NOTES for Luk 17:3
Speaking about relationships within the community, the Savior calls for complete sincerity and for not hiding offenses and misunderstandings if they exist. Indeed, rules of politeness are good only so long as there is no need to build serious and deep relationships with those nearby.
One can ignore offenses and misunderstandings where relationships are purely functional: after all, if the matter concerns only coworkers, all communication can be limited to the workplace, and here for the benefit of the work it may indeed be better not to dig deeply into relationships. Of course, in such a case sin does not cease to be sin; even more, it does not stop poisoning the relationship of the two people, one of whom offends and the other is offended. But it may not affect these people's functioning, though usually only for a time. A community is another matter: here the issue is a shared path to God, and all relationships here are absolutely important because they will have to be taken along on this path.
If there are any omissions here, unspoken offenses, sin burdening relationships, then all of this will have either to be resolved or brought, with one's sins and offenses, to God. But there, with God, in the Kingdom, there is no place for sin and offenses. Therefore all of this must be dealt with on the way. And in such a way that the road, already not easy, does not become unbearable. It will certainly become so if people pretend that there are no problems, as sometimes happens when people try in spiritual life to be guided by schemes and rules of "ideal" behavior, usually of religious origin.
Then they usually try to see both themselves and others not as they are, but as they should be according to an invented ideal, and behave accordingly, communicating not with real people, but with invented ones. That is when people usually try to hush up problems: ideal people should not have them. "Real Christians" should not take offense, and therefore "we" cannot have offenses. But in reality offenses and misunderstandings are, of course, present; in the fallen world there is no avoiding them, and they do their work, destroying real relationships between real people.
This is precisely so that nothing of the kind may happen that the Savior advises calling things by their names: an offense an offense, a misunderstanding a misunderstanding, and speaking everything directly as it is. Then it becomes possible to deal with the real problems that, if left to themselves, can destroy the community. And the possibility of forgiveness also appears, for in order to forgive one must understand who is guilty before you and in what, just as one can ask forgiveness only when one understands in what one is guilty before others. It is better to make problems visible and resolve them than to let them destroy everything.