The Ministry of Reconciliation
Scripture Reading: Matt. 18:15-20
Today I get to talk about everyone’s favorite topic: church discipline. To be honest, when I saw what the Gospel lectionary reading was I thought, “Hmmm, maybe Old Testament this week.” I tend to think of passages like this one like a fire extinguisher. It’s good to have on hand when there’s an emergency, but otherwise it can just sit there in the corner ignored. It’s enough to know that it’s there if I need it, which I hope I never do.
But the more I thought about it, the reconciliation of sinners, which is what this passage is about, is really the heart of the gospel. In fact, it is the gospel. We are all sinners in need of reconciliation with God, which we receive through Jesus Christ, but sometimes we need to be reconciled through Christ to one another as well.
Now, this may come as a shock to some of you, but the church is no oasis from the hurt that sin can cause. I know, I know…it sounds implausible, even impossible, but it’s true! In all seriousness, I imagine that many of you have first-hand experience or second-hand knowledge of some incident that happened in church that left you or someone you know deeply wounded.
Because many of my friends are in ministry, I hear it more from the pastor’s point of view, not so much as observers but as victims themselves. Sadly, the church is not immune to the increasing polarization that’s dividing our society. As shepherds of an entire flock, many pastors try to straddle the middle, where they can disappoint or enrage both sides. The pandemic only made things worse and led many clergy to leave not only their church but the ministry altogether.
Whether as clergy or as laypeople, what should we do when we are wronged by others within the church? That is the topic that Jesus puts before the disciples in today’s reading. It’s amusing because as much as we sometimes romanticize the early church—imagining it to be free from the jealousies, grievances, and quarreling that we sometimes face—this passage is evidence that Christians wounding other Christians is as old as the Gospel itself.
…as much as we sometimes romanticize the early church—imagining it to be free from the jealousies, grievances, and quarreling that we sometimes face—this passage is evidence that Christians wounding other Christians is as old as the Gospel itself.
The first thing I want to note about this passage is not actually in the passage. It’s what comes right before. Just before Jesus expounds on what to do about one church member sinning against another, he tells a parable. It’s the Parable of the Lost Sheep. You may be familiar with it.
“What do you think,” Jesus asks rhetorically, “if a shepherd has a hundred sheep, and one of them has gone astray, does he not leave the ninety-nine on the mountains and go in search of the one who went astray?” To leave no doubt as to the point of the parable, Jesus explains, “So it is not the will of your Father in heaven that one of these little ones should be lost.”
I mention this parable even though it’s outside the scope of today’s reading because it provides context for Jesus’s teaching in the passage before us, which is what to do when one member of the church goes astray by sinning against another. The goal is not shaming the offender or punishing them. What is of ultimate concern to Jesus is reconciliation. Jesus wants to bring home that lost sheep.
“If another member of the church sins against you,” he says, “go and point out the fault when the two of you are alone. If the member listens to you, you have regained that one.” First of all, note the emphasis on regaining the offender, on restoring them to the fold. That is the desired outcome.
Second, I don’t underestimate how difficult it can be to go to someone one-on-one and tell them that they’ve wronged you. This holds especially true if the person is in a position of authority. Few of us are comfortable with confrontation. It’s much easier to go on social media and broadcast to all our friends and followers the wrong done to us, without naming names, of course.
Listen, I get it. If you stub your toe, you want to scream. We want to let out our pain. The desire to publicly air our grievances is understandable. It gives us a sense of satisfaction to think that we are heard. It also gives us a sense of control over something that we feel is mostly out of our control. But it’s not exactly in line with Jesus’s more subtle approach to reconciling with an offender, an approach that’s grounded in humility for victim and offender alike.
Now, before I get in too deep, let me add some caveats. What I’m about to say does not hold true for instances of physical or sexual abuse within the church. While of course sins, those are also crimes and ought to be handled by law enforcement. What’s more, a victim of abuse of any kind should not meet one-on-one with their offender. What I’m referring to are sins that don’t involve abusive behavior but nonetheless have the power to destroy relationships— gossip, deceit, argumentativeness, selfishness—all of which Christians have been known to practice.
To approach a church member who has committed such a wrong rather than broadcasting their behavior is an act of humility and grace. It’s to see the offender as more than their offense, which is of course how we would wish to be seen and treated were the tables reversed and we were the one at fault. As for the offender, their opportunity for humility comes in listening, in laying down their defensiveness and their justifications and honestly listening to how their words or actions harmed the other.
This is where I have to confess that the best advice I ever received on this sort of conflict management came not through the church or in seminary but in a corporate seminar. Back when I was working in advertising, we had a consultant come in to train us on managing workplace conflict. The advice she gave was that when two people met one-on-one to discuss their conflict, the offended party should distinguish between actions, which are objective, and feelings, which are subjective. For example, rather than saying, “You never appreciate my input,” which is purely subjective, you say, “When you didn’t acknowledge my contribution to the project, I felt unappreciated.”
Usually I am loathe to bring any aspect of corporate culture into the church. The world of business has no business in the church. But this was one area where corporate culture offered something of practical value.
And speaking of practical, it’s amazing how practical Jesus’s teaching is in this passage. We’re used to hearing him speak in parables that leave his disciples baffled and require some explanation, but here he offers a kind of stair step of practical wisdom for seeking reconciliation with another member of the church. First go to the person one-one-one. If that doesn’t work, bring one or two others with you to serve as witnesses. If even that fails, then present the matter to the church.
What Jesus is doing is making reconciliation a ministry of the church. Like a ripple in a pond the ministry expands outward from the individual to the small group and then to the entire church. If you think of the church as a body, as the Apostle Paul does, this makes sense. Collectively, we are the body of Christ, and individually we are each members of that body, so that what affects one part of the body affects the whole. Therefore a wound to one member of the church is a wound to the entire church.
What Jesus is doing is making reconciliation a ministry of the church.
This is one of many things that makes the church a countercultural movement in our society, a society in which our strong sense of individualism limits our ability to think and act collectively. Another is how Jesus tells the church to respond to someone who stubbornly refuses to listen to the person they’ve offended, nor to the small group of witnesses, and not even to the church as a whole. “Let such a one be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector,” he says. That sure sounds like “three strikes and you’re out,” a concept that we’re familiar with not only from baseball but from the criminal-justice system.
However, taking Jesus at face value becomes a bit complicated when we consider how Jesus had no qualms about interacting with, and ministering to, Gentiles and tax collectors. We heard just a few weeks ago how Jesus went to Tyre and Sidon—Gentile territory—and healed the Canaanite woman’s daughter. Earlier in the Gospel he did the same for a Roman centurion’s servant. And the Gospel from which both of these stories come bears the name of Matthew, himself a tax collector, whom Jesus nonetheless called to be his disciple. And lest we forget, one of the criticisms that the religious authorities leveled against Jesus was that he was a friend of tax collectors and sinners.
Jesus just won’t make it easy for us to write off anyone as a lost cause, which is actually good news, because when it comes to sin, each of us is a lost cause. But Jesus, ever the Good Shepherd, sets off after his lost sheep to bring them back into the fold. And so what makes us Christian is not whether or not we wound one another—we do—but rather how we go about mending those wounds. As the church of Jesus Christ, a church guided and sustained by the power of his presence, ours is a ministry of reconciliation.