18th Sunday after Pentecost 9/14/08 Text: Matthew 18:21-35 Title: Living Forgiven

09/14/08

Text: Matthew 18:21-35

Title: Living Forgiven

     All of our Bible readings for this morning are about forgiveness.  The Old Testament reading shows us what happens when you do not believe you are forgiven.  The brothers of Joseph, not being sure they have been forgiven, are living in fear of him, some 17 years after Joseph had forgiven them.  Our second reading is also about forgiveness even though the word is not directly there.  For to not pass judgment on another is to forgive them for what they are doing.  It is obvious that our Gospel lesson is about forgiveness, for we see it taking place.  Unfortunately the servant that was forgiven did not take his being forgiven to heart as we read in the text.

Now the topic of forgiveness might be rather boring to those who believe they know all that they need to know about forgiveness.  For others the topic of forgiveness is one that they look forward to, so that they can learn more about forgiveness. 

Our text this morning looks like it is a canceling of our debts.  Sort of like a religious bookkeeping exercise; the balancing of the scales, forgiveness outweighing sin. That’s nice but not very exciting. God cancels our debt and then we get on with our life.  The problem with that type of thinking is that those that think that way too many times feel like they can just continue to pile up on their side of the ledger, for God will eventually balance it out on Judgment day. 

I would put forth this morning that this not what this Gospel reading is about.  It is not the balancing of one’s debt.  It is about the radical, incredible forgiveness of God, a forgiveness that can transform you and make you not only a forgiven but a forgiving person. Now that is exciting for how many of you would like to be a more forgiving person?

     Peter comes to Jesus with the question, “How often do I have to forgive someone who’s hurt me?” It’s a natural question and Peter suggests what seems like a generous answer; seven times. Now that in itself is pretty generous, for the Jewish Law said that a person had to only forgive three times and then they could let the person have it.  I am afraid that too many times we have a hard time forgiving three times much less 7 times.  We generally like to, even though it speaks of fraud, stick to the old saying “Fool me once shame on you.  Fool me twice shame on me.”  

But as we read we see that Jesus goes way beyond Peter’s 7 times.  He says not seven times but 70 times 7. Forgiving 490 times instead of seven, an impossible task we say.  Is Jesus then 70 times more forgiving than Peter?  It does not, for Jesus in telling them they are to forgive 70 times 7 has referred back to a reference in the Torah that they all would know; being good Jews.  It is found in Genesis chapter 4 verses 23 and 24 where we hear Lamech say to his wives. “Adah (pronounced AY duh) and Zilah,(pronounced ZIL uh)  hear my voice; you wives of Lamech, (pronounced LAY mek) listen to what I say: “I have killed a man for wounding me, a young man for striking me.  If Cain is avenged sevenfold, truly Lamech seventy-sevenfold.”   In other words, unlimited revenge! If you step on my toe I’ll burn your house down and massacre your family. And primitive or not, we hear about that kind of thing on the news all the time, don’t we?
     As time went on the Old Testament law tried to control that and put limits on retribution: “An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.” People sometimes think of that as a harsh law, but it sets limits. If you knock my tooth out I’m not allowed to kill you. The only revenge I can take is to knock your tooth out.
     It’s a civilized law that seems natural and fair to many people then and to us today. I mean who hear today has not thought that that child molester or rapist should have the same thing done to them.  Dante in writing about his version of hell set it up that way.  Whatever evil you did in your life was done to you over and over again for eternity.  If you murdered someone, you were murdered in the same way, brought back to life and murdered again.  This would go on for eternity.  That type of punishment suits our sense of fair play and if people believed that is the way it worked with God the world would be a better place.  Unfortunately civilizations that have believed that way were and are just as corrupt.

That is the way the world, we think.  But you see God does not think the way we do.  I thank God for that.   Jesus goes beyond what seems natural. He doesn’t just put a limit on revenge but gets rid of it. Jesus turns vengeance on its head; not forgiveness just seven times but 70 times 7. Instead of unlimited payback there is to be unlimited forgiveness!
     How is that possible? Revenge seems all too much like common sense. Why even talk about something that seems so much out of synch with the way we feel and the way the world, seems to work today? 

