José Ricardo Bezerra and Felipe Bezerra
On this 23rd Sunday in Ordinary Time, the Gospel brings us two interlocking parts: fraternal correction and prayer made in common (Mt 18:15-20). Only six verses, and each one of them could fill an entire Sunday of prayer. They are not side by side by accident. Whoever is not reconciled with his brother does not pray in unity with him, and whoever does not pray for his brother will hardly have the courage and the delicacy needed to correct him.
It is worth recalling the whole. All of chapter 18 is a catechesis of Jesus on the life of the community. It opens with a child placed in the midst of the disciples, as the answer to the question about who is greatest in the Kingdom of Heaven (cf. Mt 18:1-5); it passes through the parable of the lost sheep, whom the shepherd goes out to find because it is not the Father’s will that a single one of these little ones be lost (cf. Mt 18:12-14); and it ends with Peter’s question about how many times one must forgive, and with the parable of the unforgiving servant (cf. Mt 18:21-35). Humility, the search for the one who is lost, correction, prayer and forgiveness form a single block. Reading today’s passage apart from that whole is the shortest road to misunderstanding it.
As always, we have chosen five points for your meditation and prayer, which we share on the podcast: https://youtu.be/LMaYI5MExls (with subtitles in your language).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LMaYI5MExls
Gospel: Mt 18:15-20
“At that time, Jesus said to his disciples: ‘If your brother sins against you, go and tell him his fault between you and him alone. If he listens to you, you have won your brother. If he does not listen, take one or two others along with you, so that every case may be settled on the word of two or three witnesses. If he refuses to listen to them, tell the Church. And if he refuses to listen even to the Church, treat him as you would a pagan or a tax collector. Amen, 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. Again, amen, I say to you, if two of you agree on earth about anything for which they are to pray, it shall be granted to them by my heavenly Father. For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them’.”
1. “Go and tell him his fault, between you and him alone”: a duty born of charity
The first question is unavoidable: is correcting an obligation or an option? Jesus speaks in the imperative, “go and tell him his fault” (Mt 18:15), and the Old Testament was already clear: “you shall reprove your neighbor, lest you incur sin because of him” (Lev 19:17). This Sunday’s first reading says the same thing through the image of the watchman: if the sentinel does not warn the wicked, God will require that blood at his hand (cf. Ez 33:7-9).
But we need to understand what kind of duty this is, and it is neither automatic nor binding for every sin of every person. Saint Thomas Aquinas examines fraternal correction within the treatise on charity, not the treatise on justice (cf. Summa Theologiae II-II, q. 33). It obliges when there is real need, competence to speak, prudence, and well-founded hope of helping one’s brother. Before it is a demand, correction is an act of love: I cannot bear that my brother should remain in error, because error takes him away from God. The tradition attributed to Saint Augustine insists on the other side of the same coin: in certain circumstances, keeping silent out of convenience about a necessary correction is not meekness, it is a failure of charity.
From this follows the first condition, and it is a hard one: you have not been appointed judge or collector of everyone else’s sins. Before setting out to correct, one must acknowledge oneself a sinner. “If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves” (1 Jn 1:8). And Jesus was uncomfortably clear: “the measure with which you measure will be measured out to you,” and “why do you notice the splinter in your brother’s eye, but do not perceive the wooden beam in your own?” (Mt 7:2-3). Whoever wants to correct begins with his own examination of conscience.
The second condition lies in the words “alone.” Jesus speaks of a sin “against you,” which happened between the two of you. In that case the first step is private, without an audience and without witnesses, precisely to protect your brother’s good name. It is different when the sin is public and causes scandal or grave harm to others: then a public correction may be necessary, made by the competent authority or, depending on the case, by someone who has legitimate responsibility and the prudence to make it. Even then, the reason is to repair the scandal and protect others, never to expose the person for the pleasure of it.
Notice too the gradation the Gospel describes: alone; then with one or two others, according to the ancient rule of two or three witnesses (cf. Dt 19:15); and only then before the community. Each step is a fresh attempt, not a net closing in. The ladder of fraternal correction is, in truth, a ladder of patience.
