Romans 14.1-12; Matthew 18.21-35
“If someone sins against me, how often should I forgive?” Behind Peter’s question at the start of today’s gospel reading is a debate as old as the Bible and as fresh as our own experience. “How often should I forgive?” Behind that question, you maybe sense another question lingering in the background: ‘How can I forgive?’
The Lord’s Prayer, the Our Father, the prayer Jesus gave as a model for our own prayer includes the petition, “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.” In that prayer, we not only ask for forgiveness, but we also ask to be people of forgiveness. Forgiveness received is forgiveness passed along. So much so, that right after teaching the Lord’s Prayer, Jesus adds a clause and provision. “If you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you; but if you do not forgive others, neither will your heavenly Father forgive your trespasses.” Jesus is clear. Un-forgiveness is dangerous. If we deny forgiveness to others, God will deny forgiveness to us. Only how often should I forgive?
The scale and scope of forgiveness in God, and of forgiveness received being forgiveness passed on, is the theme of Jesus’ parable in answer to Peter’s most practical question about forgiveness. Yet suppose someone does the same thing over and over again and shows no sign of change. Isn’t there a limit? The must be a limit.
Peter suggests seven times. That seems like a reasonable balance between mercy and personal limits. Jesus has taught us to forgive. Fair enough. But no one wants to be a doormat or pushover. There is, to be sure, genuine virtue in Peter’s question. He has learned from Jesus; he is seeking to be a person of forgiveness. But there is a fundamental; flaw in his question: a notion that forgiveness can be quantified or is limited. Seven times? Jesus’ answer corrects Peter’s math. Not seven times but seventy-seven times.
Jesus’ use of the number 77 can’t be random. He is echoing a story in the book of Genesis about a man named Lamech, a descendant of Cain. Early in Genesis, Cain murders his brother Abel. Lamech not only inherits his ancestor Cain’s murderous impulse, he also has an appetite for revenge.
At one point, Lamech boasts to his wives that, out of a hunger for revenge, he killed a man who had merely wounded him. What unfolds next reads like a scene from a gangster movie right on the pages of the Bible. Lamech issues a mob-boss-style order that if anyone crosses him, he will pay that person back 77 times over. Speaking of himself in the third person he says, “Truly Lamech is avenged seventy-seven-fold.”
Now in the Bible, seven is a number that signifies completeness: the seven days of creation, the seven gifts of the Spirit. But Lamech wants something beyond completeness. He wants excess and revenge seventy-seven-fold. Jesus, by calling for forgiveness 77 times, overturns Lamech’s desire for payback. Jesus calls his followers to show the same excess in forgiveness that Lamech sought in revenge. Forgiveness is infinite. Seventy-seven times is not about tracking offenses on a tally counter then making plans for payback as offense 76 approaches. Because if you’ve been counting all along and preparing for what to do after the 77th time, you actually haven’t been forgiving, just postponing revenge.
“If someone sins against me, how often should I forgive?” Jesus answers Peter’s question about the extent of forgiveness by telling a parable about the scope of forgiveness. Two servants: one is in debt to the king to the tune of 10,000 talents; another owes his friend and fellow servant 100 denarii.
Now 10,000 talents is an unimaginably vast sum of money, the sort of debt that would cause alarm in a small nation, an amount impossible to imagine as personal debt. One talent was worth fifteen years’ salary, a third of your working life. 10,000 talents? You can do the math. In comparison, 100 denarii is about three months’ salary for an average worker.
Facing accountability and ruin, the servant with a nation-sized debt makes a plea that is nothing short of absurd. “Have patience with me, and I will pay you everything.” A payment plan?! At $100 a month there is literally not enough time in the world to pay that back. Yet the servant gets infinitely more than he asks. He asks for mercy and a chance to repay. He receives total remission and forgiveness, a forgiveness that as complete and excessive as his debt. The king, rather than holding the servant to account, clears his account. “The lord of that servant released him and forgave him the debt.”
Only you know that debt like that never really disappears. Someone must cover it. On a practical level, if a friend owes you $100 and you forgive her, you suffer a loss; you are $100 poorer because of your forgiveness. If a family member borrows your car, totals it through reckless driving, and can’t cover the cost to replace it, you might say, ‘I forgive you.’ But that means you then bear the cost either for a new car or paying Uber fares for months to come. Forgiveness costs something. If you’re robbed of your reputation, if someone does something to you that alters your present or your future, hurts you in word or action, there is a cost involved. Now you could demand payback from the wrong-doer; that’s the sort of thing that keeps civil courts in business. Or you could suffer loss and bear the cost yourself through forgiveness.
