Matthew 18: 21-35 September 13, 2020
There is nothing that God will not
forgive us for, based on how we, in turn, forgive. There, one sentence, covers the whole
passage. This is the lesson of the
parable that Jesus tells to answer Peter’s question, “How many times should we
forgive a member of the church?” Is
seven enough? In this version, Jesus
says no, it must be seventy seven times.
In earlier translations, this passage is translated as seven times
seventy times. The number is not
important, only the practice.
How then do we understand
forgiveness? To explain, Jesus offers a
parable, of forgiveness in the Kingdom of Heaven. A slave owes more than he can pay. The judgement is that he, his family, his
possessions, everything is to be sold to pay off the debt. This is what the Kingdom of Heaven is like. What is the Kingdom of Heaven?
The
Kingdom of Heaven was ushered in with the accomplishment of God’s plan, at
Jesus’ resurrection. Jesus talks about
what it ‘will be like’, when it is complete on the Day of Judgement. Yet it is a process. In the meantime, the blessings and the
consequences of this Kingdom are already here, but not yet complete in the
lives of each one of God’s children.
So,
in parable terms, the reality of the Kingdom is that we are all sinners, that
we cannot be ‘good enough’ to balance the scales. The judgement against us is death as
punishment for our sins.
In our parable, the slave cries out
for mercy to his king, verse 26, “Have patience with me, and I will pay you
everything.” Consider the math. The slave owes ten thousand talents. A day’s wages was a denarius. That was the basic unit of wages and
prices. There are, according to my
google search, six thousand denarii in a talent, so, twenty year’s labor goes
into a talent. That is 60 MILLION
denarii. Which is two hundred thousand
years of work. In other words, the slave
cannot pay the debt on his own. This is
what the Kingdom of Heaven is like. We
who are sinners come to the Lord and promise to do the best that we can to
overcome our sin natures, to live according to the law of love. But claiming that we will not sin is like
claiming that we will not breathe. On
our own, we cannot overcome sin.
In our parable, verse 27, “Out of
pity for him, the lord of that slave released him, and forgave him his
debt.” This is what the Kingdom of
Heaven is like. We have been forgiven
our debt of sin. But this forgiveness
comes at its own cost. We are forgiven
because Jesus died in our place, was punished in our stead, because of Jesus’
love for us and obedience to God.
This passage is not about the plan
of God, that Jesus has already gone over in detail. With God’s plan in place, forgiveness in
place, the Kingdom of Heaven proceeds in this fashion. It is about our response to our forgiveness.
In our parable, the forgiven slave
meets a fellow slave who owes him far less, one hundred denarii. That is approximately a third of a year’s
wages for the working man. Not a small
sum for the working class. But when the
indebted 100 denarii slave repeats the same cry for mercy as the forgiven 60
000 000 denarii slave, the forgiven slave ignores the grace he has received and
has the indebted slave tossed into prison.
But the forgiven slave throws the indebted slave into prison until the
full amount is paid. In the Kingdom of
Heaven, the forgiven slave is the child of God who puts aside what they have
received from God, and condemn without mercy their fellow sinners, without
consideration of what God has done for them.
In our parable, the fellow slaves
see what is happening and they are distressed.
So they report what they have seen to the king. The king recalls the forgiven slave and
un-forgives him. How could this
ungrateful slave not in turn show mercy?
The result was debtor’s prison and torture. In the Kingdom of Heaven, God sees all and
knows all. God will know when
forgiveness has not been offered to another, God knows the distress of God’s
Children when they see this kind of behavior in their fellow Christians.
In the Kingdom of Heaven, the one
who considered themselves forgiven by God will have that forgiveness stripped
away because they have not shown the forgiveness they have received. Not only will the punishment for their sins
be put back upon their shoulders, but torture, what we would associate with the
fires of hell, will also be heaped upon them.
That is a tough one, theologically
speaking. Can our salvation be taken
away? Or is it something else? If one asks for salvation, but nothing
changes in their life, was that request just a mockery of the Lord? Because the Lord will not be mocked. And while salvation is a gift, it is also a
covenant, binding life change on those who receive it.
Jesus concludes by connecting the
parable to reality, “So my heavenly Father will do to every one of you, if you
do not forgive your brother or sister from your heart.”
So to give my heart to the Lord
presumes we will forgive our brothers and sisters from our heart. To do so eagerly and sincerely comes from
knowing the joyful power of forgiveness.
Because Jesus regards forgiveness as so important, as so necessary to
the Kingdom of Heaven, to the plan of God, that without it, we have not
received salvation.
Peter’s
question infers that forgiveness is a burden.
Do not forgive just seven times or seventy seven times or seven times
seventy times, but as many times as necessary.
But remember what Paul told us last week, do not owe anything to anyone
else, except love. We talked then about
how we live out the law of loving our neighbor.
