• Imitate God’s Mercy Today
    The Watchtower—1991 | April 15

    •  2. What advice did Jesus give at Matthew 18:15-17 about handling serious sin?

      2 The Bible offers us insight into God’s thinking, even on such matters as what we should do if someone sins against us. Jesus told his apostles, who would later be Christian overseers: “If your brother commits a sin, go lay bare his fault between you and him alone. If he listens to you, you have gained your brother.” The wrong involved here was not a mere personal slight but a serious sin, such as fraud or slander. Jesus said that if this step does not resolve the matter and if witnesses are available, the one sinned against should take them along to prove that there was a wrong. Is this the step of last resort? No. “If [the sinner] does not listen to them, speak to the congregation. If he does not listen even to the congregation, let him be to you just as a man of the nations and as a tax collector.”​—Matthew 18:15-17.

       3. What did Jesus mean in saying that an unrepentant wrongdoer was to be “as a man of the nations and as a tax collector”?

      3 Being Jews, the apostles would understand what it meant to treat a sinner “as a man of the nations and as a tax collector.” Jews avoided association with people of the nations, and they despised Jews who worked as Roman tax collectors.a (John 4:9; Acts 10:28) Hence, Jesus was advising the disciples that if the congregation rejected a sinner, they were to cease associating with him. How, though, does that harmonize with Jesus’ being with tax collectors at times?

  • Imitate God’s Mercy Today
    The Watchtower—1991 | April 15

    • a “Tax collectors were especially despised by the Jewish population of Palestine for several reasons: (1) they collected money for the foreign power that occupied the land of Israel, thus indirectly giving support to this outrage; (2) they were notoriously unscrupulous, growing wealthy at the expense of others of their own people; and (3) their work involved them in regular contact with Gentiles, rendering them ritually unclean. Contempt for tax collectors is found both in the N[ew] T[estament] and the rabbinic literature . . . According to the latter, hatred was to be extended even to the family of the tax collector.”​—The International Standard Bible Encyclopedia.