Matthew 18:15-20 CEB “If your brother or sister sins against you, go and correct them when you are alone together. If they listen to you, then you’ve won over your brother or sister. But if they won’t listen, take with you one or two others so that every word may be established by the mouth of two or three witnesses. But if they still won’t pay attention, report it to the church. If they won’t pay attention even to the church, treat them as you would a Gentile and tax collector. I assure you that whatever you fasten on earth will be fastened in heaven. And whatever you loosen on earth will be loosened in heaven. Again I assure you that if two of you agree on earth about anything you ask, then my Father who is in heaven will do it for you. For where two or three are gathered in my name, I’m there with them.” You know, I think there’s a half-truth that we skipped over in our sermon series on the topic, it’s called “Forgive and Forget.” Often we are told this is what forgiveness should look like, we should forgive and then it should be like that wrong never happened between us, but that is not the case. Forgiveness opens the way to reconciliation, but the two are different. Dr. Gary Chapman, best known for his bestselling 5 Love Languages, writes that “forgiveness does not always result in reconciliation,” as “the word reconciliation means ‘to bring back to harmony.’”[1] You see when we say “forgive and forget,” we want unconditional forgiveness, we want to go back to how things were before the wrong came between us, ruining our relationship and the relationship between us and God. To find harmony again is not singing the same old song, but finding new lyrics to sing. The words from Matthew’s gospel this morning help us to understand that reconciliation takes work from both the wronged and the wrongdoer to find a new way forward, not only for these individuals but for the whole of the community.
Before going any further, I think understanding reconciliation will help us understand how to practice forgiveness in our community of faith. I’ll start by asking, what do you think a restored and reconciled relationship looks like with God? In other words, what’s the goal of God’s forgiveness for you and for me? Is it to take us back to Genesis, back to Adam and Eve, to before our eyes were opened and we knew good and evil? Our Bible doesn’t end in Genesis but in Revelation, and there John writes about all the people of God living in God’s new Jerusalem. There John sees the “throne of God and the Lamb” in the city, and in that city, “Night will be no more” (Revelation 22:3-5 CEB). The people there won’t “need the light of a lamp or the light of the sun, for the Lord God will shine on them” (Revelation 22:5 CEB). Instead of God’s people going back into darkness, they will go forward with full knowledge of God. God's reconciliation makes this possible, where all people knowingly and willingly serve God. Reconciliation is not going backward but going forwards. Let me frame this in another more human way, in his book Things I Wish I’d Known Before We Got Married, Dr. Gary Chapman tells a rather honest story about himself, his wife, and toilets. Dr. Chapman reached adulthood and marriage without ever cleaning a toilet, and in fact, Gary shares “In the home in which I grew up, the toilet was never dirty,” and “It never crossed my mind that someone was cleaning it.”[2] After getting married, Gary noticed their new marital toilet was beginning to get dirty and commented on it to his wife of a month to which she replied, “‘I know. I was wondering when you were going to clean it.’ ‘Clean it?!’ [Gary] said. ‘I thought you were going to clean it. I don’t know how to clean a toilet.’”[3] Imagine this was your first fight with your new spouse. What would reconciliation look like here? Would it be to forget that whole argument ever happened and let the toilets keep getting dirty or worse yet let your new spouse do all the cleaning? Instead of going back into ignorance, Dr. Chapman goes forward: he learned how to clean a toilet. Being reconciled, and being in harmony with each other means finding a new path that does not lead back to old hurts. We will find that “[forgiveness] and reconciliation are two steps along a continuum,” as “[reconciliation] is the larger goal, reflecting the divine aim for our relationships with others and with God.”