But the law is summed up by Jesus in
two commandments. Before we are called
upon to love neighbor, we are called upon to love God. But because of sin, we are cut off from God. Forgiveness restores our connection to
God. Forgiveness does nothing less that
allow for the love of God to flow freely once more. It is the foundation on which our renewed
relationship with God is built.
The love of neighbor is, in turn, built
upon the foundation of our love of God.
If forgiveness is the foundation of our relationship with God, how much
more is it the foundation of our relationship with neighbor? Because as we confess each week, it is not
simply the sins against God that we ask forgiveness for, it is also sins
against neighbor. Forgiveness is how we
restore and renew our relationships one with another.
In our parable, when the king
forgave the slave, a renewed relationship was returned, for the king. When slave did not forgive slave, he shunned
that renewed relationship.
When we truly forgive someone, we
have wiped out a debt, whether it be financial or emotional or something
else. Someone hurt us, someone did bad
by us, there is an action or an event that now stands between me and the other
person, friend, family, spouse, parent, child, church member, whomever. To forgive is to make a choice to remove that
thing between myself and the other person.
This is separate from compensation or from forgetting or anything
else. Those may be part and parcel of
restoring a relationship, but where it begins is with a choice. I will no longer hold on to the choice that I
have made that this “thing” stands between us.
For the king in the parable, it is
ten thousand talents. For the forgiven
slave, it was not putting down the one hundred denarii. For God, it is releasing us from sin. Perhaps the ultimate moment of what it means
not to forgive someone comes when Jesus on the cross and he cries out “MY God
My God, why hast though forsaken me?”
The fruit of forgiveness ripens to
its fullest when it is mutually accepted.
God has forgiven us, through Jesus Christ, which creates the foundation
for a life of joy and wonder when we embrace and live into the love that God
has for us, letting it flow out of us into the lives of others. Two people who have had a terrible fight,
when there is forgiveness and acceptance, the relationship can come out even
stronger than before.
But the reality of life is that
sometimes forgiveness happens only on one side.
Perhaps someone has hurt me but they don’t even know it, or they will
not acknowledge it or, even worse, they know what they did but they will not
repent. I choose to forgive them and I
can put that emotional burden down.
Perhaps I had a very contentious relationship with a parent, one that
was broken our entire lives. Then that
parent dies before anything can be resolved.
I can lay down that burden when I make a choice to forgive. It can be liberating. It can be critical for one’s own mental and
spiritual health.
Forgiveness is the key to living in
the Kingdom of Heaven now. Because we
are still surrounded by sin. For each
generation of the Children of God coming into the world, forgiveness is not
simply how we survive, but how we thrive in a life of sin. It is an incredible message that we have to
carry to those whose lives are broken, stunted, and impaired because of the
unforgiven events in their own lives. Because,
as there is nothing in life that God will not forgive us over, there is nothing
that another can do to us that we cannot, with the love and support of our
Creator, in turn forgive them for.
In
the world of sin that we still inhabit, it can be so easy for the joy we know
in Jesus Christ to get crushed by the weight of the world. That is why Jesus said, “Come to me all who
carry heavy burdens, and I will give you rest.”
Forgiveness is a key to putting down those heavy burdens. Yet, that rest can be fleeting. It is easy for us to become bored, even
jaded, that even our faith becomes a matter of rote. But Jesus goes on to say that his yoke is
light. Practicing the art of
forgiveness, it binds us to do something in the Lord’s name, but the result is
an ever renewed knowledge of God’s love when we actively carry it out in a
sinful world.
Because
that is one of the realities of a sinful world.
There will ALWAYS be something else to forgive.
Peter
asks “If another church member sins against me, how often do I have to forgive
them?” Whenever I read that, it seems to
me that Peter is not so much asking about forgiveness, so much as what can he
do when it is time not to forgive. The
subtext feels like, “You gave me the keys to the kingdom Lord, when can I use
them to punish, not just to forgive forgive forgive?”
Jesus
offers us this parable because Peter is missing the point. Forgiveness is an outworking of love, a tool of
joy and renewal and reconnection in a sinful world. Punishment is God’s, not ours. So as surely as street racing is not in the
covenant when we give our car keys to our kids, neither is punishment in the
covenant when we get the kingdom keys from God.
This is so fundamental that if we do not forgive from the heart, we are
threatened with hellfire.
Which
is why is it SO important to understand what forgiveness offers. It is the opportunity to lay down our
emotional burdens, knowing that the guilt we carry for what we have done has
already been forgiven from God’s heart.
People who actively practice forgiveness live into things like
“liberation”, “freedom”, and “new purpose”.
We know that sin and death and crying and illness will end when the
Kingdom of Heaven is fulfilled on the Day of Judgement. What forgiveness provides to us is a
foretaste of what that life is going to be like as we can already lay down the
burdens of the life of sin and know the joyful, forgiving love of Jesus Christ. It is nothing less than the foundation upon
which our lives, renewed in God’s plan of salvation, is lived joyfully and
wondrously in a sinful world.
May we be so blessed today. Amen.
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