Conflict
Resolution in the Body of Christ
Matthew
18
15 If your
brother sins against you, go and tell him his fault,
between you and him alone. If he listens to you, you have gained your brother.
16 But if he does not listen, take one or two others along with you, that every
charge may be established by the evidence of two or three witnesses. 17 If he
refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church. And if he refuses to listen
even to the church, let him be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector.
Our
text today is about conflict resolution in the body of Christ. Now when we
encounter conflict in the church between us and someone else, we do not
typically take the approach we just read. A normal reaction to what Jesus says
here is to think that this is too extreme, too hard, or just plain unworkable
for the situations in our lives. The issues may be too petty and we think we
can just get over them by ourselves, given time and personal prayer. Or perhaps
the issues are too serious, the wounding too deep, the other person too hostile
to be approached in this manner. We tend to think (whether we admit it or not)
that Jesus must not understand our world, that his way won't work for us, so we
turn to counseling or therapy or some other method that seems like a more
realistic approach than what our Lord gives us here.
But we need to try to understand and practice the
biblical model for conflict resolution, otherwise
we're living in disobedience. You see, Jesus is not making suggestions here, he's giving instructions that he expects us to follow.
He's not offering one method among others we might try,
he's giving us the one way to become the kind of community he is building. If
we think about it, we know that he created us, he does understand us, and he loves
us. We can trust him as our Lord and God and we can have faith to obey him,
even when his way seems strange to us.
What we're faced with, then, is a simple choice:
will we follow the method Jesus gives us, or will we reject his way for
something else that is man-made? If we're going to be his disciples, his
followers, we have to follow his way, which means we need to understand it and
then put it into practice. And we can begin to understand it by carefully
looking at the first and most basic command Jesus gives us here: If your
brother sins against you, go and tell him his fault, between you and him
alone.
If your
brother sins against you: this tells us right away that Jesus is dealing
with conflict within the church, specifically between two of his followers. We
can't expect this method to work between a believer and an unbeliever, or even
between a believer and a false believer or a false teacher. There are biblical
models for dealing with those relationships as well, but they lie outside the
scope of this text. Here, Jesus is dealing specifically with typical, hurtful,
sinful issues that come up between fellow believers brothers and sisters in
Christ. We might assume that we know
what brother and sister names, but Jesus tells us right here in the immediate
context what he wants his followers to look like, and
it is crucial to understand who they are who we are if we are to resolve
conflict well in the manner that Jesus gives us.
If
you look back in 18.3, Jesus tells us that in order to be a subject in his
kingdom we have to become like little children. We might be tempted to think
that Jesus has in mind the innocence of little children, but he prevents us
from making that mistake by specifying in v.4 that it is the humility of little
children that he has in mind. He helps us more in 18.12 by comparing his
followers to lonely, lost sheep.
You see the whole teaching in ch.18 follows an
argument the disciples had about who the greatest of them was (more on this later).
Jesus responds that the greatest in his kingdom really all who actually get
into his kingdom are those who humble themselves like little children; the
ones he really cares about the most are the lost. Jesus ends this discussion
with another parable where a servant is forgiven a vast sum of money by his
master (again, more on this later). So, his followers are those who are humble
like little children, who know they were once the lone lost sheep, and those
who understand just how much they've been forgiven from. Jesus' method of
conflict resolution presumes that both parties have this basic
self-understanding; without this common ground, we're not talking about
conflict resolution within the body of Christ.
If
your brother sins against you: Jesus clearly assumes that this will
happen. Even among people who fit the description I just gave, there is going
to be conflict, there is going to be real, genuine hurt. Jesus is responding to
a perfect example, the argument his disciples were having. This was neither the
first nor the last time they had this argument, a strange argument to have
given that Jesus has told them at least twice by now that he's going to
Jerusalem to die. Do you think they were jockeying to be the one in charge
after his death? Matthew (who was one those in the argument) doesn't give us
the details of their discussion, but it seems unlikely that they could've
gotten very far in such an argument without saying hurtful things to each
other. But Jesus is not only picking up on their sinful behavior of the moment,
he also knows we will sin against each other because he understands that we
live in a condition of sin. Remember, he was there when Adam and Eve fell he
knows that it's in our fallen nature to sin. All of our relationships are
characterized by a pre-existing brokenness that we can never fully get beyond
in this life.
