This coming Sunday is the 23rd Sunday in Ordinary Time.“If your brother sins (against you)…” (Mt 18:15). Long (Matthew, Westminster Bible Commentary) begins his comments on this section with: “Matthew has no romantic illusions about the church. He knows that the church is not all sweet thoughts, endlessly patient saints, and cloudless skies. In Matthew’s church, people – no matter how committed – are still people, and stormy weather is always a possible forecast” [p. 209]. Our own practical experience with such things often leads us to sometimes see 18:15-29 as a guide to church leaders on disciplinary action. But vv. 15–17 are addressed to ‘you’ (singular), the individual disciple, and their concern is not with the punishment of an offense but with the attempt to rescue a ‘brother’ whose sin has put him in danger. The passage is thus a practical guide to how a disciple can imitate his Father’s concern for the wandering sheep (vv. 10–14).

Many people assume there is one Bible manuscript that is the “original.” There is not. There are many manuscripts that exist, available to scholars, that agree in very, very high detail, but there are textual variations. The question becomes “are those variations important?”  The variations are normally indicated by parentheses – in the vase of v.15, “(against you)”

“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 over your brother.

But the nature of the concern is also important in this regard. Verse 15 begins with a significant variant reading; the words “against you (singular)” are not in some ancient manuscripts. This is significant and raises the question. Do I go and point out the fault only when a fellow believer has wronged me, or whenever I think that he or she has committed a sin whether or not it affects me? The scholars’ arguments are balanced and divided on this. Take a look at the note of Mt 18:15 in the Notes section for some of the technical issues Scripture scholars face. In these particular notes, I will take the avenue that “against you” is a later addition and thus the concern is for the spiritual welfare of a person, even absent sin against you personally.  This is one way in which Jesus begins to delineate the role of discipleship in a way that expresses the interrelationships of all members of the community.

Image credit: Sermon on the Mount (1877) by Carl Heinrich Bloch, Museum of National History at Frederiksborg Castle, Public Domain