Sermon: "What To Do with Your Forgiveness," September 13, 2020
“The Unforgiving Servant,” Jesus MAFA, Cameroon, 1973
Matthew 18:21-35
Sermon: “What to do with Your Forgiveness”
Preacher: Rev. Ryan Slifka
“Then,” begins today’s passage. “Then Peter came to Jesus and asked him, “Lord, if another member of the church sins against me, how often should I forgive? As many as seven times?” And Jesus replied, “Not seven times, but, I tell you, seventy-seven times.”
Today’s passage begins with Jesus’ teachings on forgiveness. Peter—his right hand disciple—knows forgiveness is important. But it’s gotta have a limit. “Okay… I get forgiving once, twice, three, maybe up to seven times,” he says. “But when does the gravy train run out of grace?” Jesus here says seventy-seven, but the point isn’t the exact number, to set a higher limit on forgiveness. It’s a figure of speech. The point is—as one scholar puts it—that “the kind of forgiveness called for is beyond all calculation.”[i] The point is to keep forgiving. And to quit counting. Regardless of the nature or number of offenses against you.
Forgiveness is so good, Jesus says, you just gotta keep doing it. So forgive like it’s going out of style.
Forgiveness is good, Jesus says. And yet, right after this teaching Jesus also warns that there are consequences to un-forgiveness. He tells a parable to show that an inability to forgive has some pretty dire consequences.
There’s a King, Jesus says. One who wanted to collect everything owed to him. One of his servants was given the contract for collecting ten thousand talents in taxes.[ii] Which is an insane amount—a single talent being 15 year’s wage for a labourer. King Herod himself, the King of the Jews at the time, only raked in about 900 talents. So it’s an insane amount of money. A whole empire’s GDP.
We don’t know why it is, whether incompetence, fraud, bad economy, but this guy just can’t pay up. So the king locks him away, and threatens to sell him and his family as slaves and his possessions. So the guy does what any of us would do. He begs for mercy, asks to be released and promises to pay up.
The surprising thing, though, is that the King just lets him go. No need to repay. Just freedom. Just forgiveness. If you know anything about ancient kings you know they just don’t do stuff like that. It’s kind and charitable to the max. But this is a real bizarre, unexpected thing to do.
No sooner is this guy scott-free, though, that the shock of this gracious act wears off. Next thing we know he’s knocking on some guys door, grabbing him by the throat insisting the guy pays his debt. This debt though, is only 100 denarii, like four months wages for a single worker. The guy begs for mercy, promising to pay back the debt—just as the servant did with the King. But instead of forgiving, or accepting an installment plan, he has him tossed in jail. It’s nothing, compared to the debt the king forgave him. But nope—no forgiveness. You’re in the slammer.
The irony of this guy’s lack of mercy, of course, isn’t lost on us. And it isn’t lost on his fellow servants either. They report him straight to the king. And so the king has him hauled in, and he lays into him. “You wicked slave!” he says. “I forgave you all that debt because you begged me to. First chance you had to do the same and you blew it.”
And so the king hands him over, it says, to be TORTURED, until his debt’s finally paid. You wouldn’t forgive as you were forgiven. And so here are the consequences.
And just in case we listeners didn’t quite get the point, Jesus states for us the obvious. As the King did in the parable, he says, “So my heavenly Father will also do to everyone one of you, if you do not forgive your brother or sister from your heart.”
According to Jesus forgiveness is good. So good it’s worth doing at least seventy-seven times. But he also says that an unwillingness to forgive will land us where the unforgiving servant ends up in this parable. And that place ain’t pretty.
This isn’t exactly one of Jesus’ most seeker-friendly teachings, granted. But it’s also more than simply a threat aimed at getting us to be more forgiving. It gets at the fundamental nature and necessity of forgiveness according to Christian teaching. Let me explain.
First, we have the starting point in all Christian teaching: the infinite mercy and forgiveness of God.
Jesus teaches his disciples in response to Peter’s question an infinite forgiveness. And then in the parable he tells we learn this servant with this impossible, unpayable debt, is let off the hook. And it’s for absolutely no reason, other than the gracious decision on behalf of the King. The servant does nothing to deserve it. And he really does nothing to earn it—doesn’t have to work it off, doesn’t have to even promise he won’t get into debt again. All he does is receive it.
