Matthew 18:21-35
The Best Reason to Forgive
At some point, every one of us has been hurt, sometimes quite deeply. Maybe somebody here today is hurting. The question is, will you be able to forgive and let go, to move forward with your life? Forgiveness is a choice. You don’t have to forgive, but when you don’t, you put yourself in bondage to your offender and you adversely affect your closeness to God.
Today Jesus tells a story to demonstrate our very best motivation to forgive. He has been teaching the disciples about how to hold each other accountable in Christian love. Then Peter asks a question about the minimum number of times one must forgive. Peter probably thinks he is being magnanimous in offering to forgive someone seven times, since most rabbis taught that three times were sufficient. But Jesus replies, “Not seven times, but 77!” (Or “70 times 7;” we’re unsure exactly how to interpret the Greek.) Jesus is not attempting to quantify forgiveness, but to say it’s uncountable. Then he tells a story to illustrate why. I want to focus on three truths from the story that speak to our need to forgive. First,
1. The debt others owe us is large.
Let’s not trivialize this. The servant was owed 100 silver coins, or in the Greek, 100 denarii. A denarius was about one day’s wage. So someone owed this fellow just over three months’ of work! That is more than pocket change! And it illustrates that we’re not talking about trivial matters here, like when someone jumps in front of us in line for the elevator, or somebody passes by without saying hello. We’re talking about bigger debts here. Maybe somebody assassinated your character. Maybe someone betrayed you or cheated on you or attacked you.
I want to share with you a story I often share with our Veterans. It’s a true story, with a tragic beginning. On May 11, 2002, two 20-year-old college students were coming home for summer break, when they had a head-on collision with Eric Smallridge, who was intoxicated from a night of partying. Smallridge lived. The college students did not. One of those students was Meagan Napier, and her mother, Renee, was a dedicated Christian believer who was understandably shaken to her core. She had a huge debt owed her. How could one ever replace a 20-year-old daughter with so much life before her? She would never marry; she would never bear Renee a grandchild, she would never go on to a successful career. A life was cut short because of one person’s stupid choice to drink and drive. I’ll tell you more of their story later.
This is but one example, but the truth is, we hurt people and people hurt us. And sometimes the hurt is severe. Yet, the truth is,
2. We hurt God much more than people hurt us.
And here lies the best reason to forgive. You see, you can forgive because you want inner peace, and that’s a good thing. You can forgive to try to find some meaning out of your loss; that’s where Renee Napier began. She wanted to bring some kind of good out of the untimely loss of her daughter. You can forgive so your body doesn’t suffer symptoms of unforgiveness, such as higher blood pressure, migraine headaches, ulcers, depression, and generally a shorter life span. God did not design your body to harbor resentment and bitterness.
Yet, the very best reason to forgive is because God has forgiven you. Jesus’ story points us to the wide disparity between offenses against us and our offense against a holy God. Consider the ridiculously crazy difference between the two debts. We’ve already looked at the 100 denarii that the servant sought for repayment. He was so incensed that he had the guy thrown into debtor’s prison.
But look at his own debt the king had forgiven earlier: it amounted to “ten thousand bags of gold” or “talents.” A talent was the highest unit of currency. It equaled about 6,000 denarii, or roughly 20 years of wages. So, 10,000 talents would represent about 200,000 years of work, or around $2.5 billion dollars in today’s figures. Jesus chose an amount larger than all the money in Israel at the time! If he were telling the story today, he might say “10 gazillion dollars!”
The point is, the amount is so large that it’s absolutely unpayable. It represents the enormous debt of sin that each of us has incurred before a holy God. You see, God is entirely without sin. So every one of our sins is extra dastardly when compared to God’s holiness. It is why King David, after being caught in adultery and murder, could say to God, “Against you, you only, have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight” (Psalms 51:4). Even though David recognized he had hurt others, those hurts paled in significance compared to how he had hurt God.
In Jesus’ story, when the king graciously decides to forgive this enormous debt, the servant goes out and throws someone into debtor’s prison for a measly $4,000 in today’s figures. $2.5 billion vs. $4,000, a disparity of 600,000 to 1. What is wrong with this picture?
Yes, we hurt each other, and sometimes quite badly. But compared to our indebtedness to God, these hurts are virtually nothing. Bible scholar Craig Keener comments, “The grace of God is so deep and unimaginable that it repeatedly bursts the bounds of Jesus' metaphor” (Craig Keener, “Matthew,” InterVarsity Press, 292). Timothy Keller writes, “God’s reckless grace is our greatest hope” (“The Prodigal God: Recovering the Heart of the Christian Faith.” New York: Penguin, 2008). xv).
It was this perspective of God’s great love that gave Renee Napier the inner strength to forgive Smallridge. Renee is a dedicated Christian. In news interviews, she comments, “I could hate Eric Smallridge forever. That’s not going to bring Meagan back.” When it comes to forgiveness, she says, “It doesn’t feel like the right thing to do. It doesn’t match what you’re feeling on the inside, but it is the right thing to do ... We live in a world where there is a lot of pain and heartache, and, you know, I want to promote love and forgiveness, and try to help break that cycle of hatred.” (See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qKwktLBj-lo)
Napier put her words into action. She petitioned the state of Florida to allow Smallridge to have day trips with her to speak together at local high school assemblies. Later, she appealed to his parole board, requesting an early release. Eventually, Smallridge was paroled, after serving 11 of his 22 years. Napier knows firsthand of God’s love and forgiveness. Her story was chosen by Christian songwriter Matthew West to turn it into a song called “Forgiveness.”
C.S. Lewis once said, “To be a Christian means to forgive the inexcusable because God has forgiven the inexcusable in you.”
Sometimes people wonder, “Why couldn’t God just pronounce forgiveness on us instead of having Jesus die for us on the cross?” Dr. Paul Copan speaks about this. He says, for every offense, even with forgiveness, someone has to pay. Forgiveness let’s someone off the hook, but someone still has to pay for the hurt. In Jesus’ story, the king absorbed the debt that could not be repaid. (NIV, Case for Christ Study Bible, eBook: Investigating the Evidence for Belief). And for us,
3. Jesus paid our debt.
Copan draws a parallel with a child who breaks a window and the parents end up paying for it. In our case, there is no way we can pay our sin debt. It is simply too large. One sin is one too many for heaven. As the old song says about Jesus, “He paid a debt He did not owe. I owed a debt I could not pay. I needed someone to wash my sins away.” Jesus absorbed our debt.
Christians should be the most grateful people on earth, because we have been forgiven much. And as the Lord’s prayer reminds us, we are to extend God’s grace to others. “Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who have trespassed against us” (Matthew 6:12). Or, as a four-year-old put it in her nighttime prayer: “And forgive us our trash baskets as we forgive those who put trash in our baskets.” (There’s a lot of truth to her translation!)
Let’s close with the sage advice of Ephesians 4:31-32: “Get rid of all bitterness, rage and anger, brawling and slander, along with every form of malice. Be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving each other, just as in Christ God forgave you.” Let us pray:
Lord, teach us to be humble and merciful. Remind us of the many ways in which you have offered, time and time again, your forgiving love to us. Heal our wounds and bind up our brokenness. And help us pass along that great gift forgiveness to others, relying on your help as we forgive those who hurt us. We want to grow in our gratefulness to you, to live lives full of grace. We pray this in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, amen.
