A Community That Embodies Forgiveness

Matthew 18:15-35, Psalm 32:1-2, 4-5, 10-11

Peter came and said to him, “Lord, if my brother or sister 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.”

So as we are now back from our shared worship at Nativity and we’re back to our experiment with the Narrative Lectionary. We’re taking the year, from Labor Day to Pentecost, to read through the narrative of Scripture as a coherent whole – last fall, the whole Old Testament story from Genesis through the Exodus to the kings to the prophets to the Exile and beyond, and then around Christmas we began the story of Jesus using the gospel according to Matthew. We began around Christmas with the stories of Jesus’ birth, then his baptism, then his ministry of teaching.

Then last Sunday, we read that Jesus began to teach his disciples how the story would end, in cross and resurrection. How the disciples did not understand and did not want to understand anything about the cross, even when on the mountain of Transfiguration they saw something of the resurrection. And so now, during the season of Lent, we will read more of the teaching of Jesus that focuses, more and more as Good Friday comes closer, on demonstrating what the cross and resurrection are all about.

And so today, we read, Jesus told a parable about a rich and powerful man, a king if you will, reviewing and settling his accounts. Someone is brought to him who owes him 10,000 talents – we would say something like 10 million dollars. An inconceivably large sum of money. And of course the debtor doesn’t have 10 million dollars sitting around. Who does?

The law is clear – take what the debtor has, foreclose on his house, throw him and his family out into the street, or (in those days) worse, his life as he knows it is over. Please, the man begs the king. Please, give me a little time, I will pay you back. But everybody knows he’s not going to come up with 10 million dollars in a couple of weeks. I mean, what else can he say? 

And then, as Jesus tells the story, the king changes his mind. The king feels compassion for this man and his family, about to be thrown out into the street, and says, OK, forget about the 10 million dollars. Not because the king believes the guy is going to come up with 10 million dollars next week – he doesn’t. The king doesn’t want to be the person who throws somebody else’s family out into the street over money, and so he cancels the debt. It has nothing to do with what the debtor has done or said, or is likely to do or say. It has everything to do with the king. The king wants to be compassionate.

Now, needless to say, in the real world this is not what rich and powerful people do. Once the word gets out that you’ve invested 10 million dollars and don’t care whether you get it back, your net worth is going to drop faster than you can say Elon Musk. But somehow, inexplicably, this rich and powerful man has decided he no longer cares to insist on his own money and power. And not a moment too soon for the man who owed 10 million dollars. But what will this man now do? What will he do with this reprieve?

Well, Jesus continues his story, whatever the king may have done, this man still continues to believe in money and power. When someone else pleaded for mercy on a much smaller debt, this man showed no mercy. His neighbors found this shocking, and when news got back to the king, he told his debtor – Look, I had a change of heart, but if you don’t want to have a change of heart too, if you want to keep playing the game where everyone is strictly held to repay all their debts, that’s fine. Have it your way. That 10 million dollars is due immediately. Oh, you don’t have it. Well, that’s just too bad.

This story resonates because we all, all of us, have done wrong to other people. Wrongs that we don’t know how to even begin to repair or repay. And, we all have had wrong done to us by other people. It seems inevitable when people are in proximity to one another, we wound one another and we are wounded by one another. It’s called marriage. It’s called family. It’s called a congregation. It’s called a classroom or a workplace. It’s called a neighborhood. Even when we mean well. We hurt other people and other people hurt us. And somehow we have to find a way to keep living together.

On the one hand, the hurt that we experience, the hurt that has been done to us, can feel raw and painful. Our needs matter, our dignity matters, our integrity matters, and when the people in our lives – especially when the people closest to us – don’t consider our needs, don’t treat us with respect, take us for granted, we feel that intensely. That we of course do the same to the people around us can be excused, since of course we mean well, we don’t intend to hurt the people we love, no big deal, right? But forgiving those who have hurt us is much more difficult.

Of course, we know, abstractly, that a world where everybody has to pay for their own sins leaves everyone in poverty. As the old saying goes, “An eye for an eye ends up making everyone blind.” But that doesn’t mean that harms done to us don’t matter, that we should be doormats, “thank you sir, may I have another,” seven times seventy times. The wrongs that are done to us, the wrongs that are done to people we love, we want these wrongs to be made right.

But here’s the thing – I don’t think the practice of forgiveness makes grace cheap or makes light of the real wrongs that have been done and are still being done in this world. I think the practice of forgiveness is the condition without which nothing will ever be made right. As long as we are caught up in the game of enforcing all debts and obligations to the letter, under threat of being tossed out into the street or worse, we will always be afraid of admitting that we might be the ones at fault, that we might be the ones who need to do the work of repair, that we might be stuck with a 10 million dollar bill that is far beyond our ability to pay. It is only when we know that we are forgiven, that we are loved and valued unconditionally, it is only when we know that God has given up the business of accounting for our debts that we can find the courage and the freedom to confess our sin, that we can be vulnerable enough to admit that maybe there are things we need to work on.

And what makes it all possible is God’s decision in Christ to become vulnerable for us. This is why the teaching of Jesus about forgiveness in the life of the church, about forgiveness in our personal relationships, about forgiveness in our relationship with God, is part of his teaching his disciples about the cross, and about resurrection. In Christ God experiences the ultimate vulnerability of humiliation and death, and does so forgiving his executioners, and then rises again to call together those who had denied him and abandoned him. God is not afraid to forgive, not 77 times but so many times that even God loses count, because for God it’s not about counting. God has died to the business of counting debts and transgressions and sins, and the sooner we can die to that business as well, the sooner a new kind of human connection with God and one another can be raised up.

Living into the charity and love and forgiveness and compassion of Christian community is therefore part of what Lent is about. We try to practice forgiveness here in this community, not just because we have been commanded to forgive one another and even our enemies, but because we are discovering just how much God forgives us, just how much we need forgiveness, just how much we need to let go of the business of counting debts and obligations and trespasses, just how much more human and alive and connected we are when we can have enough faith in what God has done for us to do the same things God does for one another. For when even two or three come together in the love of God, the cross is there, Easter is there, God is there.