Forgiving Toxic People 2 Series

Forgiveness part 2 July 12, 2009

Matthew 18:21-35

Jesus & Toxic People – where we’ve been – Judas; confrontation; receiving the Father’s Love; breaking relationship; forgiving.

Last week I told the story of a woman who was struggling with forgiving the man who shot and paralysed her. We learned that if we do not forgive others, God will not forgive us, and we learned that forgiveness is hard. When we speak of situations like this - a terrible crime, it is often easy to talk about forgiveness, but the reality is that it might be easier to forgive the stranger who has harmed us, because we may never have to see them again, but Peter’s question and Jesus’ answer hits us where it hurts - forgiving the people we are close to.

Jesus has just given some teaching on confronting a church member who has sinned against you, and Peter comes and asks him, “How many times must I forgive? Isn’t seven times enough?”

I don’t think that Peter was asking an abstract question here. I bet you that there was one of the disciples who was driving him nuts, maybe even his own brother Andrew! Peter has had it up to here, and he now wants the right to stay angry, to not forgive, to hold the wrong against his brother. He is being quite gracious, or so he thinks: The Rabbis taught that you had to forgive your brother or sister for a wrong, only three times, and then they had gone too far, three strikes and your out. Peter says he is will to go as far as seven times! Isn’t that enough? Jesus says no, you must forgive your friend seventy times seven!

I don’t think that Jesus meant that Peter should count up to 490 times forgiving this person, and then cut him off, Jesus just picked a very large number to say that we need to forgive over and over again. 7 & 70 are symbolic numbers for first century Jews – they are perfect, or “complete” numbers -

Paul tells us in 1 Corinthians 13 that true love "keeps no record of wrongs."

But it is easy to keep count for those we are closest to, isn’t it? There’s the old story of the man who says to the marriage counsellor, "Every time we have an argument, she gets historical!" We like to bring up the past. I know a couple who have been married over 40 years, and she just told me about an argument they had when they were married only six months, and the pain from that argument was never dealt with, so it keeps coming up again and again. The people with whom we are closest are the people that we usually need to forgive the most.

Remember what we said about forgiveness last week, Forgiveness does not excuse sin, it does not say "O that’s alright, your sin really wasn’t a bother: Forgiveness says, you hurt me, and what you did was wrong, but I will not hold it against you, I will not try to get back at you and I will not hate you for it." When we keep track; that is when we continue to hold it against them.

After telling Peter to never stop forgiving, Jesus tells a parable that explains why we must forgive, and gives us the power to do so.

There was a slave who owed the king 10,000 talents. Now if a talent was worth a dollar, that would be a lot of money, but a talent was equal to 20 years wages for a day labourer! Even at Ontario’s Minimum wage, one talent would be worth $350,000. The slave owed 10,000 times that amount: $3,500,000,000 – 3.5 billion dollars! This fellow was a slave, and therefore had little personal earnings, if he was free and went to work to pay off the debt, giving all his income to the king and living off nothing, it would take him 200,000 years! Jesus used such a high amount to explain what deep trouble we are in with God. Just as the slave could never pay back what he owed, we could never pay back what we owe to God.

This is the way Paul describes our situation before we met Jesus:

"As for you, you were dead in your transgressions and sins, in which you used to live when you followed the ways of this world and of the ruler of the kingdom of the air, the spirit who is now at work in those who are disobedient. All of us also lived among them at one time, gratifying the cravings of our sinful nature and following its desires and thoughts. Like the rest, we were by nature objects of wrath.