Reverend Jonathan Waits
Sermon: Redemption Is the Goal (Matthew 18:15-20)
Date: February 4, 2024
I grew up as the older sibling. When you are the older sibling, sometimes you might occasionally do something to cause injury to your younger siblings. Of course, the whole thing is totally their fault, and they have it coming. But the injury occurs nonetheless. The trouble with injuring younger siblings is that your parents don’t always see the absolute justification you had in your actions. Or, they can’t understand that it was totally an accident. You didn’t plan for him to run into your fist at the precise moment you swung it forward, it just happened that way. It could have happened to anybody. The universe acts in strange ways sometimes. It was an honest mistake.
Well, because of your confidence that your parents might possibly not see things the same way you do, when the tears begin to well up, and the cries of pain start to build to a fever pitch, you begin doing everything possible to prevent them from a total nuclear meltdown. You shush and you calm and you bargain and you promise the opportunity for appropriate retribution (not something you really plan to follow through on, but you’re grasping at straws here) and you assure them that you will give up your allowance or take on their chores or both for the next day…no week…no month…no year…forever…if only they will not tell Mom and Dad about this little accident.
Let me ask you something about this situation: who has the power here? While you may have had the power as the older, wiser, better looking, more successful sibling up to the point of the injury, once the fault has been accrued, things change. The balance of power shifts. Once you have sinned against your younger, cuter, more innocent, totally harmless younger sibling, she now has all the power. The person offended always has power over the person who did the offending. The person with this power has a question to answer: What are you going to do with your power? That’s something I’d like to talk about with you this morning.
Today, we are in the third part of our teaching series, Leverage. For the past couple of weeks and with one more to go, we have been taking a look at Jesus’ call for us to use our resources for the benefit of those around us after the pattern of how life works in the kingdom of God and the one He Himself set for us on the cross. We are encountering this call on His part in a conversation He had with His disciples and which Matthew recorded for us in chapter 18 of his account of the life and ministry of Jesus. The big idea for this whole journey is that we serve a God who consistently uses what He has for our benefit. If we are going to be in a relationship with Him, this is a pattern of behavior we need to reproduce in our own lives.
So far in this journey we have talked about the what and the why of leveraging what we have for the sake of those around us. The disciples came to Jesus asking about who the greatest person in the kingdom of heaven was. Jesus’ response was to stand a young child before them and insist that being great in God’s kingdom is just the opposite of being great in this world. Being great in God’s kingdom means following His pattern of putting others first, of leveraging what we have for their benefit. Or, to put it as we did then: the greatest people are the ones most committed to making those around them great. We do this, as we talked about last week, because this is how our God acts. Through a story about a shepherd seeking out a lost sheep, Jesus helped us understand that God leverages all of His resources for our benefit. Because He is that way, if we are going to be known by His name, we have to be that way too.
In thinking about using our leverage, about leveraging our resources for the sake of those around us, we typically think about our resources in a pretty limited set of terms. We talked about some of those terms in our first conversation. We typically think about our resources as falling into one of three categories: time, talents, or treasure. And it’s true, a great many of our resources do fall into those categories. But not all of them. And as we make a turn with Jesus today to spend this week and next talking through a couple of specific examples of what leveraging our resources for the sake of those around us looks like, He is going to root these examples in the use of some resources that do not fit into one of those three boxes. The resources Jesus is going to focus His attention on next are relational and emotional. These, as it turns out, are among the most powerful, but overlooked, resources we have. That makes using them after the pattern of this kingdom ethic of putting others first all the more important. If you have a copy of the Scriptures with you this morning, go back to that place you marked in Matthew 18 and join me starting at v. 15. Let’s just take a look at this whole passage as a block and then we’ll break it down together from there.
“If your brother sins against you, go and tell him his fault, between you and him alone. If he listens to you, you have won your brother. But if he won’t listen, take one or two others with you, so that by the testimony of two or three witnesses every fact may be established. If he doesn’t pay attention to them, tell the church. If he doesn’t pay attention even to the church, let him be like a Gentile and a tax collector to you. Truly I tell you, whatever you bind on earth will have been bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will have been loosed in heaven. Again, truly I tell you, if two of you on earth agree about any matter that you pray for, it will be done for you by my Father in heaven. For where two or three are gathered together in my name, I am there among them.”
Now, there’s a lot going on here. This passage has been pretty crucial in the formation of an orthodox theology of the church over the last several centuries. There are also a couple of parts of what Jesus says here that regularly get taken out of context in order to justify beliefs and behaviors that were almost certainly not in Jesus’ purview when He was first saying these things. This passage breaks down pretty nicely into three parts that each build on the last. Let’s take each part in turn, and then we’ll come back around in a few minutes to put everything back together.
Jesus starts here with a hypothetical situation. Let’s say that your brother sins against you. This is not exempting ladies. He’s just speaking from out of a cultural context in which a hypothetical person was always assumed to be a man. And, He’s not talking about a literal, biological sibling. He’s talking about a fellow member of the church. To put all of this another way, let’s say that a fellow member of the church has sinned and you know about it. What are you going to do about it?
I should also add that Matthew uses the word “sin” here the way we normally think about sin. This isn’t just a personal slight or offense to your pride that you just need to get over, this is a genuine sin. He has done something that is out of sync with God’s character and Christ’s command for us to love one another after the pattern of His own love for us. But for whatever reason, this person’s sin is not widely known. You are the only one who knows about it right now (which is probably why the “against you” part is there).
Like we talked about a second ago, this puts you in a position of power over your erring fellow church member. What are you going to do with this power? Hold it over him? Blackmail him with it into doing something you want? Just hang onto it for sometime down the road when you need a favor? Run him out of the church because you never really liked him all that much in the first place? Gossip about him with other church members?
None of those are options Jesus gave us. Jesus said that in this situation, the way to leverage your power for his benefit is to go and tell him about it one-on-one. Nobody else has to know. In fact, they shouldn’t. You don’t have to embarrass him by making a big spectacle of the whole thing. You just have to quietly, gently, lovingly let him know about it. If he listens to you—that is, if he accepts that he sinned and repents of it—“you have won your brother.” You will have leveraged the relational and emotional power you had over him because of the sin for his benefit in a way that perfectly reflects God’s behavior toward us in Christ. If we have sin in our lives, God convicts us of it right in our hearts before He does anything else.
But let’s say the person doesn’t listen to you. He doesn’t buy the idea that he sinned against you at all. You’re just making stuff up. You’re just too sensitive. You need to relax and live a little. Besides, you’re supposed to forgive and forget and all of that. (Stay tuned for more on that next week.) What do you do now? You still have this power over him even if he has rejected your claim to power in a given moment. In this case, Jesus says, you wield your power just a little bit more broadly and bring a couple of other folks in on the matter. Jesus doesn’t say this directly, but these probably need to be trustworthy, spiritually mature, godly fellow members of the church who are going to handle the matter appropriately and well. Once you have this group together, you all go back to the person who has sinned and take another shot at encouraging him to make things right.
If that still doesn’t work, there’s only one option left. You bring the whole church in on the matter. Everything that happens from this point forward happens with the backing of the full church behind the effort. This is no longer an activity for individuals to pursue. Jesus didn’t give us much in the way of specifics on how this works. He simply said that we are to “tell the church.” Now it is the entire church community who is going to be responsible for leveraging the power with you. And while that sounds like it could be a recipe for disaster that results in pushing people out of the church left and right, let’s not lose sight of our context here. Jesus is giving us an example of leveraging our power and resources for the benefit of those around us, not for their harm. This whole example is in the context of not pushing people away from a relationship with God. If the church—or anyone else before we get to this point—gets this thing wrong, if we don’t exercise the relational and emotional power we have in this instance for the benefit of the other person, and they walk away from a relationship with Jesus because of it, then we’re the ones who should have the heavy millstone tied around our necks and drowned in the sea. Getting this whole process right is desperately important.
But what if the person who has sinned isn’t even willing to listen to the church as a whole? What if the whole body says as one to the person: “Listen, we love you. We want the best for you. You have separated yourself from God because of your choice to live outside the boundaries of a relationship with Him on this point. And, if you have separated yourself from God, then you’ve separated yourself from us because we are a community defined by a relationship with God and you’re not in one at the moment. We don’t want this for you. Would you please join us in acknowledging your sin and repenting of it? We’ll walk that path of repentance right alongside you.” What if all of this gets communicated with love and gentleness and compassion for the sinner and his victims, and he still doesn’t bite? What then?