This
brokenness manifests itself in hurtful things we say or do, and also in things
we fail to say and do. Think of the parable of the Good Samaritan: the command
being taught there is to love your neighbor as yourself. Of the priest, the
Levite, and the Samaritan, the Samaritan is the only one who did not sin,
because if we fail to show love to each other, we have not kept that command;
in other words, we've sinned. It's important we understand this, because in the
culture of our day, sin has been replaced with other, nicer sounding terms
like: differences of personality, mistakes, lapses in judgment, personal
choices, and so on. But Jesus uses the word sin to refer to anything that
arises from the brokenness between us rather than the love and unity we share
anything that amounts to conflict that needs resolving between us, anything
short of loving one another. Anything less than love comes from our sin and has
to be dealt with as Jesus commands.
Because he understands our sinful condition, Jesus
doesn't seek to eliminate the conflict
between us; he doesn't try to have us avoid or prevent the inevitable. Instead,
he teaches us how to deal with it properly when it does happen. In fact, he has
made it so that learning to deal with conflict well is a key ingredient for us
becoming the kind of community he wants us to be. Jesus is always good at turning our sin
around for his glory and our good.
But
Jesus also knows we have the ability to really hurt each other. In that parable
I mentioned (starting in
Notice what Jesus does here. The amount owed to the
master is well it's infinite really; it's so much
that for someone to be just outright forgiven over $7 billion is shocking the
forgiveness God grants us is truly amazing. And while the smaller amount is a
lot smaller by comparison, the comparison is only part of Jesus' point. He's
also careful not to trivialize the hurts that we do to each other. I don't know
about you, but I think $18,000 is a significant amount of money, and if you
owed me $18,000 I would really want you to pay it back to me.
Jesus knows that sometimes we really hurt each
other, and the Lord wants me to stress to you this morning that he knows some
of you have suffered serious wounding from your brothers and sisters, from your
fellow believers, people you were close to, people you trusted, which has made
the hurt all the worse. Jesus knows you and he knows you have been hurt and he
wants to heal that hurt. We've made the mistake, however, of thinking that
these hurts are something within us that Jesus will just heal individually,
apart from each other, and without us doing what he has told us to do. In cases
where the other believer has died I think we can ask the Lord for such healing,
but in normal circumstances, where the opportunity to obey Jesus remains, his
healing comes through us obeying his command.
The
command is simple: go and tell him his fault between you and him alone.
Jesus calls for a controlled confrontation between the two believers. As
followers of Jesus, we should get used to the fact that his way is usually
completely different from our way that is, the world's way of going about
things. If it was up to us, we'd look for the one in the wrong to do something,
but Jesus places the responsibility squarely on the injured party. You have
been wronged, you have been hurt, you have been sinned
against: to you Jesus says go.
Also, like so much of Jesus' teaching, we find this
command echoed in
the law he came to fulfill. In Lev. 19.17, the Lord commanded the Israelites,
Do not nurse hatred in your heart for your brother. Confront people directly
so you will not be held guilty for their sin." We have to
confront each other, whether we think it's too petty or too painful, because
when one of us sins, we all suffer the effects; not only the one sinned
against, but also the one who sins, and all of us as a body as well. The hurt
doesn't reside within the one who has been wronged; it exists between the two
parties, hurting them both and potentially the whole community.
