Title: What He Said About Forgiveness
Text: Matthew 18:21-35
Thesis: Forgiven people forgive.
Introduction
In his book, Lee: The Last Years, Charles Bracelen Flood reports that after the Civil War, Robert E. Lee visited a Kentucky lady who took him to the remains of a grand old tree in front of her house. There she bitterly cried that its limbs and trunk had been destroyed by Federal Artillery fire. She looked to Lee for a word condemning the North or at least sympathizing with her loss. After a brief silence, Lee said, "Cut it down, my dear Madam, and forget it." It is better to forgive the injustices of the past than to allow them to remain, let bitterness take root and poison the rest of our life.
It would be nice if forgiveness was as easy as cutting down an old tree in the front yard wouldn’t it… if you have lived at all you have experienced injustices that defy your best efforts at mercy and forgiveness.
We aren’t exactly wired for forgiveness. I read about a guy who works as an umpire in a summer recreational league in Boulder, Colorado. He was pulled over by a police officer for going too fast in the snow. He tried to talk to the police officer and reason his way out of a ticket. The police officer said if he didn't like the ticket, he could just go to court.
The next summer in the first game of the summer league, he was umping and the first batter up was the policeman. The officer and Dave recognized each other as the officer stepped into the batter's box. The officer asked Dave, "So, how'd the thing with the ticket go?" The ump looked at the officer and said, "You'd better swing at everything." We aren’t exactly wired for forgiveness.
In Genesis 4 we read a brief account of a descendant of Cain (remember Cain from Genesis 4, who murdered his brother Abel?) named Lamech who killed a man for wounding him and then said that he would seek revenge 77 times over against anyone who hurts him. That became known as the Law of Lamech. It's the idea that if anyone inflicts pain on me I will make them pay again and again and again.
Revenge takes many forms… some form of payback or vengeance or spite or redress or satisfaction or tit for tat or tooth for tooth or retribution or retaliation. According to Lamech’s Law, if you hurt him he will hurt you 77 times over so as to teach you a good lesson. We see it playing out every day in the news. In the Luke 17 reading Jesus said, “Even if a person wrongs you seven times a day and each time turns again and asks forgiveness, you must forgive.” Luke 17:4
If you think that is pretty demanding, in Matthew 18 Peter asked Jesus, “Lord, how many often should I forgive someone who sins against me? Seven times?” Jesus replied, “No, not seven times, but seventy times seven!” Matthew 18:21-22
Lamech vowed to avenge a wrong 77 times… Jesus taught we should forgive a wrong 490 times. My guess is that Peter was likely pretty stunned and like me, went off somewhere with a piece of scratch paper and a pencil to do the math, “let’s see, 70 X 7,” just to make sure he heard Jesus right.
So we have a question, what is forgiveness? Forgiveness is a decision, an act of the will. This is how it works… to forgive, you begin to let go of the desire for vengeance.
But in a more serious vein, some hurts are far more serious and painful, so we desire revenge. Forgiveness means giving that up because God is judge; we're not. It means we don't try to get even because that never works.
Illustration: This week we’ve witnessed forgiveness at work in the trial and conviction of Amber Guyger of the murder of Botham Jean when she mistakenly entered his apartment thinking it was her own and shot him while he ate a bowl of ice cream on his living room couch. A jury convicted her of murder and she was sentenced to 10 years in prison.
At the conclusion of the trial Botham Jean’s younger brother, Brandt, asked the judge if he could hug Amber Guyger… he told her, “I forgive you. I love you as a person. I do not wish you anything but what is best for you.”
In order to offer another person the gift of grace and forgiveness you have to see them as you see yourself… fellow human beings who are flawed and fallen people who desperately need the mercy and grace of God and their fellowmen.
But we are not always up to the task… and while we are all pretty much wide open and receptive to mercy and grace being extended to us we are sometimes reluctant to extending mercy and grace to others. And it is that reluctance that Jesus speaks to in the parable of the Unforgiving Debtor in Matthew 18:21-35.
Transition: We begin with the simple truth that God’s Kingdom is grounded in his grace.
I. God's kingdom is grounded in his grace
The Kingdom of Heaven can be compared to a king who decided to bring his accounts up to date with servants who had borrowed money from him. In the process one of his debtors owed him millions of dollars. He couldn’t pay, so his master ordered that he be sold along with his wife and children and everything he owned to pay the debt. But the man fell down and begged him, ‘Please be patient with me and I will pay it all.’ Then the master was filled with pity, and he released him and forgave his debt.” Matthew 18:23-26
In Jesus's stories, the characters often represent God and people; that's the case here. In this story the king represents God, and we're represented by the servant who owes 10,000 talents. A talent was a measure of wealth. Most historians believe that during Jesus' lifetime the entire wealth of the Roman Empire was somewhere between four to five thousand talents. In other words, this is an enormous, unthinkable number; it's like our national debt or maybe your mortgage.
