“Missing the Experience of Forgiveness”
September 17, 2023
Matthew 18:21–35
Then Peter came and said to him, “Lord, if another member of the church sins against me, how often should I forgive? As many as seven times?” Jesus said to him, “Not seven times, but I tell you, seventy-seven times. “For this reason the kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who wished to settle accounts with his slaves. When he began the reckoning, one who owed him ten thousand talents was brought to him; and, as he could not pay, his lord ordered him to be sold, together with his wife and children and all his possessions, and payment to be made. So the slave fell on his knees before him, saying, ‘Have patience with me, and I will pay you everything.’ And out of pity for him, the lord of that slave released him and forgave him the debt. But that same slave, as he went out, came upon one of his fellow slaves who owed him a hundred denarii; and seizing him by the throat, he said, ‘Pay what you owe.’ Then his fellow slave fell down and pleaded with him, ‘Have patience with me, and I will pay you.’ But he refused; then he went and threw him into prison until he would pay the debt. When his fellow slaves saw what had happened, they were greatly distressed, and they went and reported to their lord all that had taken place. Then his lord summoned him and said to him, ‘You wicked slave! I forgave you all that debt because you pleaded with me. Should you not have had mercy on your fellow slave, as I had mercy on you?’ And in anger his lord handed him over to be tortured until he would pay his entire debt. So my heavenly Father will also do to every one of you, if you do not forgive your brother or sister from your heart.”
One day, Tina was scheduled for lunch with a friend she hadn’t seen in a long time. Juggling her schedule to make it happen, she circled the block five times to park and got into the restaurant on time and before her friend. Then she waited and waited for her friend to show up. After 40 minutes she realized she had been stood up.
Later that afternoon, Tina’s friend called confessing to having just remembered their lunch date. Apologizing, she asked for another chance. Tina agreed because what is one missed lunch between long-time friends? The date to meet again was set and it happened again. Tina faced a challenge. Forgiving her friend for two no shows was one thing, but agreeing to another date was another. How many times was she willing to set herself up to be dissed by this friend?
The disciple Peter had been listening to Jesus teach about forgiveness and asked how far he had to go with this relationship business. “Lord how often shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him As many as seven times?” he says, thinking that seven is a lot, but he gets no credit for his generous suggestion. You know the saying, “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.” Now it’s, “Sin against me once, I forgive you… Sin against me 8 times, I’m done.” We can relate to what Peter offered and the limit he suggested.
“I do not say to you seven times,” Jesus replies, “but seventy times seven.” In other words, there is no limit to forgiveness. Forgiving is not a favor we offer seven times and withhold the eighth, but a way of life that never ends.
Jesus’s response surprises and shocks. Seven acts of forgiveness you can keep track of but not seventy-seven times. He could have said a million. Jesus isn’t about the numbers. Forgiveness is not about counting, or adding up in any way. Jesus is saying, “Don’t even start counting when it comes to the transgressions of others against you, as if eventually you’ll balance the scales for your justice.”
According to the bible reading today, should Tina be willing to go through this failed lunch date seventy times seven, some four-hundred and eighty-eight more times?
Not likely. Human nature does not work that way. Most of us are willing to get burned once, maybe twice, but the third time we back off. That little calculator in your head keeps track of how much you’re putting into the relationship versus how much you are getting out of it, and not many of us pursue those with a negative balance. When someone lets us down again and again, we tend to turn our attention elsewhere, preferring cost-efficient relationships in which there is a better rate of exchange, where what we give and what we get are nearly even. It seems crass, but you know it is true.
This is what Jesus is pointing out in this parable. Like Peter who wants to limit involvement with people who run up debts with us, we try to be patient. But surely there is a limit.
This parable known as the Wicked Servant is a prickly one. It ends the section of Matthew’s Gospel in which Jesus has been teaching the disciples about the kingdom of heaven where God’s ways are the ways of life and community. Jesus offered guidance for how to address when someone has sinned against you and he is not concerned about equality or balanced scales when it comes to being the kind of forgiving community he calls his followers to be. Instead, Jesus’s way of making things right within God’s kingdom relies on the immeasurable weight of God’s mercy, forgiveness, and grace.
Jesus tells a story revealing as much. It is about a king who keeps good books, who employs several accountants to keep track of who owes him what, and several jailers as well, to lock up those who cannot pay.
One day the king is settling accounts. He starts with his top accounting servant who owes an enormous sum, 10,000 talents, basically a gazillion dollars. It would take 60 million days of work to pay it back.
Clearly, the servant cannot pay, so the king orders him and his family to be sold. The price they bring won’t cover the debt, but it will cut the king’s losses. The servant, realizing his jig is up, falls on his knees and promises to pay everything he owes if the king will just be patient. He begs not for forgiveness, but for time. Perhaps the servant didn’t realize he needed 60 million days, but he was willing to try anything. The king, responding with compassion, forgave the whole debt despite being in the bookkeeping business. It seems the king wants to keep the relationship with the servant, so for reasons known only to himself, he gives the servant back his life, cancelling the debt out of the goodness of his heart.
Within minutes of receiving this extravagant forgiveness from the king, the servant encounters a colleague who owes him money. Demanding payment of a debt amounting to only 100 days of work, the colleague couldn’t pay. This enraged the recently forgiven servant who demanded the debt be paid immediately. The man begs for more time.
