September 13, 2020
Hope Lutheran Church
Matthew 18:21-35
Forgiveness: From a Dead End to a Forever Future
Friends, may grace and peace be yours in abundance in the knowledge of God and Christ Jesus our Lord.
A father is helping his young daughter with her homework. He picks up the paper she’s working on and sees a math function. “(70 x 7) – 34 … Gee, that seems like a pretty tough math problem for a second grader.”
His daughter replies, “No, Dad, this isn’t for school. This is the number of times I still need to forgive my big, dumb brother.” *
In our gospel reading this morning, Jesus has a conversation with his disciples about forgiveness. Peter wants to know how many times he should forgive an offender. The standard answer from rabbis was three times. When Peter queries Jesus, he lavishly ups that number. “Do I need to forgive my neighbor seven times?”
Peter probably thinks he’s showing a tremendous generosity by suggesting such an extravagant amount of mercy. But Jesus’ answer blows Peter out of the water. “No, not just seven times, Peter. You need to forgive seventy-seven times.” Some versions read “seventy times seven,” which would be 490 times.
Either way, it’s a huge number. Jesus’ response completely eclipses anything Peter could have imagined. Can you picture carrying around a small notebook? In it, you’d write the name of every person you knew. Next to their name, you’d place marks for each time you’d forgiven them.
No, no you can’t imagine it! Nobody would do that! That’s the point of Jesus’ answer. He states such an impossibly high number you’d simply lose track. That’s his point. “Peter, just keep on forgiving. That’s what I want you to do. Don’t keep score. Forgive without limit, Peter.”
For Jesus, forgiveness is an essential quality of the divine reflection. He tells Peter a story of outrageous forgiveness. A certain royal slave has racked up an unbelievable debt: 10,000 talents.
A talent was a weight measure. It was equivalent to 130 pounds. 130 pounds of silver. This week, the price of silver was $26.97 per ounce. So, 10,000 talents of silver would be worth $560,976,000.00 in today’s money. This is an outrageous sum of money. In his story, Jesus has purposely chosen a number so impossibly large, the man could never repay the amount.
And nevertheless, the king shows mercy on him. He flat-out forgives the debt! It’s a crazy story! What king would forgive over a half billion dollars of debt? No one, that’s who!
That’s the whole point of the story. This king’s lavish forgiveness of debt reflects how generously God forgives our debts. We owe God a debt we can’t possibly repay! We cannot make whole what we have broken.
And yet, God shows such tremendous mercy to us! Through the life, death and resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ, we have been restored to a perfect, whole relationship with God our creator.
Jesus’ parable is disturbing in two ways. First of all, there’s something unsettling that this guy who had racked up such a huge debt got off, Scott free. There’s something out of sync with our notion of justice. This man had done something seriously wrong! If he is absolved, what motivation is there for anyone else to follow the law? Our notion of justice and accountability are in place for a reason. They maintain good order in society and protect the welfare of all.
But this story isn’t primarily about our worldly justice. Jesus tells this parable to convey something very central about divine justice. And there is a cost, a great cost. It took a great deal for that king to forgive that monumental debt. It was the king, not the man, who absorbed the loss.
God’s grace doesn’t come without cost. That cost has been met through our Lord Jesus Christ. The healing of our broken relationship with the divine is not, and cannot, be ventured by us. This breach cannot be mended on our side of the equation.
No, it can only be restored through divine power. And the power of the Divine is Love. “For God so loved the world, he gave his only Son.” It is God who steps into the void. It’s the divine Son of God who crosses into our realm of hurt and sorrow and brokenness.
Our shattered relationship with our creator was at a standstill. It was divine initiative that finally moved the impasse. God is always the prime mover. It was God who brought all things into being, and it was God who shaped the vehicle to restore our ruptured relationship. When Jesus came to live with us and as one of us, that division was crossed from God to us. And then through his death, Jesus took into himself all that separates us from God, all that corrupts our true nature. He took all of that into himself, and he took it with him to the grave. By taking it in, he took it to its end.