     Those listening to what Jesus said felt the same way, so Jesus in answering their question tells them a story. The point of this story is not a balancing of the books.  It is that a person’s forgiveness of those who have wronged you is to be inspired by, and flow from, God’s forgiveness of you.

That’s where we’ve got to start. God’s forgiveness is unlimited. God is so far from taking revenge for human sin that he let the revenge be taken upon himself, taking the consequences for sin upon himself as he died upon the cross. We are the ones who have sinned against God, but God accepts the penalty. We are forgiven in an unimaginably generous, undeserved way, and are then called to live as a forgiven people.
     Jesus’ parable about the king and the two servants illustrates this in a negative way. It shows what happens if God’s tremendously generous forgiveness isn’t internalized, if it’s treated just as a matter of bookkeeping and doesn’t change the life of the person who receives it.
     The king starts with the servant who owes him “ten thousand talents” - a fantastic amount of money. It misses the point to try to translate that into so many billions of dollars because it’s beyond any real amount of money - as when we say “zillions of dollars.” It’s beyond anything that the servant could actually pay, and to picture him as being called to pay that much is kind of a joke. But the real joke is that he imagines that he could pay it. Just give him a little more time. “I know I owe the gross national product, but I can save that out of my lunch money next week!”
     That’s where the human problem begins; for we think we can pay it back.  We don’t realize the seriousness of sin. It’s a far more weighty matter than breaking a rule or offending against the dignity of some powerful ruler. Sin separates us from God, and being separated from God means that we are separated from the source of our life; the source of our very being.

     The first servant in the story has his unimaginable huge debt forgiven, but maybe it’s significant that we’re not told that he even thanked his lord. He doesn’t internalize the forgiveness he received.  He doesn’t allow it to change the way he sees the world or the way he acts. He probably backed out of the king’s presence thinking “What a sucker!” For we see that he goes out and finds a fellow servant who owes him a few hundred dollars. Apparently he doesn’t just run into him but searches him out. He grabs him by the throat, demands payment, and refuses to listen to his pleas for a little more time. No forgiveness here.
     But the king hears about it. God is unimaginably generous, but you don’t mess with God. If you think you can play God for a sucker, if you just want a formal pardon so that you can go on living as you always have, refusing to live as a person who’s been forgiven, you’re out of luck. That attitude means that you have refused to be reconciled to God, in spite of what God has done for you. Don’t mess with the one who knows your heart and mind.

     We all live in an atmosphere of hurt feelings, suspicions and desires to get even. Whole nations exchange vengeance with one another over things that happened years or generations ago. Husbands and wives can’t forgive one another, and children harbor resentment of parents. Sometimes there are understandable reasons for hard feelings and sometimes not, but any consideration of those reasons gets swallowed up in the desire to keep on resenting and to hurt the person who hurt me. Think of the slogans we hear; “Don’t get mad, get even.” and “It’s payback time.”

     Our lives are as polluted as the air in big cities.  But God has begun a cleanup of our spiritual environment, bringing us into a purified atmosphere of forgiveness. It smells strange at first, just the way the fresh air of the countryside seems strange to a person whose been living in a smoggy city. They feel like they have to get back into the city to get there toxic fix. 

     But breathe in deeply this clean air. Hear Jesus tell you that you are forgiven, not because of anything you have done, but for Christ’s sake God has forgiven you. All of your guilty secrets, all of the faults you have tried to rationalize away, all of the sins that you don’t even realize you have committed, things done that you shouldn’t have done and things you should have done that you didn’t, are forgiven. You are free of them. Just accept that wonderful, amazing forgiveness of God, for it means that you have been reconciled with God.
     Breathe in that forgiveness and let it cleanse your system. It’s a life-giving and life-changing message. As Martin Luther put it, “Where we have the forgiveness of sins we have life and salvation.” And since we are people who live by God’s forgiveness and acceptance, we can be forgiving people.
     That can be hard. There is no point in pretending that forgiving is easy or just comes naturally to us, for it is not always easy and it does not come naturally to us. It may seem impossible sometimes. But through Christ God has brought each of you into a new spiritual environment in which it can happen because each of you have first been forgiven. We can all now pray, “Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us” the way Jesus meant us to pray it, for it is a given; we the forgiven, forgive other forgiven people.  Amen.