Jesus makes clear that this brokenness between us
is something that we must struggle together to overcome. This requires hard
work, honest real love,
a commitment to unity, and serious confrontation. We are one
body. If you catch a virus by breathing it in, or if bacteria
gets in through a cut on your finger, you don't have a sick finger, or a
sick nose you have a sick you! If someone has sinned against you, you can't
abandon your brother or sister in their sin, you have to go to them because you
love them, and your love for them, the relationship that you share as members
of one body is so important, so necessary, that it's worth the risk, whether we
risk seeming petty, or even if we are risking further hurt.
And
we have to be honest about this, if you confront someone who has hurt you, the
chance exists that they will hurt you again and perhaps even worse. But is it
so surprising that Jesus would ask us to make ourselves vulnerable like this?
Not only is his way unlike the world's way, and not only is it the fulfillment
of the OT way, it's also the way that he embodied, the way he himself took.
We're his disciples, his followers, because we follow his example; we do the
things he has done in the way he has done them.
Remember the parable of the two servants we just
talked about Jesus is the master in that story. He is the one to whom the $7
billion is owed, he is the one we've all sinned so deeply against. And how did
he respond to our hurting him? He went to the cross and died. The verse in
Leviticus we read he did hold himself guilty for our sin and he sends his
Holy Spirit continually to us to confront us when we sin. This is our example.
We sin against Jesus he sacrifices himself and then confronts us by his
Spirit. Someone sins against us we sacrifice ourselves to confront them to
rescue them from their sin.
We
also have to understand that this is why we confront them we are not seeking
restitution, we are not looking to get even, our goal is not to be proven right
we go in order to forgive them and be reconciled to them. The whole point of
the parable of the two servants is that for one who has been forgiven of so
much to withhold forgiveness from another is scandalous. Scandalous because not
only do we exist in a condition of sin we also exist in a condition of
forgiven-ness, we forgive each other because we've already been forgiven by Jesus.
One of the hardest things about becoming a disciple of Jesus is learning to be
forgiven, to accept our own forgiven-ness.
You see, Jesus told the parable of the two servants
in response to Peter's question in v.21: Lord, how often will my brother sin
against me, and I forgive him? As many as seven times?
Peter reacted to Jesus' method of conflict resolution the same way we do he
thought it was unrealistic and needed some boundaries, some limitations, some qualifications. Do you also notice that Peter assumes
that he's the one being sinned against, and not the other way around? Do you
suppose he kept quiet during the argument that started this whole episode?
Yeah, me neither. What Peter wants and what we want too is to retain the
power to give or withhold forgiveness when a brother or sister has sinned
against us. We want them to repent first, to be really sorry for hurting us.
But
in telling Peter, not seven times, but seventy times seven, Jesus refuses to
let him or us keep the power to withhold forgiveness from each other,
because it is never the case that Jesus withholds his forgiveness from us. He
died for us before we repented, his forgiveness comes to us before we ask; we
only become aware of our sin as the Spirit reveals it to us, we only repent as
the Spirit enables us. Hear me carefully here: forgiveness precedes
and makes possible true repentance. Do you remember the story of the
prodigal son? What did the father do? He was on the lookout for his son, saw
him while he was still a long way off, ran out to meet the wayward boy and cut
him off in the middle of the speech he had prepared. The father had forgiveness
there waiting for him just as he had that fat calf, that ring, and that robe
waiting for him.
Now you might argue that the boy had to get up out
of the pig sty and walk back home, but that story uses humans as an analogy,
our Father doesn't live far away, He leans over the rail of the pig sty and
begs us to let Him lift us out. And when it says [the
prodigal] came to himself that in itself is the work of the Holy Spirit.
I hope I don't have to convince you any further that there is nothing we do to
earn or merit the forgiveness Jesus gives us.
So
the question is, do we offer forgiveness like the
father of the prodigal son, or like the older brother? The older brother wanted
what was fair, he wanted judgment, he wanted restitution; the father wanted
reconciliation he wanted his family back together. He ran out to forgive the
younger son, and in the middle of celebrating their reunion, he left the party
to go to the older son. The father is our model for going to each other with
forgiveness at the ready.
