23rd Sunday in Ordinary Time 2026
Whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.
It may well seem a case of Catholic protesting too much, to have this saying thrice in just a matter of months. We heard these words not only during the Feast of Ss Peter and Paul, but also just a fortnight ago in the normal run of the Sunday lectionary. And perhaps even more remarkable than this co-occurence in the lectionary is the fact that St Matthew’s gospel itself contains the saying twice, just two chapters apart. But the context of the saying is different, and so must be its content.
Indeed, this second use of the saying tempers somewhat, if not the Petrine primacy of Matthew 16, then at least his uniqueness. There, Jesus addresses Peter singularly: hands him the keys, and builds the Church on him—as we are pointedly reminded whenever we enter his Roman Basilica, where the line is inscribed in cobalt-blue glass tesserae set on a shimmering background, itself made of glass underneath which sits 24-carat gold leaf. But now, here, the pronouns shift: our American friends might say, whatever y’all bind, whatever y’all loose, so be it done in heaven. The responsibility given to Peter is thus extended to us; but then, any sensible ecclesiology would give us much the same result.
Which raises the question, of course, of what it is to bind and loose, and what it is that we are meant to be binding and loosing.
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The initial mention of this, to Peter, is quite unhelpful. It seems to come out of nowhere, though there is clearly some connection we are meant to draw between this language and the language of keys. Things get much clearer here in our text this morning. Conveniently—perhaps providentially—included in our gospel reading are the preceding verses about conflict within the Christian community, or better still: about exclusion and inclusion in the Church.
It is a sensible enough approach, I suppose, though I cannot quite imagine it working this way in polite English society. If someone wrongs you, try speaking to them privately; so far so good. But then, bring two or three witnesses? Worse still, bring the matter before the whole church, airing our unmentionables on the front garden? Heaven forfend. What would the neighbours think?
Whatever we make of this as a conflict resolution strategy, the point is that this is what directly precedes our Lord’s assertion that whatever [we] bind and loose on earth shall be bound and loosed in heaven. Which is to say that this business of binding and loosing has to do with the boundaries of the Christian community, to do with who is in and who is out. It is, in other words, to do with keys, and the doors they lock or unlock, close or open. This business is our business, the fundamental work of Christian communities like our here at St Mary Magdalen’s.
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There is a lot of talk of inclusion these days. It’s right there on our website, and has been since at least the days of my curacy on the website we built then: “We are a vibrant all-age and inclusive community, offering worship and witness in the Catholic tradition”.
But talk is cheap, and the inclusion of some is costlier than the inclusion of others. The context of the gospel reading is not about the inclusion of people who inhabit different identities, which is the sort of thing that is nowadays either contested or embraced. Of course, we rather pride ourselves for being rather sound on this sort of thing. Inclusive with a Capital-I. Our gospel text isn’t really about that though. It is about the much more mundane thing, and so the much more timeless and universal thing of people who don’t get along, who rub others the wrong way. The people whom we feel have wronged us, even sinned against us; and even those who have done so repeatedly and seemingly unrepentantly, so that not even the social pressure of quiet thuggery or public shaming will compel them to desist or, at the very least, apologise.
What the gospel would have us do to these miscreants in our midst is to treat them as we would Gentiles and tax collectors: Gentiles, those uncircumcised barbarians who deserve no part of the Kingdom of God. There better be none of them here today. Tax collectors, those imperial collaborating blood-traitors, who put profit over people. Like, St Matthew himself, as we are told a few chapters earlier in Matthew 9, now venerated among the evangelists.
And if we still manage to miss the message, then we might turn to what follows directly from this episode, skipping forward to next Sunday’s gospel reading [with apologies to Fr Barry]: Peter asks Jesus how often he should forgive a brother who sins against him. Not seven times, the Lord replies, but seventy times seven, and for those of us whose theological arithmetic is rusty, that works out to an infinite number of times.
What we are meant to do with the people who test our patience, who grieve us, even who wrong us is to include them, even as the Gentiles have been included into the people to God; is to trust them, even as Matthew was entrusted with the gospel. Whatever we bind on earth is bound indeed, and whatever we loose on earth is loosed indeed; and we are called, as individuals and as Christian communities, to let go of our gripes and grievances, and hold on to one another
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There have been times and places when Christian communities have been more enthusiastic than is seemly about excommunication and schism. It is easy to think of the dramatic textbook historical examples: 1054, 1559, and all that—and in our own times, the fracturing of the Anglican Communion over certain questions of inclusion. But I am thinking now of things at a smaller scale, at the level of parishes and congregations.
We decide all the time who include and exclude; who to welcome and embrace, who to neglect and ignore and ostracise. We choose sometimes whether to include or exclude ourselves, whether to get stuck in or step back, even back out, turn our backs because of some slight, some sin, some specific something that meets our disapproval. The reality of any community of human beings is that we won’t naturally like everyone equally; and that even those whom we do like might sometimes rub us the wrong way.
In such circumstances, as Christians—as a Church—we are called to resist the temptation to do the easy thing, to hang out only with the people like us, the people we like easily, and to walk away whenever whoever has said or done whatever. And it is a hard thing, and goes against not only the social psychology of our species, but also our cultural programming that encourages us to think of communities like consumer commodities. But the promise is that this is where Jesus is, in the real and earnest interactions of his people, in their attempt to love one another, to accept and include one another, against the odds. When we are gathered together in this way, he is with us.