IS JESUS SERIOUS ABOUT FORGIVING?

(Preached on Sunday, September 11, 2005)

Then Peter came and said to him, “Lord, if another member of the church sins against me, how often should I forgive? As many as seven times?”  Jesus said to him, “Not seven times, but, I tell you, seventy-seven times.”

-Matthew 18:21-22

 

We just don’t get it!

Peter comes to Jesus, “Lord, how often should I forgive my sister or brother who sins against me?  Seven times?”

Sounds reasonable.  Even merciful.  It exceeds the teachings of the rabbis and the Jewish law which states: “If a brother sins against you, forgive him.  If he sins against you a second time, forgive him.  If he sins against you a third time, forgive him.  If he sins against you a fourth time, don’t forgive him.”  Three times, for most of us, even that sounds extremely generous and merciful.  So, Peter, surely expected praise, an A+, for his suggestion that you take the rabbi’s teaching, double it, and add one for good measure.  Seven times, Jesus, isn’t that a wonderful thought?  Aren’t you proud of me?

 

But no, Jesus didn’t pat him on the back and praise him for his wonderful generosity.

No, he pointed out that Peter still didn’t get it.

Not seven times, but seventy seven times (or seventy times seven times.)  Either way, the point is not to keep track.

Because God doesn’t keep track.  What Jesus keeps trying to get through to us is the notion that God has stopped keeping track — God’s forgiveness is limitless and so should be ours.

 

We just don’t get it.

We are more like the character Donald Sullivan, known to everybody in his home town as Sully.

He was a character in the film a few years ago called “Nobody’s Fool.”

Sully was a blue-collar type, about sixty years old, who spent his whole life in the same town.  When his parents died, he inherited their house.

He never moved in.  Instead he left it alone.

It was the house where his father beat him as a child.  So he left it alone, and every day he drives by to watch it slowly fall apart.

One day, he takes one of his friends, a builder, through that broken-down house.  The builder says, “Sully, you could have saved this place.  You could have fixed it up a little bit, rented it out.  You could have sold it and put the money in your own pocket.  Instead you stick it to your old man.  What’s it been — thirty, thirty-five years?  You still keeping score?  Well, here’s the good news: You won.”

Meanwhile the house is falling down.

 

We understand Sully.

We understand that accounts need to be settled.

I mean, did Jesus really mean that we are to forgive the child molester-murderer?  Including the heartbroken, grief-stricken parents of the dead child?  Did Jesus really mean the Jews are to forgive the Nazis?  Or the Palestinians the Israelis?  Or the Israelis the suicide bombers?  The Tutsis supposed to forgive the Hutus in Rwanda?  Or the wife, her abusive husband?  Is Jesus really serious about forgiveness?

Today is September 11^th, the fourth anniversary of the terrorist attack on New York and Washington, D. C. 

It is not a good weekend for many, many people, including my family.  There are losses suffered that will never be recovered and is forgiveness really the answer?

 

We just don’t get it!

Actually, Jesus understands that we don’t get it.  He continues to teach Peter and the disciples with this outlandish story about outrageous mercy offered and then rescinded.  This is truly a TALL TALE!  Just look at the size of the debt the king forgives the servant: 10,000 talents.  A talent was roughly equal to 15 years’ wages of a common laborer.  Assuming our national minimum wage of $5.15 per hour, ten thousand talents would be roughly equal to two billion dollars. 

Now our federal government throws around figures in the national budget in the billions of dollars all the time, but for most of us, we understand two billion dollars to be an impossibly huge sum of money.  What must that servant have been doing to run up that sort of debt?

Amazingly, the king takes pity on him and forgives him the entire debt.  That action alone convinces us this is a tall tale.

After all, we cannot imagine anyone, at all, forgiving such a large debt.

But that is not the end of the story.  After receiving this amazing mercy and grace, the servant goes out and bumps into another servant who owes him some money: one hundred denarii.  Using the same exchange rates as before, this sum would be approximately $4,120 — not exactly chicken feed, but when compared to the debt the servant just had forgiven, 2 billion dollars, not even worth mentioning.

Even so, this servant who has just experienced tremendous grace, shows this other fellow, absolutely none.

Now that we understand, after all, a debt is a debt.

We may not like it, but we understand it.

Again, not the end of the story.  Some other servants of the king witnessed all this and they didn’t like it for sure, so they relayed the story back to the king of what the servant did.

This angered the king so much that he called the first servant back for an audience, gave him a tongue-lashing, and withdrew his earlier debt-relief, ordering the servant thrown into prison and to be tortured.

Now that, we understand.  Let’s be honest: when we first encountered the servant, we didn’t want to see him and his family go to jail, even for such a huge debt and we were glad for the king’s grace.

But after the way he treated the other servant, we were really glad to see him “get his.”  The ungrateful little wretch!

 

We understand what goes around comes around.

We understand the squaring of accounts.

We understand just punishment for wrongdoing.

We understand revenge.

We really don’t understand forgiveness, especially the suggestion that it be unlimited.

William Willimon writes: “The human animal is not supposed to be good at forgiveness.  Forgiveness is not some innate, natural human emotion.  Vengeance, retribution, violence, these are natural human qualities.  It is natural for the human animal to defend itself, to snarl and crouch into a defensive position when attacked, to howl when wronged, to bite back when bitten.  Forgiveness is not natural.  It is not a universal human virtue.”

 

Jesus understands that.

That is why he tells the story.

He is not suggesting God is like the king in the story.  No, for at the end of the story, there is really no difference between the angry king who punished, the angry servant who wouldn’t forgive, and us.

If this is the way God works, then none of us is any better off with this god than we are with any vengeful, sin-tallying, lightening-bolt wielding, disease dishing god.

But notice, Jesus didn’t say, “The kingdom of God is like,” but rather, “The kingdom of God may be compared with.”

This is a parable, not an allegory.

The king is not to be equated with God.

Jesus is showing us that in the final equation, we never will get it — for we can never stop keeping track, doing the math — we can never let it go and truly forgive.