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Religion News Service – Rhymes with Religion
Boz Tchividjian Follow @BozT | Nov 14, 2014
“If your brother sins against you, go and tell him his fault, between you and him alone. If he listens to you, you have gained your brother. But if he does not listen, take one or two others along with you, that every charge may be established by the evidence of two or three witnesses. If he refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church. And if he refuses to listen even to the church, let him be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector. Mathew 18: 15-17.
Do these words of Jesus require professing Christians to privately confront those accused of committing a crime before the matter can be reported to the police? Too many within faith communities argue that it does. Even worse, I have met many sexual abuse survivors who actually walked through this nightmare. Not only were they re-traumatized by being required to privately confront their abuser, but they often watched as the perpetrator was never reported to law enforcement.
This well-known biblical passage has all too often been a justification for 1) not reporting abuse disclosures to the authorities and 2) convincing sexual abuse victims to privately confront their perpetrators. Needless to say, this misreading and misapplication of Jesus’ words is incredibly harmful on a number of fronts. More importantly, it’s simply not consistent with the person and character of Jesus.
In Matthew 18, Jesus prescribes three progressive steps for handling personal offenses within the local church: 1) a private confrontation, 2) a witnessed confrontation, and 3) a wider confrontation before the church. At each step, the goal is repentance by the offender as a basis for some form of reconciliation with the offended. If all three approaches are rebuffed, then the offender is no longer part of the fellowship.
Child sexual abuse is not merely a personal offense. It is a serious crime. Child sexual abuse does not even fit into the paradigm of which Jesus was speaking about in this passage. Jesus never intended these statements to be twisted into the required method for handling murder, rape, torture, kidnapping, or genocide. Child sexual abuse is not a private matter, but rather a public offense against the victim, society and humanity as a whole. It is not a matter which can be handled quietly between two persons or between two families, as is wrongly done in many communities. It is a matter of public alarm, because of its pervasive, extensive, and expansive nature, causing a cascade of misery in countless lives.
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