Matthew 18:21-35
September 14, 2014
William G. Carter
How many times?
How many times?
How many times must I forgive?
That’s the question Peter asks Jesus one
day. He has been listening to the Master speak of life in the Christian
community. In the church, children are the greatest and humility is honored. In
the church, we do not trip other people with stumbling blocks nor permit any
distraction to lead us away from the fullness of Christ’s life within us. We chase
after those who wander astray and rejoice when we can bring them back. We work
together to restore one another, affirming that Jesus lives where two or three
agree.
And then Peter, who has a hard time
sitting on his hands, shoots up his arm and says, “Ooh, how many times must I
forgive somebody in the church who hurts me?” How many times?
I am assuming it’s not a hypothetical
question. Hypothetical questions can be pretty empty when you are talking about
real people. I wonder about the circumstances. Did James and John push him out
of line on the day Jesus was doing all the healings? Did Matthew charge him too
much when he prepared his tax return? Did Simon the Zealot intimidate him with
his hidden dagger? Did Judas Iscariot stick a fork in his hand when he reached
for an extra piece of fish?
How many times must I forgive – not just
anybody, but a brother or sister in the family of God? It sounds like he’s been
hurt more than once.
You know, that is one of the problems of
living with other people. They bump into you. Disagreements are inevitable.
Differences bubble up. Maybe you have seen the bumper sticker: CONFLICT HAPPENS. There is no truer
word. As a minister who spends some of my time among birds with ruffled
feathers, I know all about the hurts, both real and perceived. It is hard work to
live with other people.
We know that if we have been called to
the gift of marriage. Marriage is the smallest form of community. Two people
share a life. Sooner or later they bump into one another. It goes with the
territory. Marriage is a laboratory for forgiveness. You get to practice it,
perhaps seventy-seven times a day.
How many times must we forgive? Is there
a limit, so that if I forgive that many times, I don’t have to do it any more?
That is Peter’s question. It’s a good question, a practical question.
In the collections of sermons that we
call the book of Amos, God begins by saying repeatedly, “Three times there is a
transgression, the fourth time I will punish.” (1:3 and following). It was the
four-strikes-and-you’re-out law. After Amos, the rabbis continued talking about
this. Peter picks up on this, doubles the word of God in Amos, and adds one
more: “What about seven times? Is that the limit of forgiveness? Seven strikes
and you’re out?”
As you know, Jesus responds with an
extraordinary number: “Not seven times, but seven-seven times.” Or if you saw
the footnote, you can translate the number “seventy times seven.” That is
outrageous! And before Peter can sputter, “That’s impossible!” Jesus tells an
even more impossible story.
There
is this king, he says, who is unlike any other king you have ever heard. He had
a lot of money. He lives in a stone palace, while his servants live in straw
huts. He is driven around in a gold carriage, while his servants drag their
mules through the mud. Every evening the king eats caviar and roast pheasant on
hand-crafted china plates, while most of his servants think it’s a good night if
they have cold sausages and a crust of bread. He is the king, after all, and they
are not.
But
this is a generous king. He is willing to lend his wealth to them for a while.
He extends himself, and provides them with loans. He doesn’t care if this is a
questionable business practice. His servants have a better life because of their
borrowed generosity.
Then
the day comes when the king settles accounts. He asks the chamberlain to pull
out that thick, old ledger book. It has everybody’s name and address, and all
the sums of money that each one owes. The moment comes to call them in. The
debtors are summoned. They line up at the palace door to prepare for the day of
reckoning. At the very beginning of the line is this man who owes a whole lot
of money. We know he’s at the beginning of the line because Matthew mentions
him first.
With
perfect clarity, the king opens his ledger, turns to the precise page, finds
the correct name, announces his debt, and says, “Pay what you owe.” He is the
king. The man before him has been living on borrowed money.
Well,
we know what happens. The servant cannot pay so the king calls for his
auctioneer. The servant cries out for patience, and for no rational reason, the
king releases the entire debt. He is free and clear. He does not owe a cent.
Now
that is an extraordinary story. No one has ever heard of a king like that. No
other king would float that much credit to a servant. No other king would ever
write off the loss. The debtor was free.
Debt
is a heavy obligation. Some people ring up their credit card balances.
Sometimes the balances go so high that they take out a cash advance to pay the minimum
balance. Once they fall behind, they can’t even dream of staying even, much
less ever paying it off. The debt is too heavy, and it’s keeping them
down.
Just
consider this poor slave: he owns ten thousand talents. Did you see the footnote
in your pew Bible? A talent was a sum of money worth 15 years’ salary. So this
servant owed a hundred fifty thousand years of salary to the king. That was the
size of his debt. Whatever did he need that much money for? Did he build a
cedar deck on the back of his hovel, buy himself a nice fishing boat, and put
four gold horseshoes on his mule? (Don’t miss the point – Jesus is making a
joke here!) Ten thousand talents? He could never repay that.
And
then the king, who was foolish to loan that kind of money to a servant, cancels
the entire debt. So the king writes off the whole thing. He dismisses the
entire burden. This is how he treats the very first debtor in line. Imagine the
buzz down the rest of the line! When you see incalculable forgiveness like
that, you simply can’t keep it a secret.
