Pentecost 16A
September 17, 2023
Matthew 18:21-35
INTRODUCTION
In last week’s readings, we dealt with how to hold one another accountable in a faithful community, dealing with the inevitable situation in which one person wrongs another. Today’s Gospel reading is right on the tails of that conversation. Peter, wondering just how far to push this, asks, “Ok, but how many times do we have to do this? How many times should we forgive? As many as seven?” And Jesus will open up the depth of God’s forgiveness, with his famous formula: “not seven, but seventy-seven times.” In other words: don’t ever stop.
This depth of forgiveness is nothing new to people of faith. Our first reading shows this. Today we hear the stunning ending of the Joseph saga. You know this story – Joseph’s brothers, the sons of Jacob, are jealous of him and his technicolored coat, and they sell him off into slavery and pretend he is dead. He has a rough go of it in Egypt, but eventually ends up Pharaoh’s second-in-command, having saved Egypt and surrounding areas from a seven-year famine. Now his brothers have come crawling to him for help, not knowing it is Joseph – until he reveals himself. Assuming there is no way Joseph will ever forgive them (and really, would you?), they try one more time to fool him, but Joseph won’t have it. Instead, he forgives them, telling them that what they intended for evil, God used for good. Would that we could all forgive like Joseph!
We have all been in a situation of either needing to ask or offer forgiveness. Neither position is an easy one. As you listen today, think about your own experiences with forgiveness, and consider what light today’s lessons might shed on the situation. Let’s listen.
[READ]
Grace to you and peace from God our Father and our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.
If last week’s address of conflict management was difficult, today we go even deeper: into the questions around forgiveness. When we did our Lenten series on tough questions last spring, the week we looked at forgiveness was one of the best attended. As I was preparing it, I realized I had more questions than answers about forgiveness, so I just started jotting them down. For example:
• Are there times when offering forgiveness is too dangerous?
• Is it possible to forgive if the offender hasn’t shown regret?
• Does forgiving send the message that what was done was acceptable?
• Does forgiving someone mean I have to relinquish my position of power?
• Does forgiveness have to include reconciliation and restoration of the relationship?
• Perhaps most painful of all: will forgiving open me up to being hurt once again?
Most of my questions, you can see, are about the difficulty of offering forgiveness, rather than receiving it. As we can see from the parable Jesus tells, offering forgiveness does seem to be the trickier bit. Let’s look at the different parts of this story, and dig in bit by bit.
First, Peter’s question that starts the conversation. Actually, it doesn’t start the conversation: Jesus has already been talking about how to deal with conflict in the Church community. That’s what we heard last week, remember? When someone wrongs you, talk to them about it. If they won’t listen, include a neutral third party. If they still won’t listen, bring it to the church. All of that is a lot of emotional work! So Peter wants to know, just how many times are we expected to go through all this trouble? To his credit, he actually overshoots. The Jewish teaching was and is that you should apologize to someone you’ve hurt three times. That’s a lot! And, Peter is more than doubling that! But Jesus blows it out of the water again (typical Jesus!). “Not seven,” he says, “but seventy-seven times,” or in some translations, “seventy times seven.” The point here is not the number. The point is: “there is no stopping point. Forgive indefinitely.” After all, is there a point at which you think God should stop forgiving you? “Well, the first 490 times was fine, but now it’s been 491, so….” Of course not. We want infinite forgiveness, and so that, Jesus says, is what you, as children of God, should extend.
Then he goes on to explain, using this bombshell of a parable. Now, the first scene of this parable I like, quite a lot! A worker is called to the king, who has noticed this guy owes 10,000 talents. In modern money, this amounts to nearly three and a half billion dollars! It is intentionally hyperbolic. He might as well have said, “He owed a million gazillion dollars!” The point is, he owed more than anyone could ever hope to repay, an incalculable amount, a debt beyond measure. Rather than being sold off with his family and possessions, the worker begs for mercy, more time to repay the debt he could never repay. And out of pity, the king forgives him this astronomical amount, just wipes the slate clean.
Wow! Wouldn’t that be a nice, feel-good parable if it ended right there? But no, Jesus won’t let us off so easy. This man, who has every reason to be grateful and gracious in proportion to the mercy he has received, who can now literally afford to be generous, heads right off to find a guy who owes him 100 denarii. In modern money, this is like, a few hundred bucks. Not a small amount, but an amount that could reasonably be paid back in a few months’ time. When the guy asks for mercy (just like the first worker had done, even in the same words!), there is none to be had. The first worker throws the second worker in prison until he can repay. We, the listener, are rightly outraged. What a jerk!
Well, the other workers thought so, too. Off they go to tell the king, who calls the first worker back, reinstates the debt, and vows to torture him until he can repay – which, as we know, will be never. So, this greedy ingrate will be tortured for eternity. Then, if you weren’t already feeling warm fuzzies about how this ends, Jesus hits it home: “So my heavenly Father will also do to every one of you, if you do not forgive your brother or sister from your heart.” The good news, friends! Whew!
It would be easy, especially with that last line, to take this parable as prescriptive: if you do this, then that will happen, so, watch out! But parables are seldom so straightforward. Rather, parables are like a room you enter, and take a look around. They are descriptive of a reality. Jesus prefaces this parable by saying, “The kingdom of heaven can be compared” to this: a world in which there is mercy enough to erase incalculable debt. And, when people have received this immense gift, they are inspired and empowered to be merciful toward their neighbors. This is the image of God we can see here, and we are bearers of this image. We receive forgiveness of debts, as we forgive our debtors. (Forgive us our sins, as we forgive those who sin against us.) This is what God envisions for the world.
And yet too often, we reject that vision. We withhold the forgiveness we have received in abundance. We are greedy. We choose pride over relationship. And when we do that? Not only does it grieve God, but it is torture to us. It eats away at us, at our hearts. It burdens us, traps us, chaining us forever to the very source of our pain, and we cannot find the abundant life we all crave. I knew an old woman once who told me something her estranged son had done many years before, and she said flatly, “And I will never forgive him for that.” And all I could think was, “What a sad life to live” – a life that knows not the joy of releasing the chain that binds you to pain. This woman would give up her relationships with her own son in order to cling to her poison.
That is not what God wants for us. God wants us to inhabit a world in which grace and mercy (both divine and human) are plentiful. But living into a world of such grace and mercy is not so easy for humans. We need lots of practice to be forgiving. We may even need to forgive the same thing 77 times – innumerable times! We need to work at making forgiveness a regular practice, until it does come more naturally to us, until it becomes a quality of mind and heart, a way of life – not just something we do, but who we are: we are givers and receivers of mercy. We are children of God, living by God’s grace.
It is possible. Humans are creatures of habit. We brush our teeth at night, even though we are dead tired, and wash our hands after using the restroom, even if we’re in a hurry. We established these habits early on, through repetition, and they are powerful. The habit of mercy can be so powerful, too. It’s a matter of practicing mercy 77 times (and more), practicing it every chance we get. Perhaps we practice first on insignificant things and then working up to bigger ones, but we keep on practicing – until we truly are bearers of the image of our gracious and merciful God.
Let us pray… God of mercy, even though we are receivers of your immeasurable grace, we struggle at times to extend that grace and mercy to others. Soften our hearts, and help us forgive as we have been forgiven – 70 times 7 times and beyond. In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Full service HERE.
No comments:
Post a Comment