NOTES for Luk 17:3
Speaking about relations within the community, the Savior calls for complete sincerity and for not hiding grievances and misunderstandings if they exist. Indeed, rules of propriety are good only as long as there is no need to build serious and deep relationships with those nearby.
One can ignore grievances and misunderstandings where relationships are purely functional: after all, if the issue is only coworkers, all communication can be limited to the workplace, and here, for the sake 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, and even more: it does not cease to poison the relationship of the two people, one of whom offends and the other takes offense. But it may not affect how these people function, though usually only for the time being. The community is another matter: here the issue is a common 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 reticences here, unspoken grievances, or sin burdening relationships, then all such things will have either to be resolved or brought with one's sins and grievances to God. But there, with God, in the Kingdom, there is no place for sin and grievances. This means that all this must be dealt with on the road. And in such a way that the road, already not simple, does not become unbearable. It will certainly become so if people pretend that there are no problems, as sometimes happens when they try to guide themselves in spiritual life by some 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 imagined ones. That is when they usually try to hush up problems: ideal people, after all, should not have them. "Real Christians" should not take offense, so "we" cannot have grievances. In reality, however, grievances and misunderstandings are certainly present; in the fallen world there is no way without them, and they do their work, destroying real relationships between real people.
It is so that nothing of this kind happens that the Savior advises calling things by their names: a grievance a grievance, a misunderstanding a misunderstanding, and speaking everything directly, as it is. Then the possibility appears of sorting out the real problems that, if left to drift, can destroy the community. And the possibility of forgiveness appears then too, 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 solve them than to let them destroy everything.