Forgive Us, As We Forgive

There is a joke or maybe it is a true story about a young preacher who was sent to a congregation not unlike our own. He got up one Sunday and he really preached a great, but challenging sermon. When he finished everyone in the congregation patted him on the back for his insightful, yet constructively critical words of inspiration. Seven days passed and he got back up in the pulpit. Pretty quickly some of the congregants looked around in surprise. Those who had been present the week before realized right away that the preacher was speaking the exact same words as the week before. This week when he shook hands with people after the service no one patted him on the back. When finally the church matriarch came out she wondered, “Why did you preach the same sermon two weeks in a row?” “Well,” he replied, “I figure I am going to keep on preaching the same sermon until you all actually live out the challenging words that Jesus was speaking through me.” We may feel the exact same way about Jesus in this section of Matthew.

The entire Eighteenth Chapter of Matthew’s Gospel account walks around the challenging topic of forgiveness. Making my way through I excitedly read of a shepherd fawning after his lone lost sheep, but then I wonder about God leaving the ninety-nine good ones to go in search of the lost one. The middle of the chapter appears even more difficult. As Evan rightly pointed out last week when I see someone struggling with sin I am not so much in need of calling him out, as I am in inviting him home, but this welcome is hard—requiring us to get out of our comfort zones! Two messages back-to-back on forgiveness would be quite enough, but then Jesus goes even further than that young preacher with today’s lesson.

Peter asks a well-meaning question about how much, how often, or how fully—depending on the translation and understanding of the number seven—one ought to forgive. This calls to mind the old saying, “Fool me once shame on me, fool me twice shame on you,” but what about fooling me or sinning against me seven times? Jesus says to Peter not just seven times, but seventy-seven times, or not only completely forgiving, but beyond complete forgiveness is required. If the story stopped there I would think of Jesus as challenging if a little repetitive, but still on the whole understandable. What comes next though appears to be an off-putting story depicting God as one of the worst parable characters in all of the New Testament.

Oddly enough though, this depiction of God as the king in the parable of the unforgiving servant taps into a difficult thread that runs through the Gospel according to Matthew. This theme is so obvious that if it were a snake it would have bit me it was so close to my daily life. Running through Matthew’s telling of the Good News is the theme that “God forgives us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.” It is so obvious because we say it daily or at least weekly when we pray the words that Jesus taught us. When Matthew introduces the Lord’s Prayer and gives his commentary on it in the sixth chapter he points out, “For if you forgive others their trespasses, your Heavenly Father will also forgive you; but if you do not forgive others, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.” Taken together with the parable of the unforgiving servant here in Matthew chapter eighteen, this principle that God forgives only when I forgive creates an image of Our Heavenly Father that causes me not to love the Divine, but to fear Him. The logical next step is to say that God only loves me when I am acting in a certain way. Thus, if I am not careful God’s love becomes conditional in a hurry, but is that really it?

As I walk through the parable of the unforgiving servant—one that may have become too familiar for me to hear the ridiculousness of it all—there may be more to the story than a law of conditional forgiveness. Matthew gives me no choice but to connect the king with God in verse thirty-five, but maybe something more exists beneath the surface. Let us take a deeper look.

This king demands an absolutely absurd amount money. Sometime in the past I tried to convert this into modern currency. While it is more than several lifetimes worth of money, in our day and age of the ultra-rich-one-percenters these kinds of stats get drowned out by Bill Gate’s, Oprah Winfrey’s, or Warren Buffet’s net worth. To those who initially heard this story, the numbers stated—ten thousand and talents—were too big to fathom. Early manuscripts of this story shrunk the number because of this. Stated simply to the servant this number was not big, but infinite. While the concept of an infinitely large number can be hard to understand, what may be more difficult is comprehending someone who lends out that much money in the first place.

Sometimes when we take a metaphor, an analogy, or in this case a parable to its furthest extent things do not always make sense. Still the king—remember this is God in this story—empowered this servant to get into such trouble by continuing to allow the slave to run up debts that he would never be able to retire them. Would you like to think of God as a modern day pay-day-lender who will run up someone’s debt? What kind of God allows his beloved creation to get into such indebtedness? Well, actually our God! As tough as this is for me to accept, God allows me to make so many mistakes that I will never be able to make amends for all of those failings. So maybe the king here is verging on being gracious—he did not strike the servant dead the first time he missed a payment. However, before you begin thinking of this king in too rosy a light, observe what he does in response to permitting such a charge to be owed.

On top of enabling a catastrophically large amount to be due this king—who remember Jesus compares to God—orders this servant to be sold along with his wife, his children, and all his possessions to make amends. WHAT? Let alone for a moment that Jewish Law prohibited slavery and even in the Gentile world of the day selling whole families rarely if ever happened. Jesus said in this moment that God who lovingly created all things would actually go through with selling off an entire household to make up for this vast financial obligation. Except, if we do not think of this transaction as monetary and instead understand the wife, the children, and the possessions as collaterally damaged by sin is this not what happens in our own lives? Our own Prayer Book describes sin as the distortion of relationships not only with God, but with other beloveds in our lives. Still, I struggle with this depiction of God.

Perhaps the straw that breaks the camel’s back in this story comes at the end of it. The king forgave the servant. Then, in the servant’s elated nature he fell back upon some bad behavior. He sought recompense of a debt owed him—in perhaps a greedy way. The tattle-tales around him went and told their king. Now this, this is where I struggle to understand God. The king forgets his momentary kindness of relinquishing a big bill, goes beyond selling the servant along with his family, and what does he do? He has the unforgiving servant tortured. TORTURED! This is how Jesus depicts God? This may affect my ability to say, “Forgive us our trespasses/sins as we forgive those who trespass/sin against us” or to use the very fitting Methodist language, “Forgive us our debts as we have forgiven our debtors.” So one very straightforward way of interpreting this parable is fear God for he is a severe master who will act with excessiveness if we do not do practice forgiveness.

Now, wait a minute. This is the danger of literally interpreting the Good News. We can all to easily turn it around, so that instead of being filled with grace this story is about law that requires us to earn our way into the love of God.

If we go back though we will see that the king in this story was not waiting to forgive this servant until he forgave the one who owed him. No, he forgave him the infinitely huge debt first. This servant owed more than he could make in many lifetimes, but the king said it is forgiven. The challenge here is to Peter’s original question of how often we ought to forgive others—and not to is God waiting to forgive us. OF COURSE, GOD IS NOT WAITING! God forgives us like he forgave this servant—infinitely! The challenge that Jesus puts forth to us is to live in such a way that we are changed. To live like we get what Jesus is saying, so that the young preacher won’t have to say the same words over again.

We are changed because we have been forgiven something that we could never pay back. We are freed from that burden of making up to God what we properly owe for all those times we missed the mark. If I truly let this sink into my soul won’t it forever change my life? This story is only about grace. God forgives me and now I am invited to forgive anyone and everyone else. In the long run this is the only thing that leads to life, for what truly tortured that servant was not the king but his own inability to forgive others. This is what will bring us down as well. Who is it that I need to forgive? Who do you need to forgive? We do not have to wait on God to forgive us first, for God has always forgiven us infinitely more than we can ever ask or imagine. Now Jesus calls us to forgive as we have been forgiven, not seven times but forgiveness times infinity!