Once
we go, Jesus commands us to tell him his fault. This telling is no
ordinary speech. It must adhere to the highest standard we as Christians have,
which Paul describes in Eph. 4.15 as speaking the truth in love.
Truth-telling is crucial here, but alone it is not enough and will only make matters worse to speak truth without
love is no better than speaking a curse. Speech that is loving, but not
truthful is a lie and we know that love can't be based on a lie, so there can
be no such thing as speech that is loving but not truthful. But settling on
speaking the truth in love as our goal and standard is easier said than done.
This requires careful, deliberate concern for the quality of our speech. This
further means that we must make the effort to remember truthfully.
The problem is that careful memory and speech are
often the first casualties of sin. The one who has been sinned against must be
diligent in interrogating their own memory and must exercise constant vigilance
over what they say and when and to whom they speak, to make sure it is truth
spoken in love. Just a few weeks ago we heard how James warns us about the
destructive power of the tongue (ch. 6). Speaking the
truth in love means we don't tear others down to build ourselves up, we don't
throw around casual accusations, we don't spread gossip, and we don't create scapegoats. These are
all normal patterns of speech in the world around us; but as followers of Jesus
we must unlearn them or they will destroy us as a body.
Practically
speaking, let's think about what sort of limitations speaking the truth in love
places on us. If the one sinned against is going to speak only loving truth,
what can they say? They can tell what happened, you know just the facts,
ma'am (from their perspective of course). They can tell how that
made them feel, either at the time, or later, or now, or all three. They
can tell how what happened is at odds with what Christians are supposed to say,
do, or not say or do (when appropriate, and based on their reading of
Scripture).
Is there anything else they can say and remain
strictly truthful? Can they speak of the other person's motive or frame of mind
or intent? Probably not. Can they speak about anyone
else or to anyone else about this? No, but more on that in a minute. What
happened and how it made them feel, that's pretty much it and that ought to
be enough if they are talking to a brother or sister in Christ. Right?
Maybe or maybe not, which leads us to the last part
of the initial command but bear in mind that this loving truth-telling kind
of speech is required from beginning to end, at no point can the standard for
Christian speech be lowered in what follows. Also bear in mind that the person
who did the sinning has their own perspective; they will often have a different
take on what happened. This means that speaking the truth in love is only
possible when both parties are present; no step in this process can rightly
occur when one party is absent. The two should be able to work the matter out
most of the time, but it will most likely involve a give and take, with each
speaking the truth in love and seeking to reconcile of course, but a real live
confrontation all the same.
Between you and him alone. The rest of the
instructions that Jesus gives us following this verse come from his desire to
protect the body his body from the damage that comes when we sin against
each other. It would be a serious mistake to think that the sin between two
members of our body was somehow not an issue for the whole body; Jesus does not
instruct us to keep the matter discreet because it is private; this command is
for the protection of the body. If there is sin in our body, we have to deal
with it as a body, but the first step is to keep it from spreading to the rest
of the body if possible.
This means quite literally that the one sinned against
is not to mention the offense to anyone except for the offender whom they are
obligated to confront as we have already seen. If the one sinned against tells
of the matter to anyone else in the community this itself is sin and under no
circumstance are we to take these matters outside our community. Jesus clearly
details who we are to tell and when we are to tell them, and he never instructs
us to go outside our body with these matters. This is serious and Jesus expects
us to follow his plan. He tells us to deal with the matter between the two
alone to keep us from falling into a cycle of sin, where we compound sin on top
of sin, which it makes it much harder to heal the situation.
The
way we stop a cycle of sin from starting is to commit ourselves not to listen
to anything of the sort. If someone comes up to you and begins to tell you how
someone else in the body has hurt them you need to stop them before they get
started. Don't listen to their story first, it's none of your business (yet)
and if you listen to it, you have sinned as well. Cut them off and tell them to
go to the person directly and follow this plan. Also encourage them to go ready
to forgive and be reconciled; remind them of the prodigal's father. If they
tell you they've already done that and it didn't work well, we'll get to that
in a second, but most of the time, you're going to send them back and do tell
them that if they can't work it out one on one to come back to you then.
