Text; Matthew 18: 21-35
The story we heard in our second reading is a story that cuts to the heart of Christianity, to our relationship with Jesus and to the kingdom of God. It comes at the end of the second half of Matthew 18 and we need to start by putting our reading into the context of what Jesus has just been saying.
Jesus has just been talking about the way that members of the kingdom of God deal with disagreement among themselves. From verse 15 he sets out the way that believers should behave when they come into disagreement. It’s quite simple. If your brother or sister sins against you, go and show them where they are wrong, just between the two of you. If they listen to you, Jesus says, you have won them over. If that doesn’t work take two or three other people along. Not to threaten them, but so that “every matter may be established by the testimony of two or three witnesses”. If even that does not work, the whole church needs to be involved. Only if the believer is still refusing even to listen to the church should the ultimate sanction be made; only then should they be treated as an outsider and excluded. The emphasis here is on reconciliation. Exclusion, excommunication, is very much a last resort.
But there’s a danger about taking all this at face value. What Jesus says here seems to assume that it’s just a simple matter of following these principles and trusting that people are intrinsically reasonable and will recognise when they are in the wrong. Peter asks a very astute question, right here at the beginning of the reading we are looking at today. “Lord, how many times shall I forgive someone who sins against me? Seven times?”
I just want to pause here a moment and acknowledge what a brilliant question this is. This isn’t a stupid question and Jesus doesn’t rebuke Peter. Peter has cut right to the heart of the matter of reconciliation; that there is no reconciliation without forgiveness. Peter recognises that; his question is purely practical. How many times should I forgive? Seven times?
Seven is not a stupid number. If someone is persistently wronging you, it takes a lot of heart to forgive them seven times. A community of people who made a point of forgiving those who have wronged them seven times would be a pretty loving community and a pretty good role model for the world. But Jesus says no; not seven times, seventy seven times.
What’s the difference between seven times and seventy seven times. Well in a nutshell, if we were called to forgive seven times, there is a danger we’d try and keep count and our focus would be on us, and how good we were being by forgiving at all. In forgiveness terms, forgiving seventy seven times is tantamount to unlimited forgiveness. Lest there is any doubt about that Jesus tell the parable that we call the Parable of the Unforgiving Servant.
A man owes a king an absolute fortune; ten thousand talents. A talent was the largest unit of currency available at that time, worth about 16 year’s wages for an ordinary labourer. That’s one talent, and the servant owed 10,000. That’s zillions.
We don’t know why he owed so much money, but he did. The king asks for it back, as he is legally entitled to do. The servant is in the wrong and he cannot pay. Because he cannot pay, all that he has is taken from him, and he and his family are to be sold into slavery. The servant is utterly ruined, and with nothing to lose he begs the king for mercy, for time to pay back a debt he simply can’t repay. The king is filled with pity, cancels the debt entirely and releases the servant.
There is nothing grudging about the enormous debt being written off. The king isn’t just a bit sympathetic and he doesn’t just agree to some kind of terms. He is filled with pity from the bottom of his heart and his forgiving of the servant is an act of unbelievable generosity. His forgiveness is not partial or conditional, it is in full, complete and unconditional. Had the king said, “Well I can’t let you off the whole debt, but I won’t have you all sold into slavery, however you’re going to have to work hard for me for the rest of your life” He would still have been generous, he had no obligation even to say that. but the king goes far, far beyond even that, forgiving the debt in full. It is lavish, extravagant, exuberant forgiveness.
Not so the servant, who only a few moments later, faces a fellow servant who owes him a much, much more modest debt, about three month’s pay. Unlike the first debt this debt, though not small, is repayable. None the less the first servant, who only a few moments before was forgiven so extravagantly a debt that would have ruined him for ever, chooses instead to have the second servant thrown into jail. What shameful ingratitude. When this is brought to the attention of the king he is furious. ”You wicked servant! I forgave you all that debt because you begged me. Shouldn’t you also have had mercy on your fellow servant, even as I had mercy on you?” and he hands him over for punishment.
I want to draw three points from this. My first point is that real forgiveness is not cheap. Real forgiveness is not cheap. Sometimes we use the words “I forgive you” too glibly. If it’s not too hard to forgive it’s probably because it’s not real forgiveness. If I hadn’t turned up this morning, you’d probably have forgiven me. You are good people. It would have been irritating, annoying. You’d have come out in your best clothes and wasted your morning, but on the other hand you’d get to have your lunch earlier. At the end of the day it wouldn’t really matter.
On the other hand if I was your church treasurer and I took money that you had sacrificially put aside for God and I stole it from you, that wouldn’t be so easy to forgive; I would have betrayed you personally. If I used my position of trust to abuse the most vulnerable members of this church, I don’t think that would be easy to forgive at all. Real forgiveness is not easy and it is not cheap.