2. “You have won your brother”: the goal is not to be right
Jesus does not say “you corrected him,” nor “you were right.” He says “you have won your brother” (Mt 18:15). The measure of success is not the argument defeated, it is the person recovered. The goal of correction is not to humiliate, not to prove that I knew more, not to make sure my brother never sets foot in the Church again. It is to bring him back, closer to Christ.
Saint John Bosco insisted that it is not enough to love the young: they must feel loved (cf. Letter from Rome, 1884). Applied to correction, the principle is simple and demanding: if the person cannot feel loved in what you are about to say, it is better to wait. Dom Estêvão Bettencourt, the Benedictine monk of Rio de Janeiro who directed the Mater Ecclesiae School and founded the magazine “Pergunte e Responderemos,” today a Servant of God, recalled, along the lines of Saint Thomas, that correction presupposes some hope of success. When it would only serve to harden the heart and drive the person further away, charity may ask that one wait for the right moment, pray for one’s brother, and look for another road (cf. Summa Theologiae II-II, q. 33, a. 6). This is neither cowardice nor neglect: the duty remains; what changes is the hour and the manner.
It is worth saying plainly, because it is the most common sin of the internet: it is possible to win the argument and lose your brother. When that happens, there was no victory at all. One’s own pride was fed, which is good for nothing, and a soul for whom Christ died was driven further from God.
There is also a question of method, and it has a name. The Church speaks of a “hierarchy of truths”: all revealed truths must be believed, but they are ordered among themselves in their relation to the foundation of the Christian faith (cf. Unitatis Redintegratio 11; Catechism 90). This is not relativism. It is pedagogy. No one understands the value of chastity before understanding his own value, that is, before knowing that he is loved by God and that his body is a temple of the Holy Spirit (cf. 1 Cor 6:19). That is why we begin with the central proclamation: “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son… God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through him” (Jn 3:16-17). Then, little by little, our brother grows and understands. You cannot start with moral theology.
And it does no harm to remember: correcting the wrongdoer, instructing the ignorant, and bearing patiently with difficult people are spiritual works of mercy (cf. Catechism 2447). Works of mercy. Not of irritation.
3. “Whatever you bind on earth…”: the power of the keys at the service of the brother’s return
Verse 18 is usually read on its own, but it is glued to what comes before it: the community that was not heard. Jesus had already told Peter that he would give him the keys of the Kingdom, with this same power to bind and to loose (cf. Mt 16:19); now he says it to the Church assembled.
In the rabbinic language of Jesus’ time, “to bind” and “to loose” meant to declare something forbidden or permitted. In the context of Matthew 18, the two words express the authority of the Church to make decisions that truly oblige, both in the discipline of the community and in the discernment of reconciliation. It is worth noticing that, contrary to what our intuition suggests, “to bind” here is not the positive gesture: it is to retain. And “to loose” is to set free, to give the brother back to the heart of the community. This power is shown most eminently in the forgiveness of sins, when the Risen Christ breathes on the Apostles and says: “Whose sins you forgive are forgiven them” (Jn 20:22-23; cf. Catechism 1444-1445). And it is shown also in canonical penalties, among them excommunication, which impedes the reception of the Sacraments and the exercise of certain ecclesial acts (cf. Catechism 1463). Two things are worth holding on to: these penalties are juridical and medicinal measures, applied only when the conditions foreseen by law are verified, and they are ordered to the conversion and return of the one who has gone away. And they are not feelings: no one is inside or outside the communion of the Church because he feels that way.
That leaves the most misunderstood verse of the whole passage: “treat him as you would a pagan or a tax collector” (Mt 18:17). What the sentence says, in the first place, is serious: whoever stubbornly refuses to listen to his own Church is in fact no longer living ecclesial communion, and the community recognizes it. But that does not close the matter, and here the whole Gospel forces us to ask how Jesus treated pagans and public sinners. He called a tax collector to be an apostle and went to eat at his house, saying that it is not the healthy who need a physician (cf. Mt 9:9-13). He stayed at the house of Zacchaeus (cf. Lk 19:1-10). He praised the faith of the centurion and of the Canaanite woman (cf. Mt 8:10; 15:28). And he sent the disciples to make disciples of all nations (cf. Mt 28:19). He never stopped desiring their conversion. So, although the immediate sense of the sentence is the rupture of a communion that the brother himself refused, the pastoral reading that imposes itself is this: if he has become an “outsider” again, then treat him as one treats those outside, that is, as someone to be evangelized from the beginning. It is not striking him off the list: it is starting again from the kerygma.
