"Let It Go"
Matthew 18:21-35
A little boy was saying his prayers.
And as he went down the list of his family, asking God to bless them, he skipped over his brother's name.
His mother asked him, "Why didn't you pray for Liam?"
He replied, "I'm not going to ask God to bless Liam because he hit me."
And his mother said, "Don't you remember Jesus said to forgive your enemies?"
But the little boy said, "That's just the problem.
He's not my enemy; he's my brother!"
(Pause)
I'd imagine that most of us can relate to what Peter was going through in our Gospel Lesson for this morning.
He was facing a similar problem--the problem of forgiving his brother.
In Matthew Chapter 18 Jesus has been dealing with the question of relationships between Christians.
And then Peter came up to Jesus and said to Him, "Lord, how many times should I forgive my brother...who sins against me?
Should I forgive as many as seven times?'
Jesus said, 'Not just seven times, but rather as many as seventy-seven times."
I have often wondered, as I've read this passage, if Peter might actually have been thinking of his literal brother, Andrew.
Peter and Andrew were brothers and had grown up together.
And, not unlike lots of brothers, Andrew may have had a habit of doing something that drove Peter nuts.
Maybe Andrew was always "borrowing" something from Peter without asking for Peter's permission.
Perhaps, they had been fighting for Jesus' attention or for their place in the "pecking order" of God's Kingdom.
Maybe Andrew had a tendency to bully his brother, dismiss him, take him for granted--you name it!!!
We've all been there one way or another.
At any rate, Peter probably thought he was being really, really generous here in suggesting to Jesus that he should forgive Andrew seven times.
And there was a good reason why Peter might have thought he was being really generous toward his brother; the rabbis at the time taught that you only needed to forgive someone three times at the most.
The fourth time you could do whatever you wanted.
Imagine that.
There was a three strikes rule long before baseball was even invented!!!
In any event, there is a lot of humor in the way Jesus responds to Peter.
Don't get me wrong, but I think there are many passages of Scripture that we get wrong because we take them literally, even though Jesus is going "over the top" and actually speaking kind of humorously in order to make His point.
There may very well have been a bit of laughter in Jesus' voice when He replied to Peter, "Peter, would you believe seventy-seven times?"
I mean, that's a lot of strikes!!!
In effect, Jesus was saying to Peter, "It's not a question of how many times you should forgive your brother.
That's not really the question.
There is something much deeper beneath all that.
The real question is, 'Why should I forgive at all?
And when you see that you should forgive you will see that there is that's there is no limit at all.
Forgiveness is something that ought to go on without limit."
Jesus has really only chosen seventy-seven times as a play on what Peter has just said to Him.
But what seventy-seven times really means is an unlimited forgiveness!!!
And then, to answer that deeper question of "Why should I forgive my brother," Jesus tells the parable of the unforgiving servant.
"Therefore," Jesus says, "the kingdom of heaven is like a king who wanted to settle accounts with his servants.
When he began to settle accounts, they brought him a servant who owed him ten thousand bags of gold.
Because the servant didn't have enough to pay it back, the master ordered that he should be sold, along with his wife and children and everything he had, and that the proceeds should be used as payment.
But the servant fell down, kneeled before him, and said, 'Please be patient with me, and I'll pay you back.'
The master had compassion on that servant, released him, and forgave the loan.
When that servant went out, he found one of his fellow servants who owed him one hundred coins.
He grabbed him around the throat and said, 'Pay me back what you owe me.'
Then his fellow servant fell down and begged him, 'Be patient with me, and I'll pay you back.'
But he refused.
Instead, he threw him into prison until he paid back his debt."
This parable is really a picture of us, isn't it?
Jesus is holding up a mirror in order for us to see ourselves.
We are the servant who has been forgiven a huge and staggering amount of money, and God is the great king who has forgiven us.
And this "ten thousand bags of gold" is a huge amount of money!!!
Some scholars suggest that it represents the largest possible number.
It would have been more money than was actually in circulation in Judea at the time!!!
And the king forgives the entire loan.
The king had every right to order that the man, his wife, children and all that he had be sold.
Even though that would fall way short of paying off his debt.
In desperation, the man makes an impossible promise.
He falls on his knees and says to the king: "Please, be patient with me, and I'll pay you back."
Of course, he never could have paid him back.
If he worked all his lifetime and gave the king everything he made he couldn't make that much money.
But in desperation, he cries out, and the king's heart is moved by the man's impossible situation, and, out of compassion, he forgives him, at a staggering cost to himself!!!
Which means, of course, that the king took on the debt himself.
Again, we must see ourselves in this if we are going to get the point of Jesus' parable.
We must see that the totality of our sin against God constitutes this kind of debt, an absolutely impossible amount.
We owe God a staggering debt that we could never, ever repay.
But here comes the Good News, the wonderful Good News of the Gospel.
There came a day when we stood in the presence of God and heard Him say: "By the blood of Christ you are forgiven."
The debt was wiped away.
In one moment it was gone.
And we were free!!!
In direct conflict to this, Jesus says that the man in the parable went out from this experience so unbelievably forgiven and met a man who owed him a measly "one hundred coins."