Can
you see who else is in that line? There is a washer woman who owes twenty
thousand talents to the king. Behind her is a teenage boy who owes seven and a
half thousand talents. These are people so deeply in debt. Maybe the king will
be generous enough to cut them a break as well. This is, after all, a very
generous king.
But
as the story goes, that fortunate guy who had his entire debt cancelled went
whistling out the door. Suddenly he sees a neighbor who owed him thirty bucks.
Even though his debt was cancelled, or perhaps his debt was cancelled, he decided
to reclaim some money that he had loaned out, money that presumably he had
first borrowed from the king. So he grabbed his neighbor by the neck, shook him
a good bit and said, “Pay what you owe!” When the neighbor couldn’t come up
with what was an infinitely smaller sum, the lender had him thrown into
debtor’s prison. With that, the news rustled back up all the way to the front of
the line. And the king was overheard to say, “Is that so?”
In
a flash the king’s soldiers grabbed that man by both of his ears, dragged him
to the front of the line, stood on his feet long enough for him to hear the
king’s condemnation, and then they tossed him into the torture chamber until he
paid off the entire debt, all one hundred fifty thousand years of it. Last anybody
checked, he was still there…
That’s
what his kingdom is like, say Jesus. And he lets us draw the necessary parallels.
What
are we going to do with this story? A lot of people like the first half – it’s
about forgiveness. We like to hear about this servant who was in debt up to his
eyeballs and then gets forgiven. Whew! Wouldn’t that be nice? Wouldn’t it be
wonderful to live way beyond your means, and just when the whole thing comes
due, we are let off the hook? What a relief that would be!
Just
imagine if you tempted the providence of God and went down to the casino.
Presbyterians don’t gamble, of course, because they don’t believe in chance.
But imagine you went to the Super Duper Casino. In the roll of the dice, you
hit it big. You hit it really big. In fact, you hit it so big that they have to
close down the casino permanently and give you all the money. Even all the
gangsters who have a “business interest” in the establishment have to empty out
their bank accounts and give it all to you. Count it up: the sum is ten
thousand talents!
Just
imagine how you are feeling – your heart is racing, your eyes are circling in
opposite directions – you’ve hit big. You don’t walk out of there, you float on
air. And imagine, on the way out to the parking lot, as people are cheering,
you see the next door neighbor who owes you twenty bucks. Are you going to slam down your feet, seize
him by the throat, and say, “Pay what you owe”? Of course not! You’ll say,
“Forget about it. Twenty bucks, that’s nothing.”
Do
you see the problem with the man in the parable? He hits it big and it brings
out the worst in him. He scores an unexpected sum and refuses to pass it along.
He is totally unchanged by the generosity shown to him. He is unmoved by the
mercy that set him free. He has been forgiven – but in turn, he will not
forgive.
Peter
asks, “How many times must I forgive?” If you have truly received the
forgiveness of God, do you have to ask the question? Jesus reminds, “Forgive
the neighbor seventy-seven times.” We could take him literally, and think of
what that would do to us. If you forgive somebody seventy-seven times,
forgiveness will become a habit, in the name of the God who first forgives you.
And
what about that alternate translation? Jesus says, “Forgive the neighbor
seventy times seven.” He pushes forgiveness beyond bookkeeping. Mercy is a
matter of multiplication. Mercy multiplies. The more we forgive, the more it
expands. Not merely to “forebear” somebody else, to give them room to exist,
but to forgive them – to cancel the debt, to release the hurt, to stop picking
at the wound. To declare the damage is finished and a new day has begun.
This
can be hard to do. This can be easy to do. I don’t know how it is for you. I
think the Anne Lamott tells the truth. If you don’t forgive somebody, she says,
“it’s like drinking rat poison and then waiting for the rat to die.”[1] How
much better it would feel to let it go! To stop fussing about it. To cease
clinging to it. To let it go.
I
believe that is the King’s intent. He lets go of what he hasn’t received, what
the indebted servant could never pay back. He wishes to create a chain reaction
of graciousness. When it doesn’t happen, when the forgiven slave refuses to
extend the forgiveness he has received, the mercy of the king comes unraveled. That’s
why the king won’t let him loose on the streets.
So
theologian Miroslav Volf says about this parable:
Our failure to forgive undoes God’s
forgiveness. God takes back that which is given if we don’t give as God gives.
God’s forgiveness is here conditional on our performance. Though we couldn’t
earn God’s forgiveness, we could, so to speak, un-earn it.[2]
Then
he brings it home, and says:
If I am united with Christ in faith,
I’ll have forgiveness and Christ will live in me, forgiving through me those
who offend me as he has forgiven me.[3]
When
the dust settles, it really comes down to this. Have we truly received the Word
that our sins are forgiven? That God does not remember them because of the
grace of Jesus Christ? Do we trust that everything that we’ve done wrong has
been scrubbed clean? The best evidence will be in our readiness to forgive
other people.
One
day they asked Jesus how to pray. He said, “Forgive us our debts, as we forgive
others.”
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment