490 Matthew 18:21-35

Forgiveness is at the very heart of the Christian community. It is the core of a personality at peace with itself and others. It is an absolute must in relationships. No marriage can last without it. There’s hardly a day that goes by where we are not faced with the need to forgive someone for something. No church can thrive without it. Take the Church of the Holy Rude in , at the gateway of the Scottish highland. Founded in the 12th century, the church was overtaken by the religious turmoil of the 17th century. An extreme Presbyterian , , would not accept his more moderate colleague. The result of the feud was a brick wall built into the middle of the sanctuary. So in 1656 the church became two separate churches, east and west. They worshipped like this for 280 years until, in 1936, they tore the wall down and reunited. You can still see the scars where the bricks finally came down in 1936.1 The scars on that church floor are symbolic of scars across the face of the church of Christ. Denominations splitting, churches dividing, congregations choosing sides and digging their heels into the ground. Those scars are also indicative of many human hearts racked by bitterness, refusing to let go of past hurts, holding on to the sweet, but deadly poison of an unforgiving spirit. Jesus told a parable one day about forgiveness. It was prompted by a question from Peter, Lord, how many times shall I forgive my brother when he sins against me? Up to seven times?” Peter’s question followed a teaching of Jesus about sin in the church, and the need to forgive those who sin. There was no question the church would be a place of sinners. Not only would sinners need forgiveness from God, but they would also need it from one another. But how many times do you forgive someone? How many times do you take them back? Peter understood the rabbinic tradition of the day, as did Jesus, which said to forgive a man three times. You are not obligated to forgive him a fourth time. So when Peter expands that teaching, moving it from three acts of forgiveness to seven, he thinks he’s being very magnanimous. He knows that Jesus is a merciful man so he expects Jesus to be quite pleased with his liberal interpretation of the tradition. But Jesus trumps Peter’s increased mercy with unqualified mercy. He says, “I tell you, not seven times, but 77 times.” Some translations use the phrase “7 times 70" which turns out to be 490. Jesus is not merely trying to increase Peter’s sense of mercy. He is not providing a quantitative answer. He’s giving a qualitative answer. Jesus is saying, in essence, “Peter, you forgive as many times as necessary. There is no final number for which you are to forgive. You forgive without limit.” Perhaps Jesus saw a look of puzzlement on Peter’s face. A bemused look that said, “You’ve got to be kidding. Isn’t that taking forgiveness a bit too far?” So Jesus tells a parable about forgiveness.

The Parable There was a powerful king who had a servant who owed him 10,000 talents. Well, right there you know this had to be a fanciful story, because 10,000 was an astronomical amount of money. It’s hard to say exactly how much it was, for a talent was a measure of weight. Usually it translated into about 150 days labor. So 10,000 talents was equivalent to about 1,500,000 days of labor. It was more than the tax revenue of the kingdoms that comprised the entire Palestinian territory. Nevertheless, this servant is brought before the king and told he owed 10,000. Of course, he recognizes that he can’t pay it. So he begs for mercy. He makes the ridiculous claim that with patience he will be able to pay every talent back. The king knew better. He would never be able to pay back the money, but the king had mercy on him. He didn’t reduce the debt. He didn’t say, “Well, pay me $100 a week for the next 25 years.” or “Serve in my army and pledge your son to serve in my army.” No, he flat out cancelled the debt. He edited the records so that the servant didn’t owe a penny. It would’ve been a great story if it had just ended there. The point was well made. God forgives our debt that we could never pay on our own. But Jesus extends the parable, because the parable is not just about God’s forgiving man, but man’s call to forgive man. The forgiven servant goes out and sees someone who owes him 100 denarii, which is about one day’s wage. Remember the math? 1.5 million days labor versus one day’s labor. Not even close. And yet the forgiven servant demands to be paid back. Evidently, he hadn’t learned any kind of lesson from the king. The man who owes one day’s labor begs for patience and mercy. But the king’s servant refused and had the man thrown into prison. Unfortunately, for this rascal his tirade was caught on videotape. Someone sold it to CNN and by 9:00 that evening Larry King was running a special on the whole, sorry spectacle. Chris Matthews was interviewing the poor prisoner on Hardball, and Bill O’Reilly named it his outrage of the week. The king, who watched all this stuff, threw the previously forgiven servant into prison, where he was tortured until he could pay back all he owed. And of course, we know how long it would take him to pay back all he owed. Forever and ever, Amen.

