It is by happy chance that this Sunda we have a serving Police Detective (who is also a priest) preaching at the 10.30am Mass, because today’s Gospel can sound very much as though it is concerned with policing the Church! It is really though about forgiveness in cased of breaking rules of behaviour? Fundamentally we ask can wrong-doers remain members of the Church?

Matthew wrote his Gospel, inspired by God, for the local Churches in Syria, Palestine and neighbouring regions. Some of the congregations were Jews who had become Christians, others were Gentiles. All were now Christians, but what were the boundaries of the community? How did it govern itself?

In the local synagogues — just across the road or down the street, in the very same towns and villages — a strikingly similar debate was taking place. Who were Jews? Could Jews do this or that and how were they to live? Christianity and Judaism were establishing their boundaries as separate communities.

Many diverse groups within Judaism were disappearing. Paul’s letters to Greek speaking churches in Greece and what is now Turkey, give another glimpse of the intense debate in early Christianity about our Jewish inheritance, and what aspects of the Jewish law were obligatory for Christians. Kosher meals? Marriage rules? How now are we to live when hitherto we have lived in a certain way for so long? How do we pass this new thing down?

But today’s passage is about forgiveness. A Christian community is a community of people whose sins have been forgiven by God and who bear witness to this – everything else comes out of that mercy.

A Christian believer has a responsibility for his fellow Christian’s salvation. He or she must try to bring someone back to the way of salvation. If the personal touch or the discrete approaches do not bear fruit, then Matthew here envisages a system of casting someone out of the Christian fellowship.

Some Christian denominations have tried systems where the whole community are responsible for public discipline and who publicly cast people out of the community. The result is usually a rather narrow group of like-minded individuals where forgiveness is much talked about but little exercised, especially towards those people who are different and who do not fit the usual patterns. The outsider perceives this as hypocritical — often correctly and we need to be mindful of that ourselves.

Within the church today how might this work? What do we pass down and how?

We expect our pastors to be charitable and our priests to be ministers of forgiveness. Yet I hear tales of babies refused baptism. I hear of some people being unwelcome. I hear tales — often thankfully from the past — about priests being reluctant to bury people who had committed suicide, or who treated badly a couple who wished to marry because one of them was not a Christian.

The truth of such tales is sometimes complex, sometimes straightforward, but often difficult to ascertain years later. Sometimes the priest was racist, uncharitable or simply badly informed. Other times, a priest may have hesitated to baptise a child when admission to a church school seems to be the be-all and end-all in requesting the baptism. Any experienced pastor will have faced many such issues and will have been misunderstood — sometimes deliberately. But this passage is not about clergy alone, it is about the whole people of God, how we live, and build, and develop, and it has to be based on mercy and forgiveness but also the sure knowledge that we have to keep ourselves focused on what we are doing, which is seeking the Kingdom of God. It is an uncomfortable truth that if someone complains every time something changes and then leaves and goes to no other church, that they should not have been listened to in the first place.

The final verse in our passage shows us that the intention of any church discipline is not punishment, but rather to bring the person so excluded to ask for forgiveness and their place back in the fold, which we must immediately grant and not refer to the issue again. We must pray gently and persistently for sinners that they may repent - put another way, we are all sinners so we must pray persistently for each other and ourselves that we may repent of those things we have not been found out for and that we may keep on the path of salvation. The details have been worked out, now the practice of the faith is our present work. May we persevere not for our good alone, but for the good of the whole world.