The perfect unity of love and truth in Matthew Eighteen

We live in times where truth is relative; it is in the possession of its owner. Even passages of scripture that are wholly devoted to Jesus’ words are heavily disputed. Here, today, is just another contribution, but it is brought to you motivated by love, which, of itself, is deeply confused as a principle from one person to another. After all, you may say, what is love?

Let me explain to you the convergence of love in truth and truth in love:

I believe everything that Jesus said in Matthew 18 was underpinned by the dualism of love and truth. Not a lovey-dovey kind of love. Not partial truth. Not a wishy-washy kind of love. Not truth that’s ‘relative’. But a love that can only be understood when we understand God’s love, and if we don’t transact with God’s love, because of some kind of refusal or intentional unknowing or any other kind of resistance, we won’t get this kind of love.

God’s love cannot be understood until we are ready to acknowledge that we could be wrong. Only when we are humble enough to accept that we could be wrong are we ready to rally with the concept of the convergence of truth and love.

Love truly cannot be understood unless we see truth implicit in it.

And here is where it really means something. In Matthew 18, we could very much pass over the concept of love if it weren’t for the polarising role of truth in each of these passages. Matthew 18, of course, is one of Jesus’ five discourses in that gospel. Jesus uses the whole chapter to teach. He teaches about true greatness, God’s pursuit of those who are lost, how we are to love those we’re in conflict with back into the fold with the truth, and the generosity of grace and mercy in that most ‘irrational’ love of all, forgiveness.

Jesus teaches a tough love in this chapter—a love that cannot be separated from the truth. He exposes the idea that truth cannot be separated from love. Equally poignant is, love cannot be separated from the truth.

At a time when the disciples wanted to big note themselves—being so insecure at to need Jesus to affirm how great they were—Jesus loves them so much as to shame them through a rebuke intended to cause them to repent. Jesus loves them with the truth. But Jesus didn’t leave it there; he capitalises on an opportunity, to show love’s depth of commitment to truth by revealing the poignancy of love in justice. Jesus shows that love is perfected in the righteous anger of God’s indignation when the innocent are harmed. See the depth of God’s love!

Joining the first two concepts (true greatness [vv. 1-5] and temptations to sin [vv. 6-9]) together in the parable of the lost sheep, I’m sure that Jesus is teaching that God hates it when so-called godly people harm those who are on their way to God and halt their progress through one or more of a million forms of legalism and abuse. And even when one person is cast away, it’s as if that person is God’s own son or daughter—because they are God’s creation!

Then we come to the matter of ‘reproving another who sins’ — Matthew 18:15-20.

These are the verses that are so often abused when it comes to ‘church discipline’. This is about loving people with the truth; that love is embedded in relationships to the standard of truth. We love another person enough that we would go to them and speak the truth. We show our love for them if they ignore us by making a second attempt with another person or three in tow. And if they still refuse to listen, we love them so much that we expose the truth to everyone that they have no choice but to account for it. Love compels confrontation so matters can be resolved. Justice must be done. Love seeks restoration and it abides perfectly in the truth, because restoration cannot occur without justice being done, which is truth. Little wonder then that where truth cannot be realised, love cannot be fulfilled.

Wherever there is even an iota of injustice,
truth is unrealised, and love stands aggrieved.

The remaining larger portion of chapter 18 of Matthew is devoted to forgiveness, which brings together the concepts of love, truth and justice, amid the gratuity of mercy.

There is no greater love, the Bible tells us, than the love of a person who lays down their own life for a friend. (John 15:13; 1 John 3:16) And this love is epitomised in forgiveness, which is the demonstrative love of God in Christ, which we are able to partake in through our acceptance of Christ, and practically so, as we forgive others.

Forgiveness, again, is very much about the meld of truth and love. The truth is propounded in the fact that we have been forgiven. And that forgiveness came because of a consummate love—God cannot love us more and will not love us less. And in the forgiving debtor parable we have Jesus, himself, setting out the biblical ideal: God forgave us so we can forgive others. Now, if we responded to God and said, “Thank you very much!” accepting the free and merciful gift of grace, and say, “Thank you very much!” to those who forgive us, we are doing well. We have received the love offered to us. And if we’re awaiting others to say with repentant sincerity, “Forgive me, please?” then we can imagine we’re also doing well to wait patiently—there is nothing more we can do. We are ready to give the love that God invites us to give and that we have in fact given. We have faced the truth and are prepared to love. All good. And we are free to hold those at bay who refuse to honour the truth and deny the receipt of our love. It’s their problem.

Love is perfected through truth.
Truth is completed through love.