Now please note that forgiveness doesn’t mean ignoring who or what hurt you. Forgiveness isn’t the same as saying, ‘That’s Ok. It didn’t really matter,’ or ‘It wasn’t that serious.’ If that were the case—if it didn’t matter or wasn’t serious—there wouldn’t be anything to forgive. Forgiveness is when something wrong does happen, does matter; when something serious must be dealt with.
Forgiveness, after suffering a loss of assets, happiness, reputation, or opportunity, is what we see in the king of Jesus’ parable as he covers and absorbs a nation-sized debt into his life. Forgiveness means bearing the cost of what happened without resorting to revenge, not Lamech’s 77 fold but Jesus’ 77 time. This is our Lord’s answer to Peter’s question about a most practical matter of faith worked out in daily life. “If someone sins against me, how often should I forgive?”
It sounds impossible. You can practically feel your own reaction in your body. Yet the truth is that it’s only when you let go of the need to keep another person in your debt, let go of the need to see another person hurt—only when you forgive rather than retaliate—that there is any hope that life in the future will look different than life in the past. Because if you fight fire with fire, fire wins and we are left behind in the ashes.
Over the last days in the news, through personal stories on social media, and among us as a people, there has been much reflection on what happened in on September 11 in New York City, at the Pentagon, and over the fields of Shanksville, PA. A Today, a lingering uncertainty about where we are headed since that day when so much changed remains. Is there any hope that life in the future will look different than life in the past quarter century?
Anglican theologian and writer Jane Williams asked a question some years ago about 9/11 that remains a question on this 25th anniversary. “What kind of reactions on our part might bring life out of death.” Even as we remember that “abominable violence,” what kind of reactions on our part might bring life out of death? How, in other words, might we witness to the truth that Christ is, as St Paul says in today’s second reading, “the Lord of both the living and the dead.” And, in response to the lordship of Jesus Christ, not live to ourselves but live to, and for, the Lord? “If we live, we live to the Lord.”
Forgiveness is about putting out old fires, including the fire of bitterness and revenge that burns within us. Forgiveness means that we will not be defined by our past but will look to God with hope for the future and live now in a way that reflects that hope.
And that’s what makes the forgiven servant’s lack of forgiveness to his friend so hard to watch. The first servant leaves debtors jail a free man when his nation-sized debt is forgiven. But when he comes across a fellow servant who owes him the equivalent of what you might earn between now and the end of the year, the very same speech that the first servant used, “Have patience with me and I will pay what I owe,” doesn’t work (even if, in this case, a payment plan would be realistic).
The servant who received forgiveness refuses to pass along forgiveness. The forgiveness he received leaves him utterly unchanged. For him, then, unforgiveness becomes its own sort of bitter prison, just as Jesus warned after he taught us the Lord’s Prayer. “If you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you; but if you do not forgive others, neither will your heavenly Father forgive your trespasses.” Yet with forgiveness already given, having your debt called in is the most unnecessary thing in the world.
The Lord’s Prayer with its petition asking that we would forgive others as we are forgiven, and today’s parable of forgiveness 77 times, means two things: that we will always need forgiveness; and that we will often need divine assistance to be people of forgiveness and to pass forgiveness along.
That divine assistance comes to us and is given to us in Jesus. The Son of God does for you what the king does in the parable. He takes the debt and cost of sin and absorbs and covers it in his own life. On the cross, Jesus gives complete remission and forgiveness of your sin. “He himself bore our sins in his body on the cross,” 1st Peter says, “so that, free from sins, we might live for righteousness.” This life of righteousness—our lives set right in God and our right-living in response, of forgiveness received being forgiveness pass one—includes this depiction in Ephesians of how we are meant to live in response to what God has done for us. “Be kind to one another, tender-hearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ has forgiven you.”
‘As God in Christ has forgiven you’ is excessive forgiveness beyond completeness. And even when forgiveness seems unlikely, remember that the source of forgiveness is Jesus himself. “He is the perfect offering for our sins,” says 1st John, “and not for ours only but also for the sins of the whole world.” In Jesus, forgiveness is given 77 times—not a limited number but fully, excessively, and beyond completeness.
May God give us the grace to grasp Christ’s dying and life-giving forgiveness for us. And, to make us people of hope, may the Spirit guide us and work in us so that the forgiveness we receive becomes forgiveness we pass on.
Write a comment: