The reason that outside isn’t so bad is that inside isn’t so good.

When Jesus said that people who didn’t respond to three distinct, thoughtful, caring challenges to their behavior needed to leave the church, He was intending was that the threat of having to leave the warmth of community in the church would be a deterrent that would make people rethink having to leave it.

The fact that the punishment was to treat the sinner as a pagan or a tax collector merely illustrates what Jesus wanted from the church.

Jesus loved tax collectors. He sought them out. Matthew himself was a tax collector, or had been. Matthew may have smiled as he wrote these words, remembering the party that he threw for Jesus when he first starting following.

He had his friends over to meet Jesus. The Pharisees stood outside, questioning how Jesus could be spending time in such company. Jesus said that he had come for people who needed him.

So the tax collectors were the heroes, the ones who wanted to be with Jesus. And now, in Matthew 18, Jesus says that when people don’t repent, they are to be treated like tax collectors. But Jesus isn’t assuming that the church will be like the Pharisees, capable only (as least for Matthew) of scolding. Just the opposite.

The church is to be tax collectors transformed, pharisees reborn, prostitutes renewed. It is a collection of misfit toys so in love with God and each other that to have to go outside is punishment, even if there is love.

Jesus wasn’t setting up a system of shunning. There was not to be silence. There was respect and compassion and an openness for the one being walked to the door to return when repentant. Just the way Matthew had started.