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.
But because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions - it is by grace you have been saved. And God raised us up with Christ and seated us with him in the heavenly realms in Christ Jesus, in order that in the coming ages he might show the incomparable riches of his grace, expressed in his kindness to us in Christ Jesus. For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith-and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God- not by works, so that no-one can boast." (Ephesians 2 NIV)
We too owe a debt that there is no way we can pay.
The king decides to settle his accounts, he calls the slave in, and since there is no way that the slave can pay, he orders him and his whole family thrown into prison. The slave cries out "just a little more time, and I will repay!" The king decides to have mercy on the man, and he completely cancels the debt!
The slave leaves and on his way out he finds a friend who owes him 100 denari. A denari was worth about a day’s wage, so he owed him about $7,000 in today’s money. This is no small amount, but it is absolutely nothing compared to the huge amount that he had just been forgiven. The slave grabbed his friend by the throat and said "Pay what you owe" The debtor said, just a little more time, and I’ll repay!" the slave would have none of it and had him thrown into prison. When the king got wind of it, he summoned him and said "You wicked servant, I cancelled all that debt of yours because you begged me to. Shouldn’t you have had mercy on your fellow-servant just as I had on you?" In anger his master turned him over to the jailers to be tortured, until he should pay back all he owed.
Jesus then said, "This is how my heavenly Father will treat each of you unless you forgive your brother from your heart."
Once again we are faced with the hard truth that we learned last week: If we do not forgive those who have harmed us, God will not forgive us.
When I used to tell the story, I hadn’t done the math and I used to compare the two amounts as being a billion dollars and five dollars - it seems I exaggerated even more that Jesus did! But the friend owed the slave a significant amount of money - it would have been difficult to forgive $7,000, If I loaned you $7,000, it would be money that I would need sooner or later and I’d need it back! In the same way, when some one truly harms us with their sin, it is not insignificant, we feel the pain, and we often feel like they owe us, at least an apology, if not some form of penance. We might even feel like we deserve revenge. And those feelings are real, and they would be completely justified, if God had not first forgiven us. Since God has forgiven us, the scales have completely changed. On our side of the scale, God has forgiven complete rebellion against him - we all like sheep have gone astray, and there was nothing that we could do to make up for that rebellion - and for that rebellion we owed our eternal life. In fact Paul tells us that we were walking dead men and walking dead women - you were dead in your trespasses and sins he says. But God in his great mercy gave us our lives back, so that we might live with him forever! As Christians we are people who have come back from the dead.
We are not self-made people, we did not pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps; we did not endear ourselves to God and earn our way into his presence. We were taken from the mud pit and brought into the palace - kicking a screaming for some of us. And we find ourselves here only because God forgave us. We have been forgiven a debt that we could never dream of paying.
This is why we are able to forgive those who sin against us, we are able to show mercy because we have been shown mercy
It is also why we are able to forgive over and over again. Sometimes we think of forgiveness as a banking system, that we are the bank and all our friends and family members have accounts with us. When they do nice things for us it is like they make deposits, but when they need forgiveness they are making a withdrawal. For some people who need forgiveness constantly, we want to say, that’s it, you’ve made your last withdrawal, the account is closed. But when we become Christians, it is like God has lavished so much forgiveness on us that every body’s account gets topped up, and accounts that have been closed for years are reopened and the forgiveness can flow again. If any of those accounts start to run low, God just has to remind us of what Jesus did for us on the cross, and they all get topped up again.
We Jesus sends out the twelve, he says to them "As you go, preach this message: `The kingdom of heaven is near.’ Heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse those who have leprosy, drive out demons. Freely you have received, freely give." (Matthew 10:7-8) He says the same to us, "freely you have received forgiveness, freely give it."
He also says that if we do not forgive freely, our own forgiveness will be removed from us. Our own forgiveness enables us to forgive, and our own forgiveness compels us to forgive.
