Before You Say “Can We Talk?”

There are few sentences more unsettling than “can we talk?” Three ordinary words, and your brain starts opening files. Was it something I said? Something I forgot? By the time the conversation actually starts, you’ve already prepared a closing argument.

For some people, the fear goes deeper. “Can we talk” brings back a conversation where someone said they loved you, then left you wondering whether there was still a place for you — in the family, in the church, or with God. If that’s what these words bring up for you, it’s worth naming up front: people have used this exact passage to humiliate, pressure, and exclude. Calling that love doesn’t make it love. Using Jesus’ name doesn’t mean Jesus approved of what happened.

The Story This Comes From

Before walking through the instructions themselves, it matters what Jesus had just finished saying.

A shepherd has a hundred sheep. One wanders off, and the shepherd goes looking for it — not standing on the hillside explaining that he’d already told the sheep where the flock meets, but actually going. When he finds it, he rejoices. Jesus says his Father doesn’t want even one of these little ones lost.

Then comes the passage about confronting sin. Immediately after it, Peter asks how many times he has to forgive someone. Jesus takes Peter’s generous-sounding “seven times” and opens it into a mercy that stops counting.

This passage lives inside a chapter about a shepherd who goes looking and a forgiveness that refuses to keep score. Whatever church discipline means, it cannot mean something contrary to that. Reading past the shepherd at the beginning of the chapter is one of the ways these instructions get turned into a weapon.

Your Brother, Not Everyone’s Business

Jesus begins with a brother or sister in the community who has sinned. (Some early manuscripts add “against you” here; others don’t, which is why translations differ — the point doesn’t depend on settling that question.) Either way, this isn’t a commission appointing every Christian supervisor of everyone else’s life. It’s a pattern for what happens when sin disrupts the life of a community that’s supposed to belong to each other. Belonging to the same church doesn’t mean you already know someone’s story. You can recognize a face across the sanctuary and still have a great deal of listening left to do.

Jesus says to go privately, and tells you why: “if he listens to you, you’ve gained your brother.” That’s the actual hope here — a person regained, a relationship that can start to heal.

What Makes You So Sure You’re Right

Before picturing yourself as the one who goes to correct someone else, there’s a question worth asking first: what makes you certain you’ve actually understood what’s wrong?

Jesus says “if your brother sins” — he doesn’t say that whatever you personally dislike counts as sin. Your discomfort isn’t God’s verdict. Someone disagreeing with your interpretation doesn’t, on its own, prove they’ve refused to listen to Jesus. A careful process can’t make a false accusation true.

Some people know that painfully well. Gay people, among others, have heard their families or churches talk about them as a problem to solve before anyone bothered to listen to their actual life. Whatever someone’s theology of sexuality, treating a person as a problem to solve before listening to their actual life is already a pastoral failure. Being the one who raises a concern doesn’t automatically make you the faithful one in the story. Sometimes the person who needs to repent is the person who showed up prepared to give the correction. Sometimes it’s the church. That possibility belongs inside this passage from the very first verse.

Gentleness, and Watching Yourself Too

Paul helps here. In Galatians, he tells people restoring someone caught in wrongdoing to do it “in a spirit of gentleness” — and in the same sentence, tells them to watch themselves, because they can be tempted too. Then comes the next instruction: “bear one another’s burdens.” Restoration, gentleness, self-examination, and burden-bearing all belong together. You don’t get to finish the conversation, congratulate yourself for being brave, and disappear from the person’s life.

A real concern for someone’s soul should make you interested in the person who has that soul — their loneliness, their work, their grief, what makes them laugh, whether they have anyone to sit with at lunch. If correction is the only thing they ever get from you, what reason have you given them to recognize it as love? Sometimes that means an actual dinner, where the food isn’t an opening act for another intervention — where they’re allowed to be interesting, funny, tired, or quiet, and you just want their company. Care offered as a strategy to get agreement eventually feels exactly like a strategy.

Love Doesn’t Harm a Neighbor

Paul says something equally searching elsewhere: “owe no one anything, except to love one another.” Love is a debt you never finish paying. And he gives it a very practical shape: “love does no wrong to a neighbor.”

That doesn’t mean a loving conversation always feels good. Love can name harm clearly and insist that it stop, and the person you hurt doesn’t owe you a comfortable account of it. But when someone says “that conversation left me feeling worthless,” the answer isn’t “well, the truth hurts.” Their pain doesn’t prove your faithfulness — and it doesn’t automatically prove you were wrong, either. It’s evidence to attend to, not a verdict either of you is entitled to declare on the spot.

Go Privately, But Never Secretly

Jesus says to go privately first, and there’s real mercy in that — speak to the person before an audience gets built around the problem. Give them room to answer. Most of us have rehearsed an argument in the shower and won it quite convincingly; a real conversation is harder, because the other person gets lines too.

But privacy can never become a demand for secrecy. Someone who’s been abused or threatened doesn’t have to face the person who harmed them alone. Where abuse, threats, or possible crimes are involved, protecting the vulnerable and contacting the appropriate civil authorities may need to happen immediately — Matthew 18 was never meant as a church-run alternative to reporting abuse, and it doesn’t override mandated reporting or professional safeguarding. Jesus had already warned, earlier in this same chapter, against harming his little ones. Nothing that follows gets to strip that protection back away from them.

