23rd Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year A. Ezekiel 33:7-9 · Psalm 95 · Romans 13:8-10 · Matthew 18:15-20
If your brother sins against you, Jesus says, go and tell him his fault between the two of you alone. If he listens to you, you have won your brother back. If he does not listen, take one or two others along, so that the matter rests on the testimony of two or three witnesses. If he refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church. If he will not listen even to the church, then he is to you as a gentile or a tax collector.
This is meant as an order for a congregation. I read it as an instruction for people who have to go on working together after a quarrel, and who are not indifferent to whether the other one gets crushed along the way.
If he listens to you, you have won him back. An escalation aims at getting the matter settled. Whether the other person is still there afterwards plays no part in it. In this order that is precisely the condition: it is settled only if he is still with you. Whoever escalates gathers more weight on his own side with every step; here people are brought in so that the other one gets another chance to hear. To me these are three attempts and not three rungs.
The one who has been wronged is the one who has to go, and not the one who did it. The work falls to the person with the least reason to do it.
In the first reading this becomes an office. Ezekiel is appointed as a watchman. If he does not warn the wicked, their blood will be required of him; if he warns them and they do not turn back, he has saved his own life. He is liable, then, for whether he speaks to the other at all. Whoever kept quiet shares the guilt, and whoever spoke is in the clear, even if nothing changes. Organisations have this too, mostly without any rule: afterwards it is said that somebody really should have spoken up. And there are the dutiful warners, who in the end mainly cover themselves.
The order of the steps strikes me. First one person goes alone, then two or three, then it is said in front of the congregation. In organisations it usually runs backwards. Someone has been delivering late for months and the others absorb it. In the kitchen it has been a topic for weeks. At some point somebody mentions it to management, and at the next meeting it appears as an item on the agenda. What he learns there first is not the criticism, it is that everyone knew before he did. He can no longer say anything to the matter itself, because the verdict was finished before the conversation began.
It also works the other way round. The form is observed, one to one and announced in advance, and it is still no chance to hear anything. May I give you some feedback, one of them asks, and then she lets fly. Saying no is not possible, that counts as being unwilling to learn, and afterwards it is said that she only meant well. Anyone who really wants the other person to stay talks differently.
For me the order in the gospel is therefore not a ladder upwards but a protection against being talked about before being talked to. Each step keeps the circle as small as possible for as long as it can.
The rule about witnesses is not new, it is already in the books of Moses: a matter stands only when two or three attest to it. So this is a procedure. The second reading gives the measure for it. Owe nothing to anyone, except to love one another. Love does no evil to the neighbour, so love is the fulfilment of the law.
It is not about giving someone up, then. A hopeless case, dead to me, I want nothing more to do with him: that comes from the one who says it, and it imposes something on the other. In the gospel a man has placed himself outside by what he did, after being asked three times, and all that is established is where he now stands. And there is a way back. Tax collectors in Matthew are exactly the people Jesus stays with and eats with, and the man who writes this down had been one himself.
Two verses later comes the sentence that anyone who spent time in a church youth group carries around as an earworm. Where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I in the midst of them. Here it stands inside an order for quarrels, directly after the authority to bind and to loose, which this time is not given to one person but to all of them.
When two people quarrel there are two perceptions, and the louder one is often taken to be right. With a group it is not simply that more people arrive, each with a perception of their own. Something else is there as well. Anyone who has been in a group and felt its dynamics may know what I mean: there is a level above the individuals, with a memory and a tone that nobody made alone, and nobody has it at their disposal. For me it is that level the promise is given to: there am I in the midst of them. Not to the one who holds the authority, but to the group that has a quarrel to work through.
This is a reading aid, not a second full version. Zugemutet reads the four texts of the Catholic lectionary each Sunday for what they say about living together. The texts are given; I listen for what comes across.