The Call for Forgiveness The clear teaching of the parable is a call for Christians to forgive. The reason we are to forgive is because God has already forgiven us a debt we could not pay. The Bible says, “The wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Rom 6:23). Our sin has separated us from God, resulting in spiritual death. We cannot pay enough to reunite ourselves with God. The great chasm that has been created by our sin cannot be overcome with a lifetime of good deeds. We are helpless to pay out debt. And so God provides us a gift of grace. He takes our sins upon himself. He pays our debt. He wipes the slate clean. Then he calls us to forgive others. He doesn’t ask us to die on the cross for their sins. But he does tell us to do our part to forgive them when they do us wrong. Now it can be something as simple as forgiving the stranger who bumps into you at the mall. At this level, forgiving someone means dismissing it. The value of this can be readily seen. If you retaliate, it’s likely to just escalate. If you bump them back it can lead to a full-fledged fight. Then people can go to prison. And yet this is really the easiest level at which to forgive. It’s easier to forgive the stranger. There’s no investment of relationship. There’s no understanding that you are to bound to live in relationship together. You can forget the incident and go on with your life, and everyone will be better off. The call to forgive is a mandatory command, not merely a recommended alternative, of the Christian lifestyle. When Jesus taught his disciples the Lord’s Prayer he said, “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.” In the Sermon on the Mount he taught, “Blessed are the merciful for they shall receive mercy.” The brother of Jesus, James, in his letters to the churches wrote, “For judgment is without mercy to one who has shown no mercy” (James 2:13). We can’t really call ourselves a follower of Jesus if we do not forgive those who sin against us. One provocative commentator wrote, “This teaching of Jesus makes clear that there are many people in the church who call themselves a Christian who will spend an eternity in hell because they can’t or won’t forgive their brother or sister.” Does that seem harsh? I would offer for your serious consideration that it is no harsher than this parable which concluded with the words referring to the tortured prisoner, “This is how my heavenly Father will treat each of you unless you forgive your brother from your heart” (Mt 18:35). But isn’t that a works righteousness concept? Doesn’t that mean that our salvation is dependent on our actions, instead of Christ’s mercy? Well, I don’t deny it’s a tricky theological question. But Jesus will have none of it. He won’t sit in his ivory tower and debate with us about whether our actions will determine our eternal destiny. He’s forthright and practical and plain. If you hold on to the sins of others and do not forgive them, do not expect to be forgiven for your much greater sins against God. The call to forgive is a command for the Christian.