Witnesses, Not an Audience Already on Your Side

If the private conversation doesn’t resolve things, Jesus says to bring one or two others, drawing on Scripture’s requirement that a matter be established by witnesses. That means the accusation actually gets examined. Bringing people who already agree with you doesn’t settle anything — those brought in need to be capable of listening honestly. They might help someone acknowledge a real wrong. They might discover the person making the accusation misunderstood what happened. They might recognize that someone’s being intimidated and needs real help.

If it reaches the whole church, that responsibility gets heavier, not lighter. The community’s job is to seek truth, protect whoever’s being harmed, and work toward restoration — and its authority has to be used with real humility, because it can do terrible damage when it isn’t.

The Hardest Sentence

Then Jesus gives the hardest line in the passage: if the person refuses to listen even to the church, treat them as a Gentile or a tax collector.

In the immediate sense, Jesus is describing a real boundary — the community can no longer pretend nothing has broken. But Jesus’ own treatment of Gentiles and tax collectors tells you what that boundary must never become: hatred, humiliation, or a declaration that someone is beyond mercy. This is the same Jesus who called Matthew out of a tax booth and sat down to eat with tax collectors, telling the people who objected to go learn what mercy means. Fellowship really can be broken, and a community can’t keep pretending someone who persists in harming others is participating faithfully in its shared life. But a changed relationship is never permission for contempt. It doesn’t make a person disposable, and it doesn’t hand you authority over their future with God.

Even where fellowship is broken, you still owe that person love — sometimes from a distance, sometimes carried by someone else entirely, because the person who was harmed needs safety, not more proximity to what hurt them. Seeking someone’s good was never the same thing as handing them continued access to hurt you.

And if a church has wrongly excluded someone, restoration requires the church to face its own wrongdoing first. It can’t demand a false confession as the price of coming back. The shepherd’s concern has to reach into that situation too.

Forgiveness Without Amnesia

Then Peter asks how many times he has to forgive. We understand the question — we’d like to know when the account is finally settled. Jesus answers with extravagant mercy, then tells a story about a servant released from an enormous debt who turns around and grabs someone else by the throat over a much smaller one. That’s a searching picture for anyone who’s received God’s mercy: you can talk fluently about forgiveness and still have your hands around somebody’s throat.

Jesus calls you away from vengeance and toward mercy. That doesn’t mean calling evil good or restoring trust without any reason to. Reconciliation requires truth and real participation from both sides — a relationship can stay unsafe even while you’re genuinely praying to be free of hatred toward the person in it. And if the wound still aches, that doesn’t mean you’ve failed to forgive. You don’t have to prove your faith by becoming unhurt on a schedule.

If You’re the One Who Caused the Wound

What if, reading all this, you’ve recognized yourself among the people who caused the wound instead? Maybe you said “I was only trying to help” when someone tried to tell you what your help actually did. Maybe you defended your own intentions so thoroughly there was no room left for their experience.

Repentance can start with a sentence as plain as “I hurt you, and I want to understand.” Then you have to let them answer — correct what you’ve told other people, repair what’s repairable, respect whatever space they ask for, without setting a deadline for their trust to return. Their willingness to forgive you doesn’t necessarily mean they owe you renewed access to them. That’s frightening if your instinct is to keep defending yourself. If you stop, what’s left?

Where the Promise Actually Lives

Jesus closes this chapter talking about binding and loosing, about prayer, and about being present wherever two or three gather in his name. The small numbers keep recurring — witnesses to establish a matter, two agreeing in prayer, two or three gathered with his promised presence among them — tying the hard work of confronting sin directly to prayer and to Christ himself.

That authority is entrusted, not independent. The church remains answerable to the Christ whose name it invokes; agreement among Christians can’t turn injustice into God’s will. You’re not gathering enough people to force someone’s surrender. You’re sharing responsibility for seeking truth, and staying open to what you might have misunderstood yourself. None of this rests on your ability to find the perfect words or repair a relationship single-handedly — the community shares the weight, the Father hears its prayers, and Jesus promises his presence in exactly this work.

If you’ve ever wondered why you should trust a disciplinary process at all, especially after watching one get misused: you were never being asked to trust it because a church wields it. You’re invited to judge any church’s use of it by the character of the shepherd who gave it in the first place.

The Shepherd Already Came Looking

Jesus knows the wounds you’ve suffered. He also knows the wounds you’ve caused, including the ones you’ve covered over with religious language. And he came for you anyway.

God didn’t wait for you to arrange a meeting or prepare a satisfactory account of yourself. The Son came into your actual life, shared meals with people others avoided, stayed close enough to bear the real cost of loving them. At the cross, he carried actual sin — the cruelty that got excused, the love that got withheld — and gave his life for people who could never make themselves innocent first. Then he rose, so that your sin and your failures don’t get the final word. His forgiveness, his peace with God, and the future he’s giving you were never yours to construct on your own.

Your place with him rests on his mercy. You don’t have to win the argument, justify every decision, or recover fast enough to earn it.

If you were wounded in his name: the cruelty you received is no measure of your worth to him. You don’t need to minimize what happened in order to stay close to Jesus. He already knows, and his care reaches you exactly where you are.

If you’ve wounded someone: you can tell the truth. You don’t have to keep protecting your image at their expense. Christ’s forgiveness is for real sinners, including you — free enough to let you apologize and actually start making things right.

And for a church still learning how to live together: you can receive correction too. The mercy you proclaim is strong enough to let you admit where you’ve failed to embody it.

That’s where this actually begins — not with the perfect conversation, but with a shepherd who already came looking, long before you found the words to ask if you could talk.