Indeed, Jesus himself warned those who thought themselves secure: “tax collectors and prostitutes are entering the Kingdom of God before you” (Mt 21:31). A sentence to make anyone shudder who has settled comfortably into the role of correcting others.
This is where the danger of hypocrisy lies, which is what Jesus denounced most in the scribes and Pharisees. Their problem was not knowing a great deal. It was saying and not doing, and tying up heavy burdens on other people’s shoulders without lifting a finger to carry them (cf. Mt 23:3-4). Hence the famous accusation: you pay tithes of mint and dill and cumin, and have neglected the weightier things of the Law, judgment and mercy and fidelity; you strain out the gnat and swallow the camel (cf. Mt 23:23-24). Notice that Jesus does not abolish the tithe: he says “these you should have done, without neglecting the others.” The problem is not care for small things; it is care for small things used as an alibi for neglecting what is essential. It applies to us whenever a brother’s visible sin looks graver to us than the hidden sin we ourselves carry.
4. “If two of you agree”: to ask in symphony and according to God’s will
Verse 19 is a staggering promise: anything two agree to ask will be granted by the Father. Anyone who has prayed for something good and not received it asks at once: then why does it not happen?
Let us begin with the word. The Greek verb translated “agree” is “symphoneo,” the same root as “symphony.” It is not merely a matter of coordinating a request; it is a matter of being in harmony. And notice where this promise is placed: right after the passage about the brother who sinned against you. This is not a rule that Matthew 18 formulates expressly, but the closeness of the two texts says a great deal: prayer made in common is lived in a spirit of reconciliation. It is what the Sermon on the Mount already taught about worship: if you remember, before the altar, that your brother has something against you, leave your gift there and go first to be reconciled (cf. Mt 5:23-24).
Then there is the condition that Scripture itself adds: to ask according to God’s will. Saint John is explicit: “And we have this confidence in him, that if we ask anything according to his will, he hears us. And if we know that he hears us in regard to whatever we ask, we know that what we have asked him for is ours” (1 Jn 5:14-15). And Saint James states the reverse without euphemism: “You ask but do not receive, because you ask wrongly, to spend it on your passions” (Jas 4:3).
That is why Jesus’ insistence, “ask and you will receive” (Mt 7:7), comes together with the comparison of the father who does not give a stone to the child who asks for bread, nor a serpent or a scorpion to the one who asks for a fish or an egg, and it ends in the greatest gift: “how much more will the Father in heaven give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him” (Lk 11:11-13). The best request is the Holy Spirit, because it is the gift that orders all the others.
And there is a humility to learn: we do not always know what to ask for. “We do not know how to pray as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes with inexpressible groanings” (Rom 8:26). To pray in the Spirit is to let him correct our request. On the other side, God’s generosity is greater than our imagination: he “is able to accomplish far more than all we ask or imagine” (Eph 3:20), and what he has prepared for those who love him is what “eye has not seen, and ear has not heard, and what has not entered the human heart” (1 Cor 2:9).
It is worth praying with the reverse of this. How many times have we asked for something convinced it would be our happiness. Winning the lottery, for example. No one needs to despise work, honest money and the support of one’s family: that is a duty and it is good. But there is a “woe to you” in the Gospel addressed to those who have already received their consolation here (cf. Lk 6:24). Perhaps many of our unanswered prayers are, in fact, an answer: a Father who does not hand his child the thing that would ruin him.
One more word about communion, because the unity the Gospel asks for has concrete consequences. To receive Communion is the gesture of one who is in communion. Whoever is conscious of grave sin must first have recourse to the Sacrament of Reconciliation (cf. 1 Cor 11:27-29; Catechism 1385). And the Church, in not ordinarily admitting to Eucharistic communion Christians who are not yet in full communion with her, judges no one’s faith or sincerity: she recognizes that the Eucharist signifies and brings about the fullness of communion in faith and in the ecclesial bond, which does not yet exist (cf. Catechism 1398-1401). The way forward there is to pray and work for unity, which is the Lord’s own desire: “that they may all be one” (Jn 17:21).