The Grace of Forgiveness Now it’s one thing to forgive a stranger who bumps into you at the mall. But if we wade into the water at a deeper level, we’ll feel the difficulty of forgiveness increasing. This is the level where the closest, most intimate relationships reside. Husband and wife. Mother and daughter. Father and son. Close friends for years. The deeper the love and level of intimacy the greater the possibility of hurt and the greater need for forgiveness. The investment of love and energy in the relationship create a higher level of vulnerability. Exposure to the sun can create a beautiful tan, but it can also lead to a dangerous skin cancer. There is also the deeper levels of forgiveness called for when faced with more treacherous acts of sin. It’s one thing to forgive someone for bumping me in the mall. There’s another for someone who kills our parent, or rapes our daughter, or abuses our grandchild in the park. The closer the intimacy or the greater the loss, the harder forgiveness becomes. So when pain occurs in the home.... When adultery breaks through the front window.... When a step-parent sexually abuses a step-daughter.... When a child disillusions a parent by adopting a lifestyle of drugs and profligate living.... When large and small sins accumulate over the course of years with no forgiveness. .... A great chasm is dug. The gift of forgiveness is needed more than ever, but we don’t know how. The gap seems so large. The relationship seems beyond repair. God perhaps can forgive, but isn’t God expecting too much of us, in calling us to forgive some things? There are times, when only a miracle will do. We need God’s gracious intervention enabling us to forgive in His power when we are unable on our own. Perhaps you remember the autobiography written by Corrie Ten Boom, entitled The Hiding Place. In this powerful book, Corrie Ten Boom, who has been imprisoned by the Nazi regime for her hiding and protection of Jews, tells of her experience of preaching at a church service on the very subject of forgiveness after the war was over and she had been released from prison camp. As she left the pulpit and came down to the center of the sanctuary, she noticed a man coming toward her with his hand extended and a bright smile on his face. She recognized him as the chief guard in the concentration camp where she and her sister had been incarcerated and where her sister had died. The guard’s face was beaming that night after the church service. "Oh, Fraulein," he said, "how grateful I am for your powerful message. To think that Jesus washed my sins away." Corrie Ten Boom found herself paralyzed as the guard thrust his hand out toward hers. She could not raise her hand from her side. She writes, "Even as the vengeful thoughts boiled through me, I saw the sin of them. . . . and yet I could do nothing about it. I could not feel even the slightest spark of love or charity. And so I breathed this silent prayer. ‘Jesus, I cannot forgive him, please give me your forgiveness.’" And with that prayer she was able to lift her hand from her side and touched the hand of the man who had persecuted her. "From my shoulder," she writes, "along my arm and through my hand passed a current from me to him . . . and in that moment I discovered that it is not on our forgiveness any more than on our goodness that the world’s healing depends, the world’s healing depends upon God. When our Lord tells us to love our enemies, he gives us, along with the command to do it, the love itself.” 2 Here is what I wish to say to you today. Forgiveness -- at its deepest level -- is not an act of will; it is a function of divine grace. You cannot make yourself forgive anyone, but you can make the intellectual connection between your own dependence on God’s acceptance of you and all your brokenness and inadequacies, and your reaction to those who have injured you—even deeply, terribly injured you. And if today you are at a point at which you simply cannot forgive, I do know one thing you can do. You can pray that the time will come when you can forgive. 3 I remember Golda Maier’s poignant confession, "I can forgive the Arabs for killing my son, but I cannot forgive the Arabs for teaching my son to kill Arabs." Which is to say, some things cannot be done by simple decision. We’re not talking about being bumped at the mall anymore. We will have to wait on many things, the big things. We must open ourselves to receive from God that which we find humanly impossible to accomplish on our own. And if we can finally receive the gift of being able to forgive those who have done us serious injury – a spouse who has betrayed us, perhaps, a parent who abused, a careless driver who killed – we will have followed the difficult teaching of our Lord. To forgive is not to deny the pain or the wrongness of an act. To forgive is not to excuse that which is unjust or cruel. To forgive means this: to make a conscious choice to be unbound by evil. When someone does an injury to us, the first injury they do is their fault but if we hold on to a feeling of vengeance and hatred in our own hearts, then that person does a second injury, and the fault for that is ours. I don’t think this kind of deep level forgiveness happens overnight. We don’t just go to church one Sunday, recite the Lord’s Prayer, “Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.” and go home whole. Sometimes it takes years for God’s grace to have healing effect on us. C.S. Lewis, the outstanding British English professor and Christian apologist once wrote, “Last week while at prayer, I suddenly discovered that I had finally forgiven someone that I had been trying to forgive for over thirty years. I have no explanation, my friends, for this kind of thing except to turn to the words of the Apostle Paul, written over two thousand years ago: ‘All of this is from God.’”

