Finally, after all these years, Joseph had his brothers right where he wanted them. They had horribly abused and mistreated him. They kidnapped him and sold him into slavery. They told their father he had been killed by wild animals and convinced themselves that he was as good as dead too. Truly, they were brothers by blood, but by their actions they had made themselves no brothers at all.
But now here they were, groveling before Joseph without even realizing it was him. Joseph was second in command of all Egypt, and they, starving foreign shepherds. He could have them arrested. He could make them slaves in his palace. He could have them all put to death. And so at just the right moment… he forgave them.
It’s an amazing story, really. We like tales of revenge, true and fictional ones. We want to see bad guys get the justice they deserve. And so if Joseph had taken revenge on his brothers we’d probably say it was justified. “Look what they did to him,” we’d say. “They had it coming!” But instead we see something much more wonderful and sublime that results from Joseph’s faith. It doesn’t seem like it would be possible for these brothers to ever be brothers again. But our Lord teaches us — he enables us — to regain a lost brother.
Matthew 18 contains a whole series of teachings from Jesus about forgiveness. Just before our lesson for today Jesus told the parable of the lost sheep. He described God’s love for the lost as like a shepherd who leaves behind 99 sheep to find the one that has wandered off. He doesn’t say, “Oh well, what does that one sheep matter to me, when I still have 99?” No, finding it and getting it back is his first priority. Certainly if that’s the way that a shepherd cares about his sheep, then God must care even more about each one of us.
Growing up on the farm, my family had goats for a number of years, and one goat in particular would always get its head stuck in the fence. The grass on the other side was greener, of course, so it would stick its head through, but then its horns would get stuck and it couldn’t get back. We’d have to go rescue it. With lost sheep or lost goats, bringing them back is a matter of physically rescuing them. It might mean finding them, getting them out of trouble, and leading them or carrying them back to the herd. But the people Jesus is talking about here aren’t physically lost. How is it that we are to show the same shepherd-like love that our true Shepherd, Jesus, shows to us?
Jesus says, “If your brother sins against you, go and show him his sin just between the two of you. If he listens to you, you have regained your brother.”
Jesus is talking about the person who is spiritually lost, lost because of sin. So this situation Jesus describes here is really a most common situation, something that we see all the time. It doesn’t have to be the big sins, like that of Joseph’s brothers. It might be the little tiny things too. And even though Jesus talks about brothers he’s referring to more than just those related by blood. It’s anyone, but the emphasis here is really on fellow believers.
Every sin destroys relationships. It destroys our relationship with God, as it cuts us off from his good and holy will and turns inward on ourselves. And it destroys our relationship with our fellow man. The Apostle Paul describes what love is like in that beloved chapter 13 of 1 Corinthians where he says, “Love is patient. Love is kind. Love does not envy. It does not brag. It is not arrogant. It does not behave indecently. It is not selfish. It is not irritable. It does not keep a record of wrongs.” Sin is just the opposite. It does all of those things. And since every one of us is sinful, at some point we find ourselves on one side or the other, either as the brother who has caused hurt by some sin, or the one who has been hurt in some sin. And if we were going to keep a detailed list we would probably find that we occupy both of those sides many times in any given day, any day in which we interact with other human beings.
This roadmap for restoration that Jesus gives is a general guide. It’s not a list of rules that must be followed exactly for each and every sin. Not every sin needs to be called out in the first place. Many sins are small enough that a forgiving heart simply drops them. We might even say something like, “We’re still brothers.”
Other times sin really does become a wedge between us. And here’s where Jesus’ guidelines come into play. He gives a series of steps or escalations to take as the brother who has been wronged. First, show him his sin just between the two of you. Then, if he won’t listen to that, bring along one or two others as witnesses. In this way you establish that the matter is not just your personal opinion. If he still won’t listen, the next step is to bring it to the church. This is at the heart of the work of God’s church: to call out sin, to bring people to repentance, and to comfort those who repent of their sins with the gospel. We start small, one-on-one. If necessary we work our way up to the church, and the buck stops there. After the church there is no other authority on earth.
