often referred to as shunning. And every church that does this will cite this passage and say that Jesus has clearly instructed them to do this. Even as their conclusion is the one part that is not specifically directed by Jesus.
This also depends on reading the phrase “let such a one be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector” to mean outsider when Jesus specifically welcomed these groups of people. This should cause everyone pause—particularly if you read this as an insult.
Perhaps we think of this as a kind of mixed economy of Jesus teaching. It is both direct and left open, literal and metaphor. And the best conclusion we have is that we are supposed to use our discretion to understand this teaching for ourselves.
This conclusion some churches come to is one interpretation. And there are others. To better understand what Jesus is getting at, we should probably dig into the context.
The Context
The lectionary skips a chapter, the bulk of which we cover elsewhere in the liturgical calendar. Chapter 17 starts with the Transfiguration story with Jesus and three disciples going up a mountain and having a mystical encounter, then coming down the mountain to an experience of failure.
Then we have several pieces that would increasingly color our reading of chapter 18. Jesus foretells his death a second time, has a forceful encounter about the Temple tax and the disciples bicker about how great they are. These are some of the juiciest disciples-screwing-up moments in the gospel.
Finally, in verse 6 we get the stuff we definitely need to notice. Jesus speaks of the danger of being tempted to sin. That it would be better to end things for yourself than to lead another to stumble. Really harsh stuff. But then he shifts gears and tells a version of the parable of the lost sheep. The point: God will save even one. Pairing that with the destructiveness of sin, we see the enormous power of redemption and God’s desire to redeem even one who gets lost.
This is when he dives into a redeeming process of trying over and over to bring someone back into community. And this is why the shunning reading makes so little sense given the parable before it. What we bind and loose, just like Jesus told Peter was his power, feels not like a reluctant but common practice of cutting people off, but reflects the potential destruction of a lost sheep that Jesus would have gone after.
Right after this moment, Peter will be like, OK, Jesus. I get this in the general sense, but what if somebody sins against me? How many times am I supposed to forgive? Is seven times enough? That seems like a lot. Way more than three. And Jesus is like, Rookie Numbers. Make it seven times seven and we’re approaching the right ballpark.
About Sin
This is a teaching about redemption. It’s about forgiveness and mercy. It’s also about dealing with the junk that gets in the way of redemption. Of the stuff of turning our lives around and making right with the people we have wronged. This is the heart of the gospel, friends. And so often, when we turn this into a prescriptive order that frees us to shun our neighbors, we’re missing the most important part: we should want to reconcile with them in the first place.
All of this, however, is predicated on understanding what sin is. And what redemption is. So let’s dig into that for a second.
Sin is probably the most used misunderstood word in the church.
It is more verb than noun. And it is a word that defines a fracture in a relationship more than an individual experience.
Consider the ten commandments. Commands which describe one’s relationship with God and then with one’s neighbors. To kill, steal, lie, lust, condemn is to injure others and one’s relationship to them. This, friends, is how sin works. It is to recognize how our relationships are hurt by one’s actions.
We could spend all morning describing the nuances of all the things we render as sinful and further complicate it with how often our siblings in Christ will call themselves injured, but I’d rather point to how Jesus offers his followers a repeatable practice of seeking the opportunity to forgive. Imagine each time, the disciples are saying “Let us forgive you! Please stop being so stubborn!”
A Bad Attitude
How often we start from a position of evil or disunity. We expect things to be bad. So we plan for the bad things to happen. And then, when they sometimes occur, we actually feel good, vindicated. Like the planning was worth it. Yes, we might say to ourselves, they are bad people. It becomes easy to shun from the community those we’ve already decided aren’t worthy of it.
Notice then just how different things become when we plan for the good. When we hope for a change and compel one another to seek forgiveness, saying “let us forgive you!” The story we hear from the gospel flips and makes so much more sense.
Confronting one another is always hard. And yet, assuming none of us wants to change, well that’s pretty easy. Assuming we intend to be jerks, that’s easy. Walling ourselves off and cutting off our friends, that’s easy, too. Easier than dealing with the truth. Than doing the work of reconciliation Jesus describes here. Of treating every person as worthy of redeeming.
We’ll be talking more about this next week, but for now, let’s hold to the incredible specificity of the person next to us, of the things we do for and with each other. That this is all about relationship. There is always give-and-take.
A Last Word
The last promise we make in our baptismal covenant is this:
Will you strive for justice and peace among all people, and respect the dignity of every human being?
Justice and peace, both. Shalom. The understanding that peace cannot be found without justice. Without restoration of equality. Without a commitment to respecting the dignity of every human being. This is the way of peace. Through dignity, equality, justice.
And there is so much going on in our world that is disordered, that is unjust, that is unequal, that disrespects the dignity of a lot of human beings. And we might say, doing all of this stuff disrespects the dignity of every human being.
And against that way of thinking, is another. Which notices the person next to us. The person who is trying their best. Who does know how to love.
We are sinners and forgivers. Because we live in community. Because we have relationships with other people and with God. And our respect for one another, our love for our neighbors is how we live, how we love God. How we keep trying to love. Over and over. Even when things go south. Because in God, we are sheep who never stay lost and people who do our best to find each other.