According to this parable, this is how God is when it comes to us. Now, this may or may not surprise you, but we’re all sinners. There’s no human being on this planet who has ever lived a blameless life free of brokenness. This world has piled up a debt on us that none of us began, and none of us can atone for or ever eradicate through sheer will. Many of us have come to know this through the hard knock school of experience. Like the Canadian folk singer Sarah Harmer says, “Why do they call it the past when nothing’s passed?”[iii] The past—whether our individual transgressions, or the hurts and pains of history—are ultimately beyond our repairing.
But the central good news of Christianity is that, in fact, history has been healed. And the past has indeed passed. In the cross of Christ, God has thrown his own body into the brutal machinery of history. All that accumulated debt we could never crawl out from under’s been shaken free for good. As was the case with the servant, there’s nothing we had to do, or could do to earn it. Don’t have to work it off, don’t have to promise never to go into debt again, cuz it’s been paid, written off by the King of Creation. Out of nothing but her own infinite love and mercy.
The Good News always begins with God’s infinite forgiveness. Meaning that you are, in fact, forgiven. Any sin you’ve committed. Anything you’ve done or have failed to do. No matter how many times—whether seven or seventy-seven. Any way you’ve fallen short, any way you haven’t lived up, you are forgiven. Full stop. The account is at zero. No conditions or fine print. You are forgiven.
Like this parable, the Good News always begins with the infinite, unconditional mercy, and forgiveness of God. You’ll have noticed, though, that the parable doesn’t quite end there, though. There’s a bit of an irony here in the fact that Jesus teaches his disciples to forgive seventy-seven times, and that the King in the parable doesn’t even make it past once. The second time he warms up the torture chamber. Kind of a “do as I say, not as I do” kinda thing.
It seems like a bit of a contradiction. But it’s absolutely consistent with how forgiveness works. The late great Anglican theologian, Robert Capon frames it in terms of death and resurrection:
“None of our debts,” Capon says. “None of our sins, none of our trespasses, none of our errors—will ever be an obstacle to the grace that raises the dead. […] But if we refuse to die—and in particular, if we insist on binding others’ debts upon them in the name of our own right to life—we will, by not letting grace have its way through us, cut ourselves off from the joy of ever knowing grace in us.”[iv]
Forgiveness is infinite. In Jesus Christ we are forgiven. It’s absolutely true. No conditions. It’s where it always begins again and again and again. But in this parable, Jesus teaches us that in order to be received, forgiveness must also be given away. It’s like a stream that goes stagnant unless it flows outward. It’s like getting a new bike on Christmas morning, sit in the corner and gather dust. Where the servant drops the ball isn’t in just committing another offense. It’s in the fact that he doesn’t pass the same gift he’s been given on. Grace comes to us on its way to someone else.[v]
We’ll never actually know the saving joy of forgiveness, unless we let it truly sink in. We can never be free of our sins until we’re able to forgive as Christ forgives. Forgiveness ends only when and where we let it.
So, I realize this is the second sermon on forgiveness in two weeks. In my defense, I didn’t choose the texts that came up in the schedule. But I don’t think the theme is accidental, either. Not only because it’s the central message of Christianity. But because the only way out of the pain and hurt in the lives we live. And the only chance our hurt and hurting world’s got in mending, is in forgiveness.
So remember—you are forgiven. May you be given the grace to go and do likewise.
AMEN.
[i] M. Eugene Boring, “The Gospel of Matthew,” in The New Interpreter’s Bible Commentary, vol. 8, ed. Leander Keck (Nashville: Abingdon, 1995), 380.
[ii] The reading below mostly draws on the contextual reading of this parable. See Bernard Brandon Scott, Hear Then the Parable: A Commentary on the Parables of Jesus (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1999), 267-280.
[iii] Sarah Harmer, “Around this Corner,” You Were Here. Universal Music, 2000.
[iv] Robert Farrar Capon, Paradox, Outrage, and Vindication in the Parables of Jesus (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002), 199.
[v] Bill Easum, I believe quoted somewhere in Bruce Sanguin, The Emerging Church: A Model for Change & a Map for Renewal (Copperhouse, 2008).