And he "grabbed him around the throat and said, 'Pay me back what you owe me.'"
But when the second man says exactly the same words that this guy had said to the king...just a few moments before...
... "Be patient with me, and I'll pay you back"...
...he throws him in prison until he pays back the loan.
"That," says Jesus, "is what we do when we refuse to forgive one another."
No matter how bad it may appear to us, no matter how hurt we are by what someone has done to us...
...in comparison to what God has forgiven it's like comparing a hundred coins to a Googleplex dollars!!!
And these two things are going on simultaneously throughout our lives, in an immediate context, just like Jesus says.
There isn't one of us here who is a Christian, who doesn't realize that we didn't stop sinning when Jesus forgave us the first time.
Even though we are continually receiving increasing light and power through following Christ, we still fail so very much.
Not a day goes by that we don't stand in desperate need of forgiveness from God.
And, again and again God cancels out the debt as we come to Him.
And yet, when someone sins against us, how quickly do we start demanding from them: "Pay me what you owe!!!"
"I demand an apology!!!"
"I demand my rights!!!"
"Give me my rights!!!"
"Treat me the way I deserve to be treated!!!"
"I demand to be treated with respect!!!"
"I'll never forgive you for what you have done!!!"
In the rest of the parable, Jesus shows at least two great reasons why we must forgive those who do us harm.
"When his fellow servants saw what happened, they were deeply offended.
They came and told their master all that happened.
His master called the first servant and said, 'You wicked servant! I forgave you all that debt because you appealed to me.
Shouldn't you also have mercy on your fellow servant, just as I had mercy on you?'
His master was furious and handed him over to the guard responsible for punishing prisoners, until he had paid the whole debt.
'My heavenly Father will also do the same to you if you don't forgive your brother or sister from your heart.'"
Again, there are at least two reasons here why Christians must forgive each other:
* First, we must forgive because anything less is hypocritical.
We can't demand justice from others, when we, ourselves, haven't paid what we justly owe.
Think of what Paul says in Colossians 3:13: "forgive each other. As the Lord forgave you, so also forgive each other."
That's the basis of Christian forgiveness.
Jesus says that, when we refuse to do this, when we hold a grudge, or refuse to forgive someone, then we are doing exactly what the unforgiving servant is doing.
In the very moment of our forgiveness we are demanding justice from someone else.
How often have I, have you, demanded that other people act in a way that we ourselves can never act?
It's not that discipline isn't necessary, or that we don't need to deal with wrong.
The problem is the spirit in which we do it.
The minute we revert to the basis of justice we are following the law of retaliation, and the law of retaliation always has an escalating clause in it.
What Jesus is saying is that forgiveness is possible because we have been forgiven.
Because the vast and staggering debt against us has been wiped out by the grace and love of God, we have the capacity to forgive as well.
* The second reason we must forgive is because of the torment that not forgiving inflicts upon us.
A colleague writes: "A number of years ago I had a difficulty with another Christian.
This person had done and injustice to me, a very evil thing as I saw it.
It hurt me greatly.
But the trouble was, he was living about 3,000 miles from me.
If he had lived next door where I could have done something about it--thrown my garbage over his fence, or something like that--it would have helped.
But he was 3,000 miles away and didn't even know how I felt about him.
The bitterness I had didn't bother him in the least--but, oh, how it bothered me.
It ate at me constantly.
I couldn't forget it.
It was always recurring.
At every mention of his name I could feel the acid eating in my own heart until, fortunately, reading in the Scriptures I ran across certain verses that deal with this matter, and I realized that the problem was not with him but with me.
In grace, I was enabled to put it away and forgive him, to write to him and tell him so, and forget it.
Immediately there was peace brought again to my own heart.
Jesus says that if you do not do this, this torture will go on for as many years as you refuse to forgive.
It will never stop."
The thing that makes forgiveness possible is to remember how God deals with us.
Can't we forgive a paltry 100 coins when we have been forgiven 10,000 bags of gold?
And this is always our situation.
Therefore, if we hold a grudge, if we are harboring resentment, if we are angry at someone, if we refuse to speak to someone else...
...two things have happened:
1. We have reacted as an ungrateful wretch to the grace of God, just as the unforgiving servant did.
2. Second, we have assigned ourselves a bitter heart...the eating of the acid of resentment to our own hellish detriment.
That is why there will never be a healing of this world until there is a healing between our brothers and sisters, by the grace of God through faith in Christ.
Let us move and live in God's grace--extending to others what has been given so freely to us.
Let us pray:
Thank You, Lord Jesus, for dealing so honestly with us. We know You don't show us these things in order to leave us feeling condemned or guilty, but rather so that we can accept the riches of Your grace again and again, hearing the words of the Great King: "All is forgiven."
In the glory of that restored relationship, realizing that our vast debt has been wiped away by the blood of Christ, we can turn to our brother or sister and say, "I'll forget it," and live Lord, as You have lived toward us.
We pray that we will apply this to our lives.
In Jesus' name and for His sake we pray.
Amen.