Jesus' point is that because of our sin, we all owe God an unpayable moral and spiritual debt. Under the law, the rule was "We owe" therefore "We pay." God loves us so much, and because he knows there's no way we could ever get out of our moral and spiritual dilemma on our own, he canceled our debt when Jesus died on the cross. That's why the cross always has been and always will be at the heart of Christianity. It's the ultimate expression that God's kingdom is always grounded in his gracious forgiveness.
The logic of grace and forgiveness is that since God's kingdom is founded on it; it empowers those of us who claim to be part of Christ's kingdom to forgive those who are in debt to us. Forgiven people forgive because they've experienced the gracious forgiveness of God.
Transition: However, that's not the way it always works. Sometimes forgiveness never flows. Jesus spotlights the problem in the rest of the story.
II. When we fail to extend forgiveness to other we have never experienced God’s mercy and forgiveness ourselves
“When the man left the king, he went to a fellow servant who owed him a few thousand dollars. He grabbed him by the throat and demanded instant payment. His fellow servant begged for more time to repay but the creditor wouldn’t wait and had the debtor arrested and put in prison until the debt could be repaid in full.
When some of the other servants saw this, they were very upset and went to the king and told him what happened. Then the king called in the man he had forgiven and said, ‘You evil servant! I forgave you that tremendous debt because you pleaded with me. Shouldn’t you have mercy on your fellow servant, just as I had mercy on you? They the angry king sent the man to prison to be tortured until he had paid his entire debt. Matthew 18:28-34
The servant has received pure grace, and he owes his life, his freedom, his family, his possessions, and everything he has to the grace of the master. But the servant goes out and finds a man who owes him a debt of roughly $10,000; it's repayable. Unlike the king, the servant thinks, "I'm not going to make the same mistake as the silly old king. I'm not going to take the hit on this! This man who owes me is going pay what he owes!"
Transition: We think that what is good for the gander is not good for the goose… so to speak.
A. We have a tendency to think we can receive forgiveness from God but not give it to others.
The Journal of Adult Development says: 75 percent of people surveyed believe they have been forgiven by God for past sins, mistakes and wrong doing but only 52 percent say they have forgiven others. Even fewer, 43 percent, say they have sought forgiveness for a wrong they did to someone else.
Jesus doesn't call the idea that we think we can get forgiveness from God without giving forgiveness to others a bad idea, insufficient theology, or weak thinking; he calls it impossible.
Anne Lamott says: I went around saying for a long time that I am not one of the Christians who is heavily into forgiveness … that I am one of the other kind. But even though it was funny, and actually true, it started to be too painful to stay this way … In fact, not forgiving is like drinking rat poison and waiting for the rat to die, (i.e., slowly bleeding to death on the inside). Being unforgiving eats away at you inside!
B. Forgiveness isn't natural, and that's why it's essential to let God's grace take root in our hearts. Otherwise, when we get hurt, and we will be hurt, we'll get stuck in the emotional and spiritual bitterness, hatred, and revenge and that will ruin our lives. Jesus' knows that, and he drives it home.
Word gets through the royal court about the servant's bad behavior and eventually gets to the king. He calls the servant in and says, "You just don't get it, do you? You thought grace meant that I was a fuzzy-minded, incompetent old fool who would let you get away with whatever you want and then go and abuse whomever you want." The servant had made a big mistake. The king said, "I offered you a huge amount of grace and forgiveness, but you wouldn't live in it. You wanted to receive it for yourself and then selfishly deny it to others." Then the angry king sent the man to prison until he could pay his debt.
Jesus is essentially saying, “This is not how it works in God’s Kingdom!”
Jesus ends with this statement in verse 35: "This is how my heavenly Father will treat each of you unless you forgive your brother from your heart." Jesus isn't saying that if you fail to forgive you'll be thrown into a torture chamber forever.
In other words, when we cannot or will not forgive another person it is an indication that we have never experienced God’s mercy and forgiveness ourselves. When we finally own the enormity of our own guilt and the enormity of God’s mercy and forgiveness we can then extend that same largess of mercy and grace to others.
Conclusion
When Beth Moore and her husband, Keith, spent time in war-torn Angola to draw attention to tens of thousands of malnourished people, they were changed forever. "I learned something in one of the rural villages that will mark my teaching and response to the Word of God," Beth says. "As we stood there, trying to absorb the sights and smells of living death, our new friend, Isak Pretorius, said, 'One of the most frustrating things is that in villages where they received seed, they often eat the seed rather than planting it and bringing forth the harvest.' I couldn't get the statement out of my mind… Why do some people see the results of the Word and others don't?”
Beth continues: "Why have many of us read books on forgiving people, known the teachings were true and marked them up with highlighters, yet remain in our bitterness? Because we ate the seed instead of sowing it." On this day that means we know about mercy and forgiveness but we have yet to apply it… we have yet to experience it and extend it to others.
This morning my prayer is that we who have eaten the seed of God’s mercy and grace may sow it as well… having experienced it we now extend it to those who need our mercy and forgiveness.