The
matter only goes beyond these two believers if somehow they can't come to an
agreement. They may disagree about what happened, they may have radically
different perspectives or theologies, or a genuine personality conflict, one
might be exhibiting rebellion maybe trying to say it wasn't sin or doesn't
need forgiving, could be any number of things at this point, but they're unable
to come to agreement on their own. Until this point they will be the only ones
in the know, but now others must be brought in.
Jesus instructs us to take one or two others and in Gal. 6.1 Paul adds
that these should be people who are spiritual and go in a spirit of gentleness.
Let's say someone comes up to you and tries to tell
you how someone else hurt them. You cut them off, turn them around and point
them back to that person, only to have them tell you that they did go to them
first, just as Jesus told them to, and it didn't work. At this point, you still
refuse to hear the details for two reasons: 1. you may or may not be the right
person to mediate between these two, and 2. the other person is not present
yet, making it impossible to ensure everyone is speaking the truth in love. So,
at no point should you allow someone to tell you privately of how someone hurt
them; and do I need to mention that you shouldn't be engaging in any
conversations about how someone else wronged another someone else?
As
for who should mediate, even if the two in conflict can't agree on anything
else, they at least need to agree on who they are going to ask to mediate for
them, both the number of people (as few as possible) and who they're going to
be. The people chosen should be recognized leaders in the church, not
necessarily staff, but those to whom authority has been entrusted by the
community. They should also be people that both parties feel comfortable with
and who are in a position to be neutral. Since neutrality
would be compromised if they hear one side first without the other party
present (and since we want to speak the truth in love), the telling should be
done only when everyone has come together. Given our busy lives, such an
event would probably have to be scheduled, but we shouldn't be afraid of being
deliberate and careful with such matters we should be afraid of the opposite.
If the person who has done the offense is unwilling
to agree on who should mediate, the one sinned against
must still take one or two others. They should try to be as neutral in their
selection as possible, and they should still not tell them any details until
the other person is present. All that should be conveyed to these mediators
ahead of time is that there is an outstanding conflict between the two parties
that needs help resolving. This is very different from the man-made practice
often called an intervention, because in that method everyone is fully in the
know except the person being targeted, whom the rest have been talking or
gossiping about for some time, and often the target is
even led to the meeting under false pretenses. Here, everyone must speak only
the truth in love and all must come with forgiveness at the ready and true
reconciliation as their one desire. From reading Acts and Paul's letters, we
can expect this sort of thing to happen sometimes and not create a major
crisis. In Galatians, Paul is even able to use a past ,
resolved confrontation with Peter as a teaching example, which goes to show
that Jesus knows how to build his body with resistance training.
If
the matter escalates beyond this level we have a serious problem. This means at
least one party is unwilling to receive counsel and is in open rebellion to
those over them in the Lord because if we have chosen spiritual people to
mediate according to Jesus' teaching, we need to submit to what they tell us to
do. If they tell us to repent, we should repent; if they tell us that in their
judgment, what we have done is sin, we need to stop doing it. Could they be
wrong? Of course. But didn't Paul tell us it was
better to give up some things for the sake of our brothers and sisters? Of
course, if they really are spiritually mature, we're probably just wrong and
blinded to our own sin. A very serious situation to be in, but not a position
unknown to most of us, and not a corner
of the pig sty that the Father can't reach us in, right? Remember, we are all
forgiven sinners that's what makes us brothers and sisters. Almost always,
taking along one or two is going to result in reconciliation.
But,
if the person refuses the attempt at a discreet mediation, the next procedure
Jesus gives is for that person to be brought before the whole church. Now I
can't tell you what this looks like from experience, because to my knowledge
this is only seriously practiced by groups like the Mennonites, but a few
things are clear from Scripture.
