How are we to take Jesus’ claims about the Father in heaven?
Gospel Reading: Matthew 18:15-20
For Sunday, Sept. 4 , 2011: Year A—Ordinary 23
There are some very specific instructions here that I can’t imagine ever using, not to mention some very specific claims that just don’t seem true.
My church has never disciplined anyone—has yours? Admittedly our church is pretty undisciplined in a lot of ways. Clearly from Acts and the Epistles there were a lot of disputes going on in the Church’s beginning.
Maybe in the cultural context of the early days of the Christian movement when they were trying to separate themselves from the systems of Rome it was helpful to have a primer on how to handle disputes in-house. Of course, the text isn’t just intended for its original context.
Mobius of Mercy
I think I could create a fairly serviceable Mobius Strip sermon on forgiveness, especially given the pericopes that precede and follow this week’s reading.
The “Parable of the Lost Sheep” says that not even one should be lost from the fold—so one wouldn’t want to be doing any excommunicating prematurely! Jesus’ answer to Peter in the following pericope, namely that he should forgive another church member for the sins against him seventy-seven times, also indicates an unlikelihood that the process of forgiveness would ever come to an end.
The very instructions in church discipline in Matthew 18 turn-over on themselves. If the offending member continues to refuse to listen to you, you and your buddies, even the whole church, then you are to treat him as a Gentile and a tax collector. That means the final verdict is to welcome him in.
Perhaps Matthew’s personal experience informed this rhetorical turn-about.
Bringing Heaven Into It
The part that causes me to stutter in the text, however, is bringing heaven into it. If you bind or loose something on earth (or in the church council?), than that same binding and loosing occurs in heaven! If two of you get together and agree on anything, then the Father in heaven will make it happen.
I wouldn’t even want that to be true. I don’t what the Father taking instructions from me and my knucklehead friends. What does it even mean that something is loosed in heaven?
The Hardest Question
How are we to take seriously Jesus’ claim that the Father in heaven will do anything we ask as long as there are two of us doing the asking?
Russell Rathbun is a preacher at House of Mercy in St. Paul, Minnesota, the author of Midrash on the Juanitos (Cathedral Hill Press, 2010) and the curator of The Hardest Question.
