Matthew 18:10-20
The last couple of weeks have found us leaning pretty heavily on one of my favourite movies to watch with my son: The Lord of the Rings. Today, I want to move to another of my favourites. Both are wonderful Christian movies, with all those grand themes of sin, forgiveness, redemption, good triumphing over evil, resurrection, and so on. And so let me talk to you about The Blues Brothers. In one of their songs, they sing about how “everybody needs somebody to love”. I found myself thinking about this song, because I was thinking about our Lord’s story of the one lost sheep, and what it must be like to be that sheep.
Let’s just assume for a moment that we all accept the idea that human beings need to love and to be loved. We need to be loved by others, and we need others to show love to. That is the great fulfilment of the human experience. But to be that lost sheep, all out alone and lost with no-one around them, means that they have neither.
Our Lord talks about this lost sheep so that we can recognise straight away something of what we have felt, or maybe feel right now. We might have one, and not the other, or neither. We might have someone to love, but they don’t love us; or someone loves us, but we just cannot find the way to love them back. Maybe we don’t think we have the ability or means to show them any love. Christ’s parable of the lost sheep speaks so deeply because we know what this is like, and he wants us to sense the joy of when that problem is fixed. To love and to be loved; that is the answer.
He moves on to another lesson, this time about two people who have a problem with each other. This is how his church is to treat one another: seek out the love. Pursue the path that leads to being loved, and being able to love.
All of us are good friends with righteous displeasure. We all know someone (or someones) who have said or done something that is just not right. And we all know what it is like to have those imaginary conversations with them where we give them a piece of our mind. For many of us, those conversations might not have been imaginary: we might have actually decided “enough is enough” and gone and told them exactly what we think of them.
And yet our Lord gives us a pattern of behaviour that doesn’t push people down, but builds them up. Try it one-on-one; try and build them back up to a place where you can love each other. If that doesn’t work, keep trying with a few more people. If that still doesn’t work, get the whole church, the whole family of love, to try and bring back the love.
Finally, if that still doesn’t work, treat that person as if they were, quote, “a Gentile or a publican”.
Now, if you were listening closely, this last line probably stuck out to you. A thinking person would hear all that stuff about love, find it all very agreeable, and then get to this last line and hear a contradiction. Is Jesus saying that there is a point at which we stop trying to love people, and just kick them out?
If you are thinking that, then I think you are right in finding a problem there. We had a consistent theme, and then a sudden handbrake turn in the opposite direction. But what if Jesus wasn’t talking about kicking people out? He merely said to treat that person as “a Gentile or a publican”. Let us therefore ask the question, how did Jesus treat Gentiles and publicans?
First of all, we know what he thought about publicans: he loved hanging out with them! Many times he is criticised for eating with publicans, prostitutes, and (worst of all) tax collectors. Indeed, these are the people he came for! He came for the lost sheep – the people who were not loved, and had no-one to love. He invited them to dinner. He brought them back into the flock.
Second, what about Gentiles? Well, we don’t have to look very far for an answer to that one: look in the mirror! He loves Gentiles so much that he would die for them.
And this is the ultimate reason why we should be so zealous for the cause of bringing people back together. In the search for the one lost sheep, and the instruction on how to reconcile personal differences, we see the cross of Christ foreshadowed.
Think of the two people in disagreement in Jesus’ second lesson. One of them is you; the other is God. You have sinned; God is offended. If God were to come up to you and give you a piece of his mind, he would be perfectly in the right. You are the offending party; he is completely innocent. More than that; you are a human, his creature, and he is your God, your creator. You have a conscience implanted in you; God’s very nature is the source of that conscience. His holiness is supreme; his righteousness is perfect. It is perfectly just for you to bear the punishment for your offenses against him.
Yet – God did not choose this path. Instead, our heavenly Father sent his only-begotten Son, whom he loved very much, to become incarnate as a human being and be our representative. The Lord Jesus, the Word of the Father became flesh and blood so that he might stand in our place. When he hung on the cross, he not only died a physical death, but a cosmic death. God’s perfect judgement on human sin was poured out on him on the cross.
The cross of Christ teaches us two very important reasons as to why we must always seek to reconcile our differences and build each other up.
First, the cross of Christ teaches us that we must seek to reconcile our differences because we are not, in fact, the centre of the universe. How dare we look at a fellow human and take the moral high ground? We all are brought low before God’s standard; it is only by his gracious love that we even have breath. And the same is for the person who has offended us; they are equally condemned by God’s standard, and equally forgiven by Christ’s death and resurrection. Whatever problems we have with one another fade into irrelevance when we consider the problems we had with God. God was able to forgive and forget; so must we.
Secondly, it is because it is God’s nature to reconcile and love. When we offended God, he did not punish us, but died for us, so that we may be reconciled with him and brought into his love. We must do the same to one another. When Jesus speaks of the shepherd seeking the lost sheep, he is talking about himself. And in the context of the past couple of weeks, about the Church he is building, he is talking about us, his body. We are acting on behalf of the Great Shepherd, seeking out his lost sheep, reconciling and building up.
And so while the bard sang “everybody needs somebody to love”, he was reflecting the great love of Christ for us, in bringing us back into fellowship with him, so that we may love him and one another. Let us be a church known not for “speaking our mind”, but for always seeking out a way to build each other up; to find a resolution that leads to love. And when we gather before the Lord’s Table, I want you to exhale deeply in sweet relief, knowing that because Christ has died for you, God will never be angry with you, he will never punish you, but only ever build you up in his love.