Trust & Obey, Week 2: Matthew 16 & 18, Part 2
As a pastor of twenty-three years, I’ve had some surprising experiences during worship services. For example, one time a wasp landed right on my Bible as I was preaching! People seated close to the front saw it all. I swatted at it, and it fell to the ground, where I stepped on it. The congregation clapped and cheered!
But perhaps my most surprising worship service experience occurred when I was not a pastor. Instead it happened when I was visiting a church. After the service was over, the pastor asked everyone to stay for a special announcement. The pastor asked one of the church leaders to come up front with him. There the leaders confessed publicly that he had committed adultery in his marriage, and he apologized and asked for forgiveness. What do you think about that? Does Jesus want churches to have public confession of sin during worship services?
In the previous post, we saw how Jesus taught that everything we do as a church family should be based on the foundation of Jesus. There are plenty of other foundations that we could try to build on if we wanted to. The foundation of worldly success, for example. How do you build on the foundation of worldly success? Easy, you do whatever it takes to be successful based on what the world defines as success. Bigger is better. Bigger budgets, buildings, and bodies in seats. More, more, more. That is how the world defines a good choice. Smaller is failure. Bigger is success.
But if we build on the foundation of Jesus, we have a very different measure of success. Jesus points this out when he said crazy stuff like “small is the gate, and narrow is the way” to following him, and get this, he said “few will find it.” Or how about this winner of a statement: “if you want to be my disciples, take up your cross, die to yourselves, and follow me.” These are not generally considered to be motivational or exciting statements.
In fact, there were times, when Jesus seemed to say that kind of crazy stuff to purposefully get fewer people to follow him. At the height of his popularity when he was doing all sorts of healing miracles and making bread and fish multiply to feed people, he had tens of thousands in the crowds following him. That is worldly success. Jesus was leading what amounted to a mega-mega church.
You capitalize on that worldly success, and you try to reach as many as possible, right? You want a huge following. What did Jesus do? He said to them, in John 6, “unless you eat my flesh and drink my blood, you have no life in you.” I’m dead serious. He said that. It’s gross and disgusting, and it seems the people in the crowd that day also thought it was disgusting, because they were good humans who did not eat human flesh.
We know they were grossed out and repulsed because of what we read in John 6:60-66, right after he said the “eat my flesh and drink my blood” thing. Some disciples, not the Twelve, grumbled, saying, “This is a hard teaching…and from this time many of his disciples turned back and no longer followed him.” If I heard some bible scholar or professor or preacher say what Jesus said, I would say, “Nope. I’m out. That guy is out of his mind.”
But Jesus did say that, and it is no surprise that the huge crowds started thinning out. Getting large numbers was not his main goal. He was willing to speak hard, difficult, but truthful things, even if meant people would turn away. Because of what he said, the crowds just kept getting smaller and smaller.
After Jesus dies, rises again, and ascends back to heaven, we know exactly how many disciples and followers were left. Not thousands. Acts 1 tells us there were 120 of them. That’s it. But when you build the church on the foundation of Jesus, size doesn’t matter. Success is not about numbers and buildings and bodies. Success is following the way of Jesus, individually and together as a group.
And that brings us to the second time Jesus mentions church is in Matt 18:17. This one we can mention very quickly. In this Matthew 18, Jesus is talking about what to do when someone sins against you. But remember he is teaching this before there is any such thing as a church. Maybe he is preparing them for future situations after they start the church.
Side note: Didn’t Jesus go to synagogue and temple? Yes. Isn’t that similar to going to church worship services? Yes. So couldn’t we say that there was a church. Yes, and no. Jesus was a good Jew, so he would have gone regular gone to religious gatherings at synagogue and temple. But what would become the church has differences from synagogue and temple gatherings, and that would only become apparent in the months, years, and decades after his Ascension. Furthermore, when Jesus is referring to church, as we will see in a post later this week, he does not envision the kinds of institutions we think of when we think of churches in our era. Instead, Jesus is using a word that refers to an assembly of people. It was not a specifically religious word. In other words, in Matthew 16 Jesus could be understood as saying, “on this rock, I will build the movement of people who are my followers,” and that brings us to Matthew 18.
Here is what he says. “If a person sins against you, go to them one on one, and try to make it right. If that doesn’t work, take one or two people with you to try to work it out. If they still refuse to listen, tell it to the church; and if they refuse to listen even to the church, treat them as you would a pagan or a tax collector.”
Jesus could be interpreted as envisioning a time when the church has local groups of Christians, local churches, which is exactly what did happen in the months and years after his ascension. They were all house churches. No buildings for hundreds of years. Jesus could also be envisioning the assembly of Jewish elders who would handle relational disputes in each local town.
In Matthew 18, what we read is Jesus giving instructions for how to work at bringing reconciliation when there is a broken relationship. If a person refuses to reconcile with you, after you’ve reached out one on one, and even after trying with the help of one or two others, Jesus says, get the church/assembly/elders involved.
He doesn’t say precisely how to get the church involved in bringing reconciliation. Some churches have interpreted this as Jesus saying that local church families need to air out their dirty laundry in front of the whole church family, such as when I was surprised at the church I visited. At Faith Church we don’t use that very public method. Instead we have handled those kinds of situations inside the anonymity of the leadership Team. Thankfully, they have been very rare. But they have happened.
And there you have it. Jesus make two references to church/assemblies. One about him as foundation of the church (see previous post). One about dealing with broken relationships.
Think about what doesn’t mention. More on that in the next post.
Photo by Daniel Morton on Unsplash
Engaging Scripture 