5. “Where two or three are gathered in my name”: a presence that is not our property
This is probably the most quoted verse of the passage and one of the most misapplied. To gather “in the name of Jesus” means to gather because of him, in faith and in charity. And that promise does not automatically confer on any group whatsoever the sacramental and governing powers proper to the hierarchically constituted Church. One need only look at the context: the sentence comes right after “tell the Church,” and the word used is ekklesia, the assembly that Jesus himself convokes. It is the same Jesus who had said to Peter: “upon this rock I will build my Church” (Mt 16:18).
Nor should this presence be isolated from the others, or confused with them. Christ identifies himself in a singular way with the poor, the sick, the imprisoned and the stranger, to the point of saying that what is done to them is done to him (cf. Mt 25:31-46). He is present in his Word, when Scripture is proclaimed in the liturgy; in the person of the minister; in the assembly gathered in prayer; and, in a unique way, truly, really and substantially, in the Eucharist (cf. Sacrosanctum Concilium 7; Catechism 1088 and 1373-1374). These are real and distinct presences, and they are not equivalent.
A beautiful image of this “two or three” is the disciples of Emmaus: two walking and talking about what had happened, and the Lord draws near and walks with them. And notice the ending: recognized in the breaking of the bread, he vanishes, and the two return at once to Jerusalem, to the Eleven (cf. Lk 24:13-35). The personal encounter with Christ gives us back to the community; it does not replace the community.
This does not mean that God is bound by our borders. The Church recognizes that outside her visible structure there exist many elements of sanctification and truth, which impel toward Catholic unity (cf. Lumen Gentium 8; Unitatis Redintegratio 3; Catechism 819). God hears the sincere prayer of whoever seeks him with an upright heart. What today’s Gospel asks is not suspicion of others: it is that we not use an isolated verse to dispense ourselves from the unity Christ willed.
It is the same Church that gathers millions of young people at a World Youth Day and the priest with three faithful in a hidden chapel. The promise holds for both: “there am I in the midst of them.” And for both there holds the condition that the whole of chapter 18 has been preparing since the child was placed in the midst of the disciples: humility and unity. Without them, the verse becomes a slogan.
Steps of the Lectio Divina
Lectio Divina is the prayerful reading of the Word of God. Set aside a time of silence, call upon the Holy Spirit, and go calmly through these steps, praying yourself with this Gospel.
1. Reading (Lectio). What does the text say? Read Mt 18:15-20 slowly, and if you can, read the whole of chapter 18. Notice the verbs: correct, listen, win, bind, loose, ask, be gathered. Observe that the promise of answered prayer comes after, and not before, the path of reconciliation.
2. Meditation (Meditatio). What does the text say to me? Is there someone I ought to speak to alone, and whom I have instead been talking about to others? Is there someone I have been correcting in order to be right, and not in order to win him back? And what have I been asking God for lately: what is good, or what I want?
3. Prayer (Oratio). What do I say to God from this text? “Lord, we praise you and bless you for this Gospel, in which you call us to charity toward the brother who errs and teach us to correct in order to win, and not to drive away. We pray for your Church, spread throughout the world, and for the duty of correction that belongs to the shepherds and to each one of us. Give us a heart like yours, meek and humble, so that those who have gone away may return to you. We pray also for the Church gathered every Sunday, this ekklesia in which we celebrate your Word and your Body and Blood. And we ask you, O Mary, Mother of the Church and our Mother, to intercede for us and for all who listen to us.” Continue your prayer as the Holy Spirit inspires you.
4. Contemplation (Contemplatio). What new way of seeing does God give me? Stay in silence and picture the face of the most difficult person in your life right now. Ask for nothing. Let the Lord show you that face as he sees it: a brother to be won.
5. Action (Actio). What is the Lord calling me to today? Choose one conversation this week and, before answering, listen to the end. And if there is a correction to be made, make it alone, at the moment when the person can feel loved, and pray for him first.
Until next week!
Shalom!
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Podcast video: https://youtu.be/LMaYI5MExls with subtitles you can select in your language.