But the power of divine love was not nearly quenched. Divine love absorbed all, paid for all, and overcame all. Through that love we have been restored. Our debt has been paid in full.
And now for the second disturbing thing in Jesus’ parable. For as outrageous as the king’s forgiveness of the huge debt was, this second thing is even more shocking.
The man who received this great mercy was not in the least bit transformed. Nothing within him changed. When he left the royal court, no glimmer of the mercy he received reflected from his soul. His interior was like a black hole. It sucked everything in, and there was nothing coming out.
His soul did not reflect in any way a shred the mercy he had received. When he sees someone who owes him a trivial amount, he deals that man a crushing blow.
This is the real shocker of Jesus’ story. And this is what he’s trying to teach Peter. Having received the greatest forgiveness possible from our divine creator, Jesus calls us to reflect the light of that divine mercy into the world. The extravagant, unlimited love and mercy we’ve received can emit from us. It pours forth, and it doesn’t keep score.
So, let’s consider forgiveness. First, a few things it is NOT. The godly forgiver is not a doormat. By forgiving over and over, we are not staying in the victim role. No, forgiving is extremely active. It’s a decision. We choose to act from our power. It’s a power that doesn’t begin with us. It comes from God. We channel the power of God’s mercy.
This gift of mercy doesn’t only free the one we forgive; it also frees us. When we don’t forgive, when we hang on to resentments and past offences, then we remain mired in that hurt. Each resentment and hurt is like a stone that we’ve put into a sack. Wherever we go, we carry that sack with us. The more resentments we hold onto, the heavier and more unwieldy the load becomes.
Every once in a while, we’ll stop and put the sack down. We’ll peer inside at the stones. We’ll take one of them out and turn it over in our hands. We’ll fondle it and recall the event that hurt so badly. We remember the injustice. We shake our fist at a cruel world rigged against us. And then something amazing happens. While we’re holding that stone, it grows in size! Our enduring resentment feeds it and it becomes even greater.
They hold a power over us, those resentments. And they keep us looking backwards. The weight of that stone acts like an anchor. It keeps us moored to that event, that point in history. We can’t move forward. Wherever we go, whatever situation we find ourselves, the existence of that resentment flavors our present reality. We’re jaded by it.
The only way we can be free, the only way we can stop being victimized by the past offense is to let go of it. We have to drop the stone.
That letting go calls for a sacrifice from us. We relinquish the right for payback, to point the angry finger of blame. It calls us to accept the consequences of what happened.
Author Dag Hammarskjold put it this way in his profound book Markings:
“Forgiveness breaks the chain of causality because he who ‘forgives’ you—out of love—takes upon himself the consequences of what you have done. Forgiveness, therefore, always entails a sacrifice.
“There is a price you must pay for your own liberation. Since it has come through another’s sacrifice, you in turn must be willing to liberate in the same way, in spite of the consequences to yourself. You absorb them, if doing so truly flows out of love.”
Sometimes you’ll hear the phrase “forgive and forget.” But forgiveness doesn’t erase what happened. I always remember that the resurrected Christ bore the scars of his crucifixion. It’s not like he rose from the dead and any mark from what happened to him was erased, as if it never happened. In his victory, he bore the scars. They remained as a mark of what happened. The events of his murder were not forgotten. They were forgiven, but not forgotten.
This tells us something about forgiveness. Forgiveness doesn’t take us back to the way things were before the offense happened. That lies in the past.
What it does, rather, is to find a new way forward. Forgiveness forges a new future.
Forgiveness is inherently full of hope. Instead of being chained to the past, we look to a new day, a day where we’ve laid aside the festering resentment, a day free from the souring effects of anger and victimization. Forgiveness releases us from all of that.
Forgiveness comes with a sunrise. It looks to the east, to a new day, a day full of grace. Forgiveness is the morning where the pains of yesterday no longer chain us to the past. Our backs are towards the sunset of yesterday’s hurts. Our faces shine with the light of grace. This is the essence of hope. There is a new day. Relationships can be reborn from the ashes of sorrow. And the song of the first bird will awaken us with its sweet beauty.
* Cartoon by Arie Van De Graff
