If your brother sins against you,
go and tell him his fault between you and him alone.
Gossip is excluded, much more social media posts about the issue. Sometimes when someone sins against us we feel the need to talk about it so that we can experience sympathy or vindication that we are in the right. Among the problems with such approaches is that they not only do not help resolve the issue but often more deeply entrench it making it more difficult to be reconciled in the future. It ought to be easier to win over the brother before a significant portion of the internet has cast judgment on him for his action. He should be less vested in defensiveness and his heart may still be less hardened. It may not work to address him in this one on one fashion, as the fact of the subsequent guidance suggests, but it is typically worth a try.
If he does not listen,
take one or two others along with you,
so that every fact may be established
on the testimony of two or three witnesses.
Others can help by demonstrating that the accusation isn't merely the opinion or the subjective interpretation of one's own. The point is not to bully the offender into conceding, since such a tactic would likely not yield any sincere change of heart. In fact it would seem to us that the most effective witnesses one could involve would be those who were the least likely to exhibit any bias. Bringing friends as yes men to agree with every point of ours would be more likely to produce a hardening of the heart than a softening.
If he refuses to listen to them, tell the Church.
If he refuses to listen even to the Church,
then treat him as you would a Gentile or a tax collector.
The Church was intended to serve as an unbiased third party mediator when disputes couldn't be otherwise resolved. There ought to have been wise older members of the local community whose experience could help, and a local authority to which both parties could agree to yield. If the local Church doesn't typically function like this in our day, because of size and scale and other commitments, the authority of the Church as a whole nevertheless still has a part to play. For the Church is the one who speaks clearly about what does and does not constitute sin. Whoever refuses to listen even to the moral teaching authority of the Church, who willfully disagrees with her teaching, places himself outside of her boundaries. And this changes our relationship to such a person. It is not that we should shun them, any more than Jesus shunned Gentiles or tax collectors. Rather, we should treat them as in need of conversion and evangelization. When someone is a committed Christian we can get into individual specifics about how they live, overcoming the vestiges of sin in his life. But when someone has fundamentally walked away from the Church something different is needed. There is no point in trying to clean up individual specific behaviors if an overall commitment to Jesus and his Kingdom is missing.
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.
The Apostles and their successors were given authority in the Church to speak definitively about moral disputes, and to adjudicate specific cases when necessary. But this was not to be done arbitrarily or for reasons determined by ego. Rather, it was to arise from a deep life of prayer. They were to gather two or more of their number together so that they could be in the presence of Jesus, and only from that vantage point exercise their power to bind and loose. Yet this privilege of being in the presence of Jesus was not reserved for the Apostles and their successors alone. All of us would be well served to rely on it before we try to resolve any issue we may have with anyone. We're too susceptible to partisanship. But Jesus always keeps the hearts of everyone involved in view.
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