Mat 18:15-20
“If a fellow believer hurts you, go and tell
him—work it out between the two of you. If he listens, you’ve made a friend. If
he won’t listen, take one or two others along so that the presence of witnesses
will keep things honest, and try again. If he still won’t listen, tell the
church. If he won’t listen to the church, you’ll have to start over from
scratch, confront him with the need for repentance, and offer again God’s forgiving
love.
“Take this most seriously: A yes on earth is yes in
heaven; a no on earth is no in heaven. What you say to one another is eternal.
I mean this. When two of you get together on anything at all on earth and make
a prayer of it, my Father in heaven goes into action. And when two or three of
you are together because of me, you can be sure that I’ll be there.”
Food for thought!
In many ways this is one of the most difficult
passages in the Bible to grasp and to apply in real life. By and large, Jesus
is saying, "If anyone sins against you, spare no effort to make that man
admit his fault, and to get things right again between you and him."
Basically it means that we must never tolerate any situation in which there is
a breach of personal relationships between us and another member of the
Christian community.
Suppose something does go wrong, what are we to do
to put it right? This passage presents us with a whole scheme of action for the
mending of broken relationships; how to trouble shoot our our troublesome
people.
(i) If we feel that someone has wronged us, we
should immediately put our complaint into words. The worst thing that we can do
about a wrong is to brood about it. That is fatal. It can poison the whole mind
and life, until we can think of nothing else but our sense of personal injury.
Any such feeling should be brought out into the open, faced, and stated, and
often the very stating of it will show how unimportant and trivial the whole
thing is.
If we feel that someone has wronged us, we should
go to see him personally. More trouble has been caused by the writing of SMS
than by almost anything else. Marriages have gone sour and sometimes ended
because of SMS. The reason is that an SMS may be misread and misunderstood; it
may quite unconsciously convey a tone it was never meant to convey. And as you
know from your experience, many times we send our SMS to the wrong people at
wrong times.
Jesus is saying that if and when we have a
difference with someone, there is only one way to settle it, and that is face to face. The spoken
word can often settle a difference which the written word would only have
exacerbated.
(ii) If a private and personal meeting fails of its
purpose, we should take some wise person or persons with us. Deut.19:15 has it:
"A single witness shall not prevail against a man for any crime or for any
wrong in connection with any offence that he has committed; only on the
evidence of two witnesses or of three witnesses, shall a charge be
sustained." That is the saying which Jesus has in mind.
But in this case the taking of the witnesses is not
meant to be a way of proving to a man that he has committed an offence. It is
meant to help the process of reconciliation. A man often hates those whom he
has hurt or who has hurt him; and it may well be that nothing we can say can
win him back. But to talk matters over with some wise and kindly and gracious
people present is to create a new atmosphere in which there is at least a
chance that we should see ourselves "as others see us."
(iii) If that still fails, we must take our
personal troubles to the Christian fellowship. Why? Because personal quarrels
are never settled by going to courts, or by Christless argument. Court merely produces further trouble. It is in an atmosphere of
Christian prayer, Christian love and Christian fellowship that personal
relationships may be righted. The clear assumption here is that our Christian
communities judge everything, not in the light of a book of practice and rules,
but in the light of love.
(iv) It is now we come to the difficult part. JESUS
says that, if even that does not succeed, then the man who has wronged us is to
be regarded as a Gentile and a tax-collector. The first impression is that the man must be abandoned as hopeless and
irreclaimable, but that is precisely what Jesus cannot have meant. He never set
limits to human forgiveness. What then did he mean?
As we know, whenever Jesus speaks of tax-gatherers
and sinners he always does so with sympathy and gentleness and an appreciation
of their good qualities. It may be that what Jesus says was something like
this: "When you have done all this, when you have given the sinner every
chance, and when he remains stubborn and obdurate, you may think that he is no
better than a renegade tax-collector, or even a godless Gentile. Well, you may
be right. But I have not found the tax-gatherers and the Gentiles hopeless. My
experience of them is that they, too, have a heart to be touched; and there are
many of them, like Matthew and Zacchaeus, who have become my best friends. Even
if the stubborn sinner is like a tax-collector or a Gentile, you may still win
him, as I have done."
Seen this way, what Jesus says is not an injunction
to abandon anyone; it is a challenge to win him with the love which can touch
even the hardest heart. It is not a statement that some men are hopeless; it is
a statement that Jesus Christ has found no man hopeless, and neither must we.
(v) Finally, there is the saying about losing and
binding. What it means is that the relationships which we establish with our
fellow-men and women last not only through time but into eternity; therefore we
must get them right NOW.
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