Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Matthew · About this commentary
If Your Brother Sins Against You
Matthew 18:15-20
15 “If your brother sins against you, go, show him his fault between you and him alone. If he listens to you, you have gained back your brother. · WEB
The procedure for a wrong between two people — private first, and every step designed to keep the circle as small as possible.
"If your brother sins against you, go, show him his fault between you and him alone. If he listens to you, you have gained back your brother" Matthew 18:15.
This is the New Testament's fullest instruction on handling a wrong, and it is Matthew's alone. It comes immediately after the lost sheep, which sets its purpose before it states its method.
The first move is the one almost never made. Go — the injured party takes the initiative, not the offender. Alone — nobody else is told, which rules out the entire machinery by which these things normally travel. And the stated aim is not a verdict but a person: you have gained back your brother. If it ends here, no one else ever knows there was anything to know.
"But if he doesn't listen, take one or two more with you, that at the mouth of two or three witnesses every word may be established" Matthew 18:16. The second step widens the circle by the smallest possible margin and invokes the law's own safeguard against a case resting on one voice Deuteronomy 19:15. The witnesses are not reinforcements. They are there so that what was said can be established, including the possibility that the complaint does not hold up.
"If he refuses to listen to them, tell it to the assembly" Matthew 18:17. Only at the third stage does it become public, and by then two attempts have failed. The escalation is slow by design, and every step is a further offer to end it.
"If he refuses to hear the assembly also, let him be to you as a Gentile or a tax collector." The last resort is a recognition rather than a punishment: a relationship the other person has ended by refusing three approaches is acknowledged as ended. And the two examples chosen are worth holding against the rest of the book. This Gospel was written by a tax collector, records a Canaanite woman's faith, and closes by sending the eleven to the nations. Gentiles and tax collectors are not people this book writes off. They are people it goes after.
"Whatever things you bind on earth will have been bound in heaven" Matthew 18:18. The authority given to Peter at Caesarea Philippi Matthew 16:19 is here given to the assembly, in the same words and the same tense. Heaven is not waiting to be told; the community's task is to establish what is already the case, which is a limit on the authority far more than a grant of it.
"If two of you will agree on earth concerning anything that they will ask, it will be done for them" Matthew 18:19, and "where two or three are gathered together in my name, there I am in the middle of them" Matthew 18:20.
These two sentences are quoted everywhere and belong here, in a passage about a quarrel. The two agreeing are the two who were at odds. The promise attached to the smallest possible gathering is given precisely where a community is most likely to feel that the process has failed and that God has left the room.
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