Our passage today from Matthew illustrates what Catholic social teaching would call the principle of subsidiarity. The idea is that you don’t do something on a large scale that works better on a small scale. If an individual person can do something well, there is no reason to involve larger groups. This is just a good principle to keep in mind for any social structure, whether it’s a family, a church, a business, or a country.
On one level, then, all that Jesus is saying in Matthew 18 is that we should let this same natural order of things play out in the life of the Church. No doubt this can be difficult in practice, but the principle itself is clear: if a fellow church member steals something from me, for example, I am obliged to first confront him personally before making a fuss about it in public. Only when he is unrepentant am I permitted to bring up the problem with others, and only as a last resort should I bring it up to the whole community.
Notice, also, that this is Jesus’ instruction on what to do “if you brother sins against you”—against you, not just “if your brother sins in general.” In other words, Jesus is not here implying that we should be constantly analyzing one another’s behavior, waiting around to see when we need to confront somebody. All confrontations of sin are centered on love, as we see in Romans. So there’s a difference between exercising the prophetic role proper to all of Christ’s body—that is, the role of the watchman in Ezekiel 33—and being scrupulous about other people.
On another level, though, Jesus is giving us in Matthew 18 much more than a set of practical instructions for organizational health. There’s a key at the end, when we get the final possibility of Church discipline: “Truly, I say to you, whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.”
We’ve seen language like this before—most recently when Jesus says almost exactly the same thing to St. Peter, just a few chapters back in Matthew, and just a few weeks ago in the lectionary. He says something similar in the Gospel of John after his resurrection, when he visits the disciples in the upper room.
Today’s passage moves the discussion of authority beyond Peter to the whole band of apostles and then in a certain extended way to any group assembled in his name. This cannot just mean literally that any two or three people who gather in the name of Jesus can accomplish whatever they want. Otherwise, when three people pray for someone’s healing, it must necessarily happen. Or when John, Sue, and Bob meet in their mom’s garage to deliberate about a question of morality, they automatically have the status of an infallible ecumenical council. Most scholars think that in this passage, the “you” refers not to believers in general, but to the apostles, who carry, as a group, Christ’s own authority. But the emphasis on “I am in the midst of them” reminds us that any authority in the Church, whether the authority of Peter, the authority of the apostles, or the authority of any Christian attempting to speak the truth, comes from Christ.
Jesus really has given his ministers, and his Church, the ability to “bind” heaven in a certain way. This binding is related to the power of prayer in general insofar as God has, in his infinite wisdom, allowed us to participate, by our will, in the accomplishment of his will. And just as prayer is not a competition between our will and God’s will, the apostolic “binding” is not a competition between God’s authority and Church authority, for it is really the ability of Jesus himself. As such, we should be careful about exercising this power in a way that make it about us rather than about Jesus. So a pope, or a pastor, or an individual Catholic who abuses his particular authority for the sake of some personal grudge or desire is not acting in the proper authority of his office.
The ordered method of dealing with sin that we see here in Matthew is, at least in part, meant to prevent that kind of abuse. We start with Ezekiel, who gives us a pretty hard reminder about the need to speak out against evil. This is both the particular responsibility of the Church’s hierarchy and the general authority of the baptized, who, St. Paul reminds us, are bound to one another in love. So it is necessary for Catholics to speak today, with directness and clarity, about the popular sins of our day, not for the sake of some arbitrary rule-keeping, but for love.
When discussing sexual ethics, it is common for people to declare that the pope should stay out of their bedroom. The pope agrees! But the pope is supposed to care about his people, so he has to speak about the reality of sin. As do we all. It’s not that we have to go looking for it.
Every age has its favorite sins, the sins that it declares to be really virtues. In our age, they seem to be some combination of lust and greed and sloth. We don’t have to be cranky about it, but we all have to consider the ways that, in our individual situations, we either step up and speak the truth, or step back in fear, letting those we are supposed to love fall into danger simply because we care more about our comfort than about their health.
Still, we have to be sure that we are not using the Church’s authority for our own ends. We have to be careful about the assumption that we speak in Jesus’ name, and the more anxious the subject, the more necessary it is that we proclaim not just our private opinions, but the publicly revealed teaching of Christ and his Church. Modernity has relegated religion to a purely private realm, but the gospel of Jesus is a fundamentally public matter concerning human nature and its ultimate vocation. People might balk at the idea that the Church has something to say about anything other than theology, but Jesus tells us that it does, because what is bound on earth is bound in heaven.
It is tempting, when the Church is not good at being the Church—when, say, we see bad men in the hierarchy, or hypocrites in the local church—to deny this transcendent relationship. It is easy to find ourselves using the Church as a means to an end rather than as the unique location of salvation in Christ. It is easy, in other words, to have an escapist view of the practical aspects of Church life. The nitty-gritty work of budgets and meetings and canon law, the slow growth of neighborhood relationships, the “extra” personalities in the corner, seems so this-worldly, so unrelated to the spiritual goals of the Church, inward and outward, that we may find ourselves wishing we could just move on to the real meat of Christian living, whether we envision that as helping the poor or feeling God’s presence in prayer.
But Jesus’ words in Matthew do not give us permission to spiritualize the Church’s life, to escape its institutional constraints for the sake of some higher plane free of social complications. The Church here and now is not identical to the Church in glory, but it not independent, either, a mere means to an end.
Here is where Jesus’ instructions in Matthew become much more than a Church version of general organizational management. If the Church on earth is bound to the Church in heaven, the life of the institution is always bound up with the life of salvation. Dealing with sin is not just a way to keep the peace and be nice; it is a way of keeping the body whole and healthy on the path to eternal life. It is about making sure that we remain at home in Jesus.
Today we hear an invitation to love—not in the fuzzy abstract way of mere feelings, but in the concrete form of life together in the Church. This is the place where Jesus wants to teach us how to love God and our neighbor.