Jesus told us. We are to “let him be like a Gentile and a tax collector to you.” Hold on a second! I thought we just said the point of this whole thing wasn’t to kick anybody out of the church? What’s going on here?!? This is a point that is ripe with misunderstanding. First, then, what does Jesus mean when He says that the person is to be “like a Gentile and a tax collector to you.” Well, on that point, He means what we think He means. Gentiles and tax collectors were vile sinners in the minds of Jesus’ audience. They were separated from God because of their behavior, and they definitely weren’t a part of the community of faith. In other words, this person who has sinned but steadfastly refuses to acknowledge or repent of it is to be treated like he is no longer a part of the church community. To put that a bit more directly, his membership in the body is to be revoked. Now, to be clear here, this step isn’t taken punitively. Rather, the church is merely acknowledging reality. This person has moved himself outside of the boundaries of a relationship with Jesus by his actions, and you can’t have membership fellowship with a church if you are not in a relationship with Jesus since the church is by definition His body. That would be like saying you’re married to someone else without actually having a relationship with them. It’s a nonsensical idea. By removing this person’s membership from the body, the church is merely making official what has already happened spiritually and relationally. The church is saying, “Look, we love you, but you aren’t acting like a member of this body any longer. And because we love you and want to honor your ability to make meaningful and consequential choices like God does, it would not be right or loving for us to continue pretending you are when you aren’t.”
Now, this is a hard step. There’s really not much of a way around that fact. But again, don’t forget the context. We have to keep the context in mind or this whole thing will unavoidably wind up as a disaster. This last, hard step is never the goal of this process. That’s why it’s last. The goal of this process is leveraging the relational and emotional power we have over this other person who sinned (maybe against us directly), who is now a lost sheep that has wandered away from the flock, in order to find them and encourage them back into a right relationship with God in Christ. That’s the goal and nothing short of that. This final and hard step is only taken with that in mind. This is the parent who has tried everything possible to call a wayward child back to a good path and who finally kicks him out of the house not merely out of frustration, but in hopes that this final, extreme step serves as the wakeup call back to a righteous path that he needs to be walking.
Just to make sure we’re on the same page here about what Jesus is talking about, let me ask you this: Does the parent who finally makes this terrible move still love his child? No, he’s kicked him out. He doesn’t have any use for him anymore. Come on: Of course he does! He’s desperately passionate for his son and would and will do anything he can to persuade him to repent, come back home, and be part of the family again. Well, the same thing is true here. Jesus said these folks who absolutely refuse to repent are to be like Gentiles and tax collectors. Well, how did Jesus treat Gentiles and tax collectors? With kindness. With compassion. With love. With an intentional effort to bring them into the fold of the kingdom. He leveraged all of His power and abilities and resources for their sake. If the church is put into a place of having to exercise this nuclear option because a member has sinned and refuses to repent, it only does so with this end in mind. Repentance and reconciliation are always the goal. If they aren’t, we aren’t following in God’s pattern of leveraging the relational and emotional resources we have in this moment for the benefit of this lost sheep. Are you with me?
If this seems like a big step to take, what Jesus says next gives justification for the church’s taking it when it becomes unavoidable. He says that whatever the church looses or binds on earth will be loosed or bound in heaven. What He is doing here is giving the church—not individuals, but the church—pretty remarkable power and authority to act as His body in this world. To loose something is to allow it and to bind something is to prohibit it. In other words, if the church as a body says something is good with God, it’s good with God. If they say it isn’t good with God, it isn’t good with God.
But, before you start getting all worried about the potentially horrible implications of that idea, let’s bring things back yet again to the context here. If we miss the context, we will make an absolute disaster out of what Jesus is saying. We are talking about leveraging our resources for the sake of those around us. In this particular case, we’re talking about leveraging our relational and emotional resources to make those around us more like Jesus, to invite them more fully into a relationship with Him. If we loose or bind something for any reason other than advancing the people around us in the direction of Jesus, we’re in the wrong and God will make us pay for it. Remember: heavy millstone, rope, our necks, and the bottom of the ocean. This is serious stuff. God is still in charge. If we as the church say something is good with God that He’s not good with, He’s not changing His mind just because we said it. He is going to take His authority from us and utterly destroy us. I wonder how many church leaders will run off the reservation on this point, get to God’s throne of judgment, cry out, “Lord! Lord! We’re here. Look at all the good things we’ve done in your name, and have Jesus look at them and say, “I never knew you.” If you are a part of the church and that takes your breath away…it probably should.
