Forgive As God Forgives Series

February 24, 2021

Hope Lutheran Church

Rev. Mary Erickson

Matt. 6:7-15; Matt. 18:23-35

Forgive as God Forgives

Friends, may grace and peace be yours in abundance in the knowledge of God and Christ Jesus our Lord.

We all need role models. Our first role models are our parents. Children are always watching their parents! They never stop watching the grow-ups around them. They want to learn how to respond to the world around them. This is true for our good behaviors, but also our bad ones, too.

If parents demonstrate honesty, then children learn to be honest. If mom and dad respond to neighbors with kindness and acts of service when they fall on challenging times, kids learn to respond in a like manner. And unfortunately, when parents make hateful, discriminatory comments, children pick up on that, too. They learn to hate.

Forgiveness is in many ways a learned behavior. We learn how to forgive. We learn to value it. Nor not. We can also learn other lessons about forgiveness. Some people hold onto righteous anger. They bear a grudge for decades. Every time the offender’s name comes up, they retell the story of how they were swindled or betrayed.

When Jesus teaches his disciples how to pray, part of his model prayer involves a plea for forgiveness. “Forgive us our debts,” he prays, “as we also have forgiven our debtors.”

After he concludes his prayer, he touches back on the plea for forgiveness. He says, “For if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you; but if you do not forgive others, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.”

It’s a chilling statement. I’ve wrestled long with this verse. Does God measure out forgiveness to us to the same degree as we forgive others? If that’s so, there’s only one outcome: All of us are doomed! None of us forgives completely. We all hang onto past resentments. We act in a retaliatory manner. Instead of turning the other cheek, we give to others what they’ve given to us.

NONE of us forgive perfectly. Our brand of forgiveness is simply broken and flawed. If God only forgives us in like manner, then we are without hope!

So if we go down this way of thinking, we’re headed down a dead end. Jesus must have meant something else when he gave this explanation.

Jesus speaks a lot about forgiveness. Peter asked Jesus once how often he needed to forgive someone. Would seven times be sufficient? Jesus multiplied it, “No, Peter, more like seventy times seven.”

And then he tells Peter a story. A certain royal slave owes a tremendous debt to his master the king. It’s an astronomic amount. When the king calls him to settle up, the man isn’t able to pay him. The king orders that his family and possessions all be sold towards the debt. The man falls on his knees before the king. He begs for mercy. “Just give me a little more time and I’ll repay everything I owe you.”

The king feels pity for him. Not only does he delay the loan period, he completely forgives the huge debt.

But what happens next is the shocking part. This same slave leaves the palace. And as he goes, he bumps into a fellow slave who owes him a few bucks. He grabs the fellow by the throat and demands that he settle up on the spot. The second man can’t pay, and he asks for more time to pay what he owes. But the first slave won’t hear of it. He throws the man in jail until he can pay.

Here this man had been the recipient of tremendous forgiveness. But the magnitude of that mercy didn’t have any effect on his heart. It didn’t trickle down at all. He couldn’t see the similarities between this man and himself. And he had no sense of proportion. What this man owed him was nothing compared to the huge debt he had racked up.

The forgiveness he had received hadn’t changed him. There was no softness, no sense of reciprocity. He was like dry, hardened soil. When the rains come, the moisture just runs off and drains away. It doesn’t seep into the ground. It doesn’t loosen up the soil.

Our heart needs to be soft, not hard. It needs to allow reviving waters to seep down. Receiving forgiveness is meant to soften our hearts. It breaks up the hardpan so that grace can seep in deep. God desires that our hearts become a soft soil where the seed of forgiveness might germinate and take root.

That’s what forgiveness is meant to do. It’s meant to expand and grow. When we reflect on how much we’ve been forgiven, we allow it to infuse into every molecule of our being. Our heart and soul absorb its healing graces. And when they do, that forgiveness brings about a healing and reviving. It creates a peace that passes understanding.