[4] However, this is not a one-person job. As we talked about last week, it takes us not only being willing to address the ways our neighbors have hurt us, but also it means we have to be willing to acknowledge and correct the ways we have hurt and continue to hurt one another. In Matthew’s gospel, Jesus talks with his disciples about reconciliation in these verses from this morning. While they may sound like the ones from Luke last week, these ones have a different tone, exploring what right relationships in the community of Christ truly look like. Here, Jesus tells his followers, like in Luke, to confront their siblings about the harms and wrongs that they’ve done. Look at the goal, however, it is to get the wrongdoer to “listen” or “pay attention.” What are they listening to or giving their attention to? It is to the ways they have hurt their sibling, failing to listen not only continues to damage their relationship with this other person and to God, it also damages the health and well-being of the community. Jesus then mentions this curious line: “I assure you that whatever you fasten on earth will be fastened in heaven.” Sometimes this line is translated as “Truly I tell you, whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven” (Matthew 18:18 NRSV). This binding and loosening has to do with the community. While they can refer to moral discernment, in this passage, “to ‘bind’ is to withhold fellowship, to ‘loose’ is to forgive.”[5] To live in this community of believers is to be willing to admit when and where we are wrong, where we have truly and grievously hurt one another. To continue to have fellowship while not being willing to accept another’s forgiveness or to seek repentance in turn damages the whole health of the community. It reminds me of an old poem by William Blake, titled “A Poison Tree”: “I was angry with my friend; I told my wrath, my wrath did end. I was angry with my foe: I told it not, my wrath did grow. And I waterd it in fears, Night & morning with my tears: And I sunned it with smiles, And with soft deceitful wiles. And it grew both day and night. Till it bore an apple bright. And my foe beheld it shine, And he knew that it was mine. And into my garden stole, When the night had veild the pole; In the morning glad I see; My foe outstretched beneath the tree.”[6] An unacknowledged wrong, an unaccepted forgiveness damages and indeed poisons the whole of the community. That is why Matthew contains this strong language that forgiveness is not unconditional amongst people and that sometimes where reconciliation cannot happen, separation in the short term is healthier and better for all involved. That’s the strangest thing, after all, as Jesus says they will be like Gentiles and Tax Collectors, and let me ask you, friends, how does Jesus treat Gentiles and Tax Collectors? How are we to treat them? This passage in Matthew acknowledges that forgiveness’s ultimate goal of reconciliation is thwarted when we refuse to acknowledge where wrong has happened. Reconciliation cannot happen when “the offenders [fail to] acknowledge their need for forgiveness.”[7] We all know situations like this, right? In what world should an abused woman stay in a relationship with an abusive husband? Just because she has forgiven him does not mean that reconciliation in that relationship makes sense or is even safe, especially if he is not willing or able to acknowledge the wrong that he has done. Even if he does acknowledge his abusive behaviors, reconciliation does not mean going backward into the relationship as though the sin never happened. It did happen and it does have consequences, and one of those is the question of what a reconciled relationship looks like in the future. Forgiveness is letting go of the cost so that we can do something profoundly remarkable: “rediscover the humanity of our wrongdoer.”[8] Reconciliation is that goal where we not only say to the person, “You owe me nothing,” but also “I wish you well” and mean it. This cannot happen unless both parties are willing to acknowledge the wrong, repent of those wrongs, and find a new way, even a different kind of relationship where both seek the good of the other. Where enemies cease to be enemies but become neighbors in a community where all are welcomed by a God who turned enemies into a family of beloved children and loving siblings. Amen. [1] Gary Chapman, Things I Wish I’d Known Before We Got Married (Chicago: Northfield Publishing, 2010), 71. [2] Ibid., 76. [3] Ibid. [4] Marjorie J.Thompson, Forgiveness: A Lenten Study (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2014), 58. [5] L. Gregory Jones, Embodying Forgiveness: A Theological Analysis (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.,1995), 192. [6] William Blake, “A Poison Tree” in The Norton Anthology of Poetry, 5th edition, eds. Margaret Ferguson, Mary Jo Salter, and Jon Stallworthy (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2005), 446. [7] Jones 1995, 194. [8] Lewis B. Smedes, “Keys to Forgiving: How Do You Know That You Have Truly Forgiven Someone?,” in Christianity Today 45, no. 15 (3 December 2001), 73.
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