A few years ago I watched a TV programme about forgiveness. The studio audience was made up of people who had been the victims of appalling acts. The parents of murdered children, people who had lost loved ones to the IRA, the victims of rape and of child abuse, people who had suffered life changing injuries at the hands of others. These were real victims. Some were Christians, most weren’t. The non-Christians were generally angry at the very suggestion they should forgive and it was easy to understand why, it was. It was made worse by their perception that forgiveness devalued their loss; that to forgive was to say that their loss did not matter. As Christians we need to recognise the real hurt and anger that people, including Christians feel.
So my first point is that real forgiveness is not cheap. My second is that God gives us the power to forgive if we turn to him. God gives us the power to forgive if we turn to him.
When I first became a Christian I read a book called The Hiding Place, by Corrie ten Boom, which had an enormous influence on my becoming a Christian. Corrie was a middle aged Dutch woman who lived with her unmarried sister Betsie and their elderly father, in Amsterdam during the Second World War. Devout Christians, they hid Jews but were eventually betrayed, imprisoned and sent to prison. Corrie’s father died the night of their imprisonment and Betsie died shortly before the end of the war.
After the war Corrie committed herself to working with the most marginalised group in post war Holland; former Dutch Nazis, preaching God’s love and forgiveness. One day she met a man she remembered from prison, who had been a particularly cruel guard. Despite all that she had taught about forgiveness she found herself utterly unable to forgive a man who had treated her so badly. She forced herself to shake his hand and her testimony was that at that moment she became filled with a sense of God’s love.
God knows how hard it is to forgive sometimes. He doesn’t just tell us to do it, he gives us the strength to do it when we acknowledge we need it, and when we pray for it. Do you struggle to forgive something horrible from your past? Turn to God, trust in him, ask him for the power to forgive.
A few moments ago I spoke about the TV programme I watched about forgiveness. I spoke about how non-Christians were angered at the thought of forgiving those who had wronged them and about how even Christians struggled to, although they knew it to be important. Part of the reason they were able to even begin to forgive was their understanding that they had been the recipients of God’s forgiveness. And this brings me to my third point. We are able to forgive because we know God has first forgiven us. We are able to forgive because we know God has first forgiven us.
The problem with Peter’s suggestion that we forgive those who’ve wronged us seven times, although superficially generous misses this point. It tempts us to focus on ourselves and to keep count of how often we have forgiven others, but that’s not what we should focus on. Our human goodness, such as it is, is simply not enough to maintain the consistent forgiveness that we need to give in a fallen world.
The focus shouldn’t be on how much we have forgiven others; it should be on how much we have been forgiven by God. Our focus should be on him who has forgiven us so much, and who carried our sins on the cross, on Jesus Christ. That’s where the first servant went so wrong. It is almost impossible to understand how a man who had been forgiven so much could respond by forgiving someone else so little, and so soon after. We can only conclude that somehow, amazingly, he lacked insight into how much he had been forgiven and how little he had deserved it. When we choose to be grudging in our forgiveness of others it is because, like the first servant, we don’t really understand how much we’ve been forgiven.
Do you know how much God has forgiven you? Do I really understand how much God had forgiven me? Do we really understand how much God forgives us each day? How many wicked thoughts, unkind words, acts of ingratitude, moments we consciously do things we know to be wrong in God’s sight, moments we choose not to do a good thing because it’s inconvenient or because we simply don’t think of it. I’m not suggesting we should dwell on our sins themselves, but we should be sufficiently aware of them to have some idea how much forgiveness we have had for them. Without being aware of how much we have been forgiven we won’t be able to forgive others when we need to.
God wants us to forgive, it’s at the heart of the gospel. God has forgiven us far more than we will ever forgive others for. God doesn’t want to tell us off for being ungrateful when we struggle to forgive the very real hurts that have been inflicted on us. He wants us to forgive because forgiveness is God’s will for a hurting world. Forgiveness is what makes reconciliation and healing possible. Carrying the burden of unforgiven wrongs, of anger, damages us. It can lead to ill health and even early death. It damages our relationships with our wives and husbands, with our children, with everyone around us. It leads to bigotry and it leads to wars.
We are the servants in the story of the unforgiving servant and God is the king. We have been forgiven a debt we could never have repaid, and we have been forgiven from the depth of God’s heart. We have a choice. It is whether to be like the first servant and squander that forgiveness or to be like the king and forgive, and forgive, and forgive
Forgiveness is how we live out our witness as Christians. The passage we are looking at isn’t primarily about forgiving our enemies outside the church; it’s about forgiving our brothers and sisters within it. Jesus said, “By this will people know that you are my disciples; that you love one another, that you love one another”. If we do not even show love; including a quickness to forgive, to our brothers and sisters within the church, who will believe that we have anything to say about love to the world at large.
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