Matthew 18: 15-20
Should a brother [close associate] do something bad, go to him privately and try to reason with him. If he hears and accepts what you say, you have kept him in the fold. If he does not, then take one or two others with you and you'll have witnesses to what you both say. If that doesn't work, take it to the whole community and treat him as you would an outsider or a toll collector. I tell you that whatever you bind in this life will be considered bound in the next, and whatever you let go now will be considered let go then. In truth I tell you that if just two of you agree here about anything you ask, it will be done for you by my father in heaven. Indeed, where two or three are assembled in my name, I will be present with them."
(Translated and paraphrased by Harry T. Cook.)
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A very savvy bishop once told me that in his experience "wherever people are gathered as a church, there is bound to be conflict." This was apparently no less so in the late first century CE communities out of which the Gospel according to Matthew came. We see the familiar term έκκλησία in this passage. The word is commonly translated as "church." Even though literally it means "called out ones," it is another way of accounting for a coming together as in συναγωγή or "assembly." There are bound to be as many opinions (warranted by facts or otherwise) in any gathering of human beings. That's not the problem. It's how a community manages its disagreement that matters, not who's right or who's wrong.
To the writer of Matthew who is not hesitant about consigning those with whom he disagrees to outer darkness and the prospect of endlessly gnashed teeth, the consequence for the brother who has acted badly seems pretty mild. The counsel is to treat the miscreant as an "outsider" -- the word in the text is έθνικός, literally "a foreigner or alien." It doesn't mean the brother in question is an alien, but by his behavior he is making himself one.
A toll collector -- i.e. an ordinary Judean or Galilean who worked for the Roman provincial government collecting tolls on an array of goods or services -- would be considered an έθνικός because he was working for an alien entity and for all intents and purposes against his own people. But Jesus was depicted as eating with toll collectors, meaning that to him they could not have been alien. Table hospitality was a sign of intimacy and acceptance in the Mediterranean world, so to treat the miscreant as an alien could not have meant writing him off. To treat him as you would a toll collector would be to sit at table with him and work things out.
Matthew interrupts his tone poem on pastoral psychology to do some ecclesiology, which may be a major point of what has been described in the early part of the passage at hand. In a reprise of 16:19, Matthew depicts Jesus saying to his disciples (who came to him 14 verses earlier to ask who was the greatest in the heavenly domain) that whatever settlement of conflicts are achieved in this life will be considered settled in the next, and those unresolved will remain so. This invests a community with a great deal of power and counts on human beings to wield it with gentleness.
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Hidden in plain sight in Jesus' counsel to the hypothetical community about how to handle conflict is a big clue as to who in the New Testament analysis has the power. It is not the rabbis or the elders, nor yet bishops. It is the community itself. It is up to the έκκλησία to settle hash and to decide who's right about what, though not at the expense of comity.
The church that had its beginnings in the latter decades of the first century CE has evolved into top-down organization in which elected, but more often self-appointed, leaders have seized the power to decide what's orthodox and what is not, to decide who's in and who's not.
The church as envisioned in this Matthean passage resembles a Quaker meeting. The church as it has turned out to be resembles an audience of conscripts standing or sitting at attention as the man (almost always a man) upfront lays down the law, says what God's will is and takes no questions. He says what he says hardly ever on the basis of scholarship and consideration, but on what he and his colleagues have decided to promote as truth.
The organization known as the One, Catholic and Apostolic Church has tried and convicted those who have declined to accept that party line and have ostracized them and frequently executed them. This is not necessarily ancient history.
Several years ago a Catholic Archbishop forbade his clergy from participating in a liturgy he decided on the basis of no information was somehow destined to be illicit, in that persons either priests in good standing or other Christians who were neither priests nor Catholics would have part. The liturgy was the centerpiece of a conference that was attended by hundreds of Catholics from all over North America -- Catholics seeking to stay in their church at the same time as maintaining their intellectual honesty.
The archbishop's larger fear was that Hans K�ng, only one of the greatest philosopher/theologians of modern times, might be speaking or that a video of him speaking might be shown. K�ng was shorn of his faculty to teach for the church officially after he questioned doctrines that insisted on an unmarried priesthood and the withholding of reproductive rights from women. I can tell you that a good many of the archbishop's clergy went to that conference. I can tell you further that their attendance was duly noted by the archbishop's ecclesiastical Schutzstaffel and that some of my friends could have been in trouble.
However, the archbishop may eventually come to see that his power over those he considers disobedient will be short-lived and that a good many of those whose freedom he would circumscribe may consider him more to be pitied than condoned. -- Bishops of the church of which I have been a priest for decades sometimes think they have the keys to the kingdom in their cassock pockets, too. They don't. The power that counts for anything and everything is resident in the έκκλησία, and collectively it will work things out. If anything is bound in this life or some other life, it will not be bound by any bishop, arch or otherwise.