First, this step is still characterized by speaking
the truth in love.
Second, the offender needs to be present when the
matter is addressed and he or she needs to have the opportunity to tell their
side to the church since the only reason we've gotten this far is because
there is still a fundamental disagreement that needs to be decided on.
Third, we have reached the point when the whole
church is to know fully this level entails a full disclosure of the matter to
the entire community; anything short of this any partial tellings
fails to follow the command Jesus is giving. The church must then decide the
matter, just as it did in Acts 15 and the body must come to a decision to which
it can say, It seems good to the Holy Spirit and to us. This is no simple
majority, super majority, or any other sort of human parliamentary procedure or
bureaucratic mechanism; this is unity, the church is one body and can only
speak with one voice.
Fourth, once the whole body decides the matter,
that is it, the person must submit to the decision of the body to remain in the
body. It almost goes without saying that this sort of scenario should be
extremely rare.
Still,
Jesus presses on because he know us and he knows just
how stubborn we can be. There is the remote possibility that the person can
still remain rebellious there is no other word for it at this point despite
the great lengths the body has gone to in order to show him compassion,
forgiveness, and love. Such a person is to be removed from the body and treated
as a tax collector or a Gentile.
Even here, we need to consider what Jesus is
telling us carefully. First, remember this is Jesus talking: how did he
treat Gentiles and tax collectors? Pretty good, very friendly, cared for them a
lot. So, even if we have to take this most drastic of measures, the goal is
still forgiveness and reconciliation. This came up in
Second,
Jesus is telling us that removal from the body should only be done in the most
extreme cases in fact, only when a person refuses to accept forgiveness; if
the person is willing to accept forgiveness and is willing to repent and seek
reconciliation, they are by no means to be removed from the body because
forgiveness and reconciliation can only occur in the body between the one who
has sinned and the one they have sinned against.
None of us is able to go off by ourselves and heal
the hurts we have caused or received, it would be like sending part of your
body off for surgery. I promise, if a surgeon wants to
operate on some part of your body, she's going to want your whole body to show
up at the hospital that day. You're going to want that too. This is no
different. I know it goes against the logic of our culture, where we think we
can take care of everything by going to therapy and fixing ourselves. But this
is what Jesus teaches and he is either right or he's wrong. I'm not saying
those things don't have their place, especially when dealing with hurts outside
the body of Christ, like those from our past, when we're dealing with people
who are not brothers and sisters in Christ, or are no longer living, but in
normal, everyday relationships within our community this is how we have to deal
with them if we are going to follow Jesus. A person can only be removed from
the community if they refuse to submit to authority, and as soon as they are
willing, they must be immediately restored.
By
the way, you will notice that the next thing Jesus says is about binding and
loosing and two or three agreeing in his name asking for anything and receiving
it. The false teachers of prosperity gospel have stolen these words from their
context to teach their heresy, but here is where we find them and here is where
they belong.
The community that is willing to follow Jesus and
obey his teaching will find that it becomes the kind of community where people
are healed of those past hurts that fall outside their kingdom relationships,
where sinners become forgiven sinners otherwise known as saints or disciples,
where the gifts and the fruits of the Spirit flow freely, where the lame walk
and the blind see, where the hungry are fed and the captives are set free,
where the poor find that they are blessed and the sick have hands laid on them
and they recover.
Haven't you read what James said in 6.15-16: And
the prayer of faith will save the one who is sick, and the Lord will raise him up. And if he has committed any sins, he will be forgiven.
Therefore, confess your sins to one another and pray for one another, that you
may be healed. Forgiveness and healing go together, they cannot be divorced
from each other, you cannot have one without the other. And we can have neither
so long as we persist in our disobedience to Christ. Forgiveness,
reconciliation and healing and I mean all forms of healing, emotional,
relational, spiritual, mental, and physical only occur in and through the
body of Christ which is held together by the real working out of love that
Jesus calls us to in this passage. There is no other way for us to be his body.