Just as we would expect, the one who was just forgiven so much received this begging, remembering his own forgiveness experience, and forgave the debt of his colleague. No? Oh, that’s right. That’s not how it goes in the parable, and often that is not how it goes in life. Instead of forgiveness or patience, the forgiven servant throws his indebted colleague into debtors’ prison to remain until the money is paid.
How often is it the case that we choose to let the debt of a past wrong linger by holding it over someone else? Maybe we don’t throw people in debtors’ prison, but we make snide remarks just to remind them they still owe us for the harm they’ve done to us. Or maybe we simply cut the relationship off all together and pretend as if the person no longer exists.
Back to the story. The king gets wind of what the forgiven servant has done and does the same thing to him. The king revokes the mercy shown the servant and cries, “You wicked servant! I forgave you all that debt because you begged me; and should you not have had mercy on your fellow servant as I had mercy on you?”
I told you it was a prickly parable. On the surface, it is a lesson about the Golden Rule. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Or more bluntly: Do unto others as you would have GOD do unto you, because if you do not forgive others from your heart, God will have you hauled off to jail.
Of course, that is a terrible reading of the parable. If the only reason to forgive someone is to save your own neck, to secure your own forgiveness, then it is not something you are doing out of love, but out of fear. Does that sound like Jesus to you? Of course not, which makes me think we have to look under the surface to discover what this parable is about. How did this story start out so well and end so poorly? What went wrong? What made the servant so wicked and unable to forgive a mere fraction of the debt that he himself had just been forgiven?
Think about what it is like to be forgiven, when someone forgives you in order to restore the relationship that you damaged. It is an incredible experience, but never of your own doing. All you have been able to do is ask forgiveness, but when it has been granted it has come to you from outside yourself, a free gift from someone you have hurt, whom you have owed, but has decided that what is more important than getting even is to remain in relationship with you.
That’s what real forgiveness is about: pure, unadulterated grace. There is a lot that passes for forgiveness these days that is not forgiveness but a kind of indifference, in which we dismiss people from our lives by “forgiving” them and then have less and less to do with them until finally there is nothing left in the relationship.
But once we have experienced the exhilaration of real forgiveness, how can we fail to pass it on? That is what the king wanted to know. “I forgave you all that debt because you pleaded with me. Should you not have had mercy on your fellow slave, as I had mercy on you?’
You see, the king had quit keeping score on his servant. Why couldn’t this servant do the same thing? It seems the servant is standing in a big pool of “me.” He missed the significance of what had happened to him. He thought he had gotten away with something. He thought the king was soft in the head to buy his obvious lie. “Lord have patience with me and I will pay you everything.” He knew he couldn’t pay the debt, but if making the king feel sorry for him meant he did not have to pay, what did he care?
Sadly, he missed the experience of forgiveness altogether. It never occurred to him that he was not being let off the hook, or that what was really happening to him was that he was being forgiven from the heart by someone who understood the enormity of his deed and had financed it — but was willing to let it all go, to stop keeping score, to erase the debt that had become a substitute for the relationship — so that they could get to know one another again.
That is what forgiveness is all about. Forgiveness is about restoring the possibility of a future for a relationship. And God’s extravagant mercy and forgiveness extended to us through the sacrifice of Jesus opens the possibility of a relationship with God to us, even though our debt is so great.
Forgiving is strenuous. It can wear you out as long as you are focused on what someone owes you, you tend to spend time figuring out how to get paid back, or proven right, or protected from further harm. But once you have forgiven someone — it is time to put the calculator away and go for a walk and get to know one another again. This is what the wicked servant missed. He had missed his own forgiveness, so he could not forgive anyone else.
The story ends when the servant is thrown in jail until he can pay his debt. Yet imprisonment is a technicality because he was already behind the bars of his own making. By refusing to be forgiven and refusing to forgive, he had created his own prison, where sitting in solitary confinement he could spend all day with his calculator keeping track of his accounts.
“Lord, how often shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? Peter says “as many as seven times? Jesus said to him, “Not seven times, but I tell you, seventy-seven times.
By the end of the parable, Peter thinks he has gotten the message. Do unto others or the king will do unto you — only that is not the message of the parable at all. Rather it is: Do unto others as the king has already done unto you. It is not a matter of earning forgiveness, or letting others off the hook so that you will be let off the hook yourself. It is a matter of understanding that you have already been forgiven, that someone to whom you owe everything — your life, your brown eyes, the people you love — this someone who has given again and again to you and who has gotten precious little in return — has examined your enormous debt in detail and knows from your credit rating that the chances of repayment are nil. This someone has taken your IOUs and torn them in two, balancing your books in one fell swoop for one reason alone: because that someone wants to remain in relationship with you, and wants you to be free to respond.
Once you have let that sink in, once you have really taken that into your own heart, how can you pass up a single chance to do the same?
Images:
1) Rev. Tim Ehrhardt “Guilt, Grace, and Debt-Collecting: The Parable of the Unmerciful Servant;
2) christian.art/daily-gospel-reading/matthew-18–21–19–1–2020/
3) Karla Smith “How to practice authentic forgiveness” www.kslifecoach.com