What if he still won’t listen? Then it is the church’s job to judge him according to God’s Word. Jesus says, “If he refuses to listen even to the church, then treat him as an unbeliever or a tax collector. 18Amen I tell you: Whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.”
There are some people you just aren’t going to be friends with. That doesn’t mean you can’t treat them with civility or even with love—after all, Jesus also tells us to love our enemies—but the unbelievers and tax collectors of Jesus day had chosen a life so alien to the Jews, so opposed to their beliefs, that they never associated with each other. We too might look at some people, the way they choose to live their lives, and say, “What do we have in common? We aren’t the same.”
That’s what Jesus describes here with the stubbornly unrepentant brother. And so Jesus establishes something very important here. We seek to regain our lost brother through repentance and forgiveness. But we must not seek to regain him by compromising the Word of God. A sheep or goat may get its head stuck in the fence. But we must not save it by tearing down all the fences. There may come a time when we must recognize that a brother truly is lost— truly is no longer our brother. That is, after all, what sin does.
The story of Joseph and his brothers is ultimately a very happy story. It’s a surprisingly happy one, because anyone would have said that these brothers had cut themselves off from each other forever. How could there be forgiveness for what they had done? How could there be anything other than the possibility of revenge? Would we have acted like Joseph? Would we have wanted to restore or regain our wicked brothers? Does not our sinful pride so often get in the way of regaining a brother—leading us one moment to deny our sin and refuse to repent, and the next, to refuse forgiveness, choosing rather to use our brother’s sin as the air by which our chests are puffed up, a black mark to be held against him whenever we feel a need to boost our own sense of self-righteousness?
Jesus’ instructions, his guidelines, here are very simple, and we are simply very bad at following them. As individuals we look down our haughty noses at one another. In the company of two or three witnesses we sneer and gossip. And in the church we’d rather keep the peace by ignoring sin, proclaiming what’s nice, instead of what’s true, painting over deep foundational cracks with a pristine coat of whitewash. And it holds for a time, but the cracks get wider and deeper, and the facade of niceness wears thin over the gossip and the factions and the self-righteousness beneath, and sooner or later it crumbles and falls apart, sin compounding on sin to destroy any brotherhood we had left.
The answer, the only answer, the only way that sin can be removed and relationships restored, is Jesus. Jesus says,
Amen I tell you: Whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven. 19Amen I tell you again: If two of you on earth agree to ask for anything, it will be done for them by my Father who is in heaven. 20In fact where two or three have gathered together in my name, there I am among them.
The authority that Jesus gives to his people on earth is his own authority. The forgiveness he gives to us is his own forgiveness. Jesus came into a world of his own creation, men and women who did not want to be reconciled to him, but were hostile, who hated him, who did not receive him. They hated him so much that they put him to death on a cross. And that cross wasn’t just because of a small, angry mob in Jerusalem two thousand years ago. It was because of our sins too. But he went there to forgive us. To regain us. To call us his brothers. To reconcile us to God.
He’s the one who teaches us to forgive. He’s the one who enables us to forgive. Through our fellow Christians, through our leaders, our pastors, we hear the words of absolution: “I forgive you your sins,” and we know that those words are as certain as if Jesus himself said them, because he did. That’s his word in the mouths of his pastors. That’s his Sacraments which you receive from their hands. As we are unburdened by sin, relieved of anger and jealousy and resentment, we too have nothing left but love for our brothers, even those who have wronged us.
How can you regain a lost brother when sin has destroyed every last shred of the brotherhood you had? Jesus’ forgiveness made you his brother even when you were his enemy. Jesus’ forgiveness can reconcile you to your fellow brother and sister as well. Take comfort in the brotherhood of the church. Here is forgiveness. Here is reconciliation. Here Jesus himself is among us. Amen.
— Pastor Seth Georgson