Love that Fulfills the Law
By +Brian Ernest Brown, CWC
Proper 18 Year A
Exodus 12:1-14 Psalm 149 Romans 13:8-14 Matthew 18:15-20
When we hear these readings together, we’re drawn into the very heart of what it means to belong to God and to one another. Exodus takes us back to the Passover, to that extraordinary night when God’s people stood on the threshold of freedom. They were still slaves. They hadn’t crossed the sea yet. They hadn’t seen the promised land. They didn’t know exactly what the future would look like. They only knew that God had heard their cries and was leading them out. And notice how God begins their liberation. He doesn’t tell them to take up arms or overthrow Pharaoh themselves. He tells them to listen, to prepare, to share a meal, and to mark their homes with the sign of His saving presence. Their deliverance begins with trust. Before they ever walk out of Egypt, they have to believe that God is already at work.
There’s something important about that for us. We often imagine that transformation begins when we finally have everything figured out. We think we have to have the perfect plan, the perfect structure, the perfect community, or the perfect understanding before we can move forward. But God has never required perfection before beginning a work of redemption. God asks us to trust Him enough to take the next faithful step. The people of Israel didn’t know everything that was coming. They simply knew that they were being called out of bondage and into something new. Sometimes faith is exactly that. It’s trusting God enough to leave what has become familiar, even when what lies ahead is still hidden.
That movement from bondage toward freedom brings us directly to Paul’s words in Romans. Paul tells us that the commandments are summed up in a single commandment: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” That sounds simple until we actually try to live it. Love isn’t merely a pleasant feeling toward other people. It isn’t agreeing with everybody. It isn’t avoiding difficult conversations because we want to keep the peace. Christian love is much more demanding than that. Love refuses to harm another person. Love refuses to reduce another human being to an enemy, an inconvenience, a problem, or an outsider. Love insists on the dignity of the other person even when we disagree with them.
That’s why Paul says, “The night is far gone, the day is near.” There’s an urgency in those words. Wake up. Don’t keep living as though darkness is the final reality. Don’t sleepwalk through the Gospel. Put on Christ. In other words, let the life of Christ become visible in the way you speak, the way you disagree, the way you forgive, the way you exercise authority, and the way you treat people who can do absolutely nothing for you in return. The Christian life isn’t simply about believing certain things. It’s about allowing Christ to reshape the way we live.
And then Jesus takes that principle of love and brings it down into the messy reality of human relationships. “If another member of the church sins against you, go and point out the fault when the two of you are alone.” I think Jesus knows something about us that we’d rather not admit. We’re often much more comfortable talking about someone than talking to someone. We’ll tell three people about the problem before we ever speak directly to the person involved. We’ll rehearse the offense in our minds until it becomes larger than it ever was. We’ll build a whole case against somebody without ever giving them the dignity of hearing what they’ve done from us directly.
Jesus gives us another way. Go to them. Talk to them. Tell the truth, but tell it face to face. Don’t begin by humiliating them. Don’t begin by gathering an audience. Begin with relationship. Begin with the possibility that what’s broken might actually be repaired.
And if that doesn’t work, Jesus says to bring one or two others into the conversation. Again, this isn’t about creating a tribunal. It’s about creating a circle large enough for truth and small enough for dignity. Sometimes we need another person to help us see what we can’t see by ourselves. Sometimes we need somebody who can say, “Slow down. Listen to what they’re saying.” Sometimes reconciliation requires witnesses because our own hurt has made it difficult for us to hear clearly.
Even when that doesn’t work, Jesus doesn’t immediately say, “Destroy them. Expose them. Humiliate them. Make sure everybody knows what they’ve done.” There’s a process because people matter. Even when relationships are broken, the person who has hurt us is still a child of God. Accountability matters. Truth matters. Boundaries matter. But Christian accountability is never supposed to become an excuse for cruelty.
That’s where the Gospel becomes especially challenging for communities of faith. Jesus isn’t giving us a weapon for controlling other people. He’s giving us a discipline for preserving the community through truth and reconciliation. There’s a profound difference between confronting someone because we want to restore relationship and confronting someone because we want to punish them. One is rooted in love. The other is often rooted in our own need to be right.
And then Jesus gives us those remarkable words: “Where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them.” We’ve often heard that as a comforting promise about small congregations or prayer groups, and certainly it is that. But in context, Jesus is saying something even deeper. He’s talking about people who are gathered together in the difficult work of reconciliation, discernment, forgiveness, and truth. Christ is present in the middle of that work.
Think about that for a moment. Jesus doesn’t promise to be present only when everybody agrees. He doesn’t say, “Where two or three people have everything figured out, I’ll be there.” He says He is present when His people gather in His name. That means Christ can be present in the uncomfortable conversation. Christ can be present when we’re trying to repair something that has been broken. Christ can be present when we’re struggling to forgive. Christ can be present when we have to speak a difficult truth with compassion.
That brings us to Psalm 149, which calls us to rejoice in the Lord and reminds us that God takes delight in His people. That may seem like an odd connection to make with a Gospel about conflict and reconciliation, but I think it’s essential. God doesn’t delight in our divisions. God doesn’t rejoice when one person triumphs over another. God delights when His people become what they were created to be. The psalm calls us to praise because we belong to God, and that belonging changes the way we belong to one another.
The Passover, the commandment of love, the work of reconciliation, and the joy of belonging all point toward the same reality. God is creating a people who are being liberated from the old ways of living. We’re being called out of the Egypt of resentment, fear, pride, vengeance, gossip, and self-righteousness. We’re being taught a new way of living, and that way is the way of love.
That doesn’t mean love is always comfortable. Sometimes loving someone means telling them the truth. Sometimes it means setting a boundary. Sometimes it means saying, “What happened between us isn’t acceptable, and we need to address it.” Sometimes love means allowing someone to experience the consequences of their actions. Forgiveness doesn’t mean pretending nothing happened. Reconciliation doesn’t mean returning to an unhealthy relationship without change. Mercy and accountability aren’t opposites. Properly understood, they belong together.
The real test is what happens inside our hearts while we’re doing this work. Are we seeking restoration, or are we seeking victory? Are we trying to heal a wound, or are we trying to make someone pay? Are we telling the truth because we love the person and the community, or because we want everyone else to know that we were right?
Paul tells us that love fulfills the law because love does no wrong to a neighbor. That means we have to be very careful about the ways we use religious language, religious authority, and even Scripture itself. We can quote the Bible and still fail to live the Gospel. We can defend doctrine while wounding people. We can insist on being correct while becoming profoundly un-Christlike. The measure of Christian faithfulness isn’t simply whether we can prove our position. It’s whether Christ can be seen in the way we hold that position.
And perhaps that’s where the Passover speaks most powerfully to us. God marks the homes of His people and leads them toward freedom. We, too, are marked by Christ. We carry the sign of His mercy into a world that desperately needs it. We don’t carry that sign so that we can decide who belongs and who doesn’t. We carry it because we ourselves have been brought out of bondage. We know what it means to need grace.
So when we encounter one another in conflict, let’s remember who we are. We’re not Pharaoh. We’re not the accuser. We’re not the executioner. We’re people who have been set free by mercy, and because we’ve received mercy, we’re called to become merciful people.
The Christian community should be one of the places in this world where people can tell the truth without being destroyed, where repentance can actually lead to restoration, where forgiveness isn’t cheap but is possible, and where disagreement doesn’t automatically become division. We should be people who know how to speak truth without hatred and practice mercy without surrendering justice.
The world has enough people who know how to condemn. It has enough people who know how to divide. It has enough people who can point out everything that’s wrong with everyone else. What the world desperately needs are people who know how to love.
That’s what it means to put on Christ. That’s what it means to live as people of the light. And that’s what it means when Paul says that love fulfills the law.
May we be a people who trust God enough to leave behind the Egypt of our old ways. May we be a people who choose love over resentment, truth over gossip, reconciliation over retaliation, and mercy over condemnation. And when we gather, whether there are two of us or two thousand, may Christ truly be found among us because we have gathered not merely in His name, but in His way.
Amen.