All of those caveats noted, then, what Jesus means by this is that He really is giving the church the power to declare whether or not someone is a member of His body. Yet again, this is something that only happens in the context of the church; of the body of Christ; of the community of the called. This is what He is pointing at in those last two, often misappropriated verses. He talked about the fact that whenever two or three are gathered and praying in His name, He is going to be there with them and give them the thing they are seeking. You can perhaps see the potential misunderstanding here. These two verses are often taken as a kind of blank check from God and the assurance that as long as we have two or three people praying for the same thing, Jesus will be there with them to give them what they want. Yet is that what Jesus is saying here? Not at all! Remember the context. This is about a small group of people seeking out His direction and authority to help them lovingly hold a member of the church family accountable who is in danger of wandering off, or who has already wandered off, so that he doesn’t experience the terrible consequences of that decision. That’s the full extent of what Jesus has in mind here. Nothing more, but nothing less.
That’s all three parts of this passage. Yes, we could go into even more detail than we have, but then we’d be here for another hour and I’d be preaching to an empty room. Let’s put all of this together and see what we have. This passage is often used to talk about church discipline. It is often used to talk about the power of the gathering of the saints. It’s often used to talk about the power of prayer. It’s often used to talk about several things. And it certainly addresses some of those issues in such a way that we can say some important things about them, but what is it really about? Jesus here is talking about the same thing He has been talking about since the guys first asked Him a question about who the greatest in the kingdom of heaven is. He’s talking about leveraging our resources for the sake of those around us. He’s giving a very specific example of what this might look like in practice.
This particular example involves the leveraging not of time, talents, or treasure resources, but of relational and emotional ones. And frankly, this is a pretty important example for us to have because, if we’re being honest, we’re in the kind of situation in which we need to leverage our relational and emotional resources in a way that honors God a whole lot more often than we are in a situation where we need to leverage one of the other three. It is really important for us to get God’s kingdom ethic of being for those around us right in these situations. It is important whether we are doing it on our own, with a small group of people, or with the whole church. Jesus has given the church incredible authority to exercise in getting this right, but that kind of dramatic authority is a measure of last resort when righteously leveraging our resources in more intimate and personal ways hasn’t worked (and not just because we did it poorly). And even in this final, extreme set of circumstances, redemption is still the goal. When we leverage our resources for the people around us, redemption is always the goal. In fact, we can get even more explicit than that on what Jesus wants us to understand here. When we leverage our resources for people who have hurt us, redemption is always the goal.
And again, I know that this passage is used to talk about other things. Maybe some of you read ahead and were expecting me to talk about certain things. I certainly planned this series with some of those things in mind. But as I have spent time thinking about and reflecting on and praying through what Jesus says here, I just can’t get past the context. The whole bit about church discipline and the incredible authority God gives to the church are rooted deeply in this context of leveraging our relational and emotional resources for the benefit of those who have hurt us by sin in some way. All of what Jesus says here unfolds entirely within the context of His reframing of greatness in light of the ethic of God’s kingdom, of God’s passionate concern for those who are weak and growing in their faith, and of His committed efforts to bring lost sheep back into the fold of a relationship with Him. If we are going to leverage our resources for the benefit of the people around us, but especially those who have hurt us by sin, redemption must always be our goal. This is true individually, in groups, and as a whole community. Nothing short of this will do. When we leverage our resources for people who have hurt us, redemption is always the goal.
So, what do you do with this? You start by taking stock of the relational and emotional resources you have. Who are the people who have hurt you by sin in some way? With what people in your life is your relationship complicated by an offense of some kind? Maybe your list isn’t very long, but maybe you’ve stored up a lot of hurt over the years and your list runs on for days. You have lots of power. Or maybe you are in a position of power by virtue of natural authority. Parents have this. So do employers. To a certain extent, siblings have it over one another. Whatever your resources are, you need to ask yourself a very simple question about them: How can you leverage them for the benefit of those around you; for the benefit of those who have hurt you? When we leverage our resources for people who have hurt us, redemption is always the goal.
Imagine if we as a church got this right. Imagine if we developed a reputation of being a place where relationships that were wounded and broken were restored. Imagine that people knew when they engaged with us that they were going to get help in finding freedom from the prison that having relational and emotional power over another person so often is. Imagine if we saw waves of redemption because we were so concerned with exercising the power and authority Jesus has given us as a church in ways that drew wandering sheep back to Him. When we leverage our resources for people who have hurt us, redemption is always the goal. We can experience this when we follow Jesus’ lead. Yet while we have to get this right as a church, it starts with you and me. Come back next week, and we’ll get a lot more specific on the first step to take.