The Power of Forgiveness When we forgive we begin to enact the Kingdom of God in the world. The prayerful petition, “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven,” takes root in our lives and in the lives of others. The person we forgive is released from bondage of their sin, and perhaps just as importantly, we are released from the bondage of our anger and bitterness. Author Frederick Buechner warns us about the dangers of reliving past hurts when he says, "Of the Seven Deadly Sins, anger is possibly the most fun. To lick your wounds, to smack your lips over grievances long past, to roll your tongue over the prospect of bitter confrontations still to come, to savor to the last toothsome morsel both the pain you are given and the pain you are giving back—in many ways it is a feast fit for a king. The chief drawback is that what you are wolfing down is yourself. The skeleton at the feast is you." Betty was a living illustration of Buechner's words. Betty was filled with anger at her husband because of an affair he carried on with his secretary. The worst part of it was how she found out. The morning after her husband was honored by the Rotary Club for outstanding service to the community, Betty was looking through her husband's desk at home to find an old photograph. Imagine her shock to find motel receipts in a file drawer from a local motel. When she confronted her husband, he confirmed the affair and rubbed salt in the wound by telling her that it had gone on for 15 years. Betty's husband was not the man that the Rotary Club nor she thought he was. Two weeks after Betty confronted him, her husband had a sudden heart attack and died! Betty was left with a broken heart filled with rage and resentment. Betty told this story to a speaker at a Christian conference several years after the death of her husband when she challenged his point in a sermon that forgetting is often the outgrowth of true forgiveness. Betty used to be a whistler she told him. She was known for her whistling. But she hadn't whistled since she discovered her husband's affair and she would never whistle again. She asked the speaker how to forgive someone who had died? He suggested that she write a letter to her husband and be honest with him about the hurt he had caused her. He told her to write down the unedited rage in her soul. Betty thought this was the craziest idea she'd ever heard! He thought he had offended her because she didn't show up at the conference for the next two days. The day before the closing session, Betty came into the conference with a big stack of paper. "Betty, you look tired." "You're darn right I'm tired! I haven't slept in two days. Here's the letter and I'm going to read it to you—all thirty-five pages of it! They went to the cemetery and on a bench near her husband's grave, she read the letter out loud. The catharsis in her soul was punctuated by tears, screams and long moments of silence when she couldn't speak. When she finished, they burned the letter and watched her rage disintegrate into ashes. They both prayed and Betty asked God to help her forgive and forget. And do you know those prayers were answered. How do we know? Well, on the last day of the conference, out in the congregation, there stood Betty among everyone singing the closing hymn, Amazing Grace. Betty wasn't singing, she was whistling! That's the power of forgiveness.

Conclusion

What is most important message Jesus has for a world filled with vengeance, bitterness, and violence? I believe it is the message of forgiveness. I’m sure there are people here today who need to receive the gift of forgiveness as well as offer it. Perhaps you’ve been hurt by someone you know or love. Perhaps someone in the church has hurt you, caused you pain or created pain for someone in your family. What they did was wrong and you’ve been wounded. Perhaps you and your spouse are at odds with one another. You can’t hardly talk about any important matter without fighting. There’s a simmering spirit of anger in your heart, and its beginning to wear away the joy you once had. The kingdom of God offers a better, more holistic way to live. It’s based on the ethic of forgiveness. You may say, “But pastor, you don’t understand what they did to me.” I probably don’t, but God does. If you can’t forgive today, I commend this prayer to you: “God help me to forgive this person.” Perhaps you don’t even want to forgive the one who has hurt you. You don’t want God’s help to forgive, because you just don’t want to forgive. In that case, I encourage you to pray this prayer, “God create in me a desire to forgive.” And if you can’t request even the desire to forgive, simply say, “Lord, I confess I am unable to forgive. Work a miracle in my life.” And God will work. He will begin where you are and move you toward the kingdom of God that he has prepared for you. May God grant to each of us the grace to allow the seed of forgiveness to take root in our hearts, and may God’s love, healing, and reconciling power be the cornerstones of the world we begin to build from this day forward. Amen.

1 I found this story in a sermon by William Willimon in Pulpit Resource, Vol. 36, No. 3, July, August, September 2008, “Meditation on a Scottish Church.”

2 Corrie Ten Boom, The Hiding Place, [New York: Bantam Books, 1971; p. 238].

3 Garrett Keizer, Christian Century, 31 July 2002; p. 23.