Lectionary Readings
O Lord, forgive the sins of the preacher, that only your truth may be spoken and only your grace be heard ☩ in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.
“Enjoy your forgiveness.” That’s the tagline on a church sign outside an Episcopal Church in New York City. The idea is that forgiveness is not something we have to struggle to earn, or strive to be worthy of, or worry about whether or not we’ve been given. No, in Jesus Christ, we are forgiven, period. And this forgiveness, this freedom, is to be used so that we might enjoy the fruits of God’s mercy and grace. In this sense, “enjoy your forgiveness” is a summation of the Gospel message.
The problem is that we’ve been trained to be capitalists – where everything has to be tracked, commodified, and calculated. You’ll recall that in last week’s Gospel text, Jesus gave his followers some guidance on how to handle conflict in the Church and we saw how St. Paul’s exhortation to “owe nothing but love to each other” is at the heart of how we deal with conflict. From last week’s Gospel text, we can imagine St. Peter hearing about how we’re supposed to meet with the person who has wronged us alone, and if that doesn’t work with one or two others, and then with the whole church, if necessary. Now, Scripture doesn’t convey the tone used, but we know human nature well enough to guess how it sounded when Peter asks where today’s reading began, “Lord, if another member of the church sins against me, how often should I forgive? As many as seven times?” In other words, “how long do we have to put up with problem people?”
Perhaps Peter thought his suggestion of “seven times” was fairly generous. And it was – what’s the phrase we use: fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me. So forgiving someone seven times really is going the extra mile. But Jesus counters him – “Not seven times, but, I tell you, seventy-seven times.” And that number could also be translated as seventy times seven – but the point isn’t whether we’re talking about 490 or 77. The idea is that there is to be no limit to the number of times that we forgive others. Don’t bother keeping track, because you’ll never count to infinity.
In order to drive home the point, Jesus deploys a parable. There was a king who wanted to settle accounts, so he summons a slave who owed him a large sum that could not be paid. He begs the king for mercy, and is given it. This slave then goes out and sees a fellow slave who owes him, by comparison, a little bit of money. This second slave though does not have the money to pay and also begs for mercy, but is shown none. Instead, he throws him into a debtor’s prison. When the king learns of this, he is enraged that after being shown such great mercy, that this slave could not show even a scrap of mercy himself. The king then unforgives the debt and hands him over the jailers. Not the most heart-warming of Jesus’ parables, to be sure. And if that was it, we might think “Gosh, that first slave really was a rather ungrateful and nasty fellow. I think I can avoid being like that.” But then Jesus delivers the telling blow: “So my heavenly Father will also do to everyone of you, if you do not forgive your brother or sister from your heart.” Instead of it being a story about a wicked slave, we now all stand guilty as charged.
One of the ways that this parable functions is that it deals in the absurd in to reinforce Jesus’ earlier comment to Peter. The amount the king forgives the first slave is 10,000 talents – which is an incomprehensible amount of money. A talent was worth 6,000 denarii and a denarius is the average daily wage, making one talent the pay for 16 years’ labor. So, 10,000 talents, the amount forgiven for the first slave, is equivalent to 164,383 years’ wages. If we think about forgiveness in terms of a commodity, as something that can be counted – we end up with absurdly large numbers like that one. The point isn’t that in 165,000 years that the debt would be repaid. The point is that the debt is impossible to pay off. By comparison, the 100 denarii owed by the second slave is just over 3 months’ wages. Using these numbers, Jesus is doing something similar to those logic questions that might be asked when taking the SAT. Something like apples are to trees as grapes are to vines. Well, Jesus is saying that forgiving 7 times is to a debt of 100 denarii as forgiving 77 times is to a debt of 10,000 talents. The point is that while Peter’s 7-fold forgiveness is a nice gesture, the point is God’s limitless forgiveness.
To be clear, this entire parable includes over-the-top details to make the point. This includes the final torture of the first slave. This is a parable, not an analogy. Jesus is not speaking about hell or eternal punishment here. That’s something we read into the text instead of actually gleaning from it. If this were a parable about punishment, we’d know it. Instead, it is, rather obviously, a parable about mercy.
So, what does it actually mean to forgive? The parable is instructive for us. Financial debt was then, just as it is today for many people and nations, a crippling burden. US consumer debt is over $14 trillion, meaning each American holds an average of over $90,000 in debt and those numbers are rising. And if you’ve ever had debt, you know how it holds you back from doing the things that you’d really like to do. Debt makes you fearful and uncertain, so we are less generous than we would like to be. Debt can feel suffocating. And this is a way of understanding sin.
Earlier in Matthew, when Jesus is teaching his disciples to pray, he teaches them: “Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors.” It is Luke’s version that renders this as “forgive us our sins,” and the more familiar “trespasses” doesn’t show up as a translation until the 1500s. The point is that sins and debts are nearly synonymous in the language of the Bible. Now, notice what the king does with the large debt – he does not restructure it, he does not offer a lower interest rate or a longer repayment period, he does not reduce it; no, he eliminates it. He forgives it. The word “forgive” literally means “to let go.” Forgiveness is letting go of the chains that shackle us.
But forgiveness does not mean everything that we might think it does. Forgiveness is not about denial. The king does not pretend that the debt didn’t exist. He does not forget about the debt, rather, he forgives it. And this forgiveness changes their relationship. Forgiveness is not about coming down with a case of selective amnesia, instead forgiveness is a willful act in which we choose not to hold an unforgiveable debt over others, or more often, ourselves.
Nor is forgiveness about condoning or excusing the inexcusable. I want to make this absolutely clear – just because you forgive something does not mean that you are saying that the wrong was acceptable or okay. It just means that you won’t be tied to it anymore. Abuse, whether physical, verbal, psychological, or sexual is never, never okay. This passage has a sad history of guilting victims of domestic violence into staying with their abusers. That is an abomination. Abuse is never okay. And if you are in such a situation and need help getting out of it, please let me know.
The Lutheran pastor and author Nadia Bolz-Weber has said that holding onto anger or staying in bad relationships doesn’t combat evil, it just feeds it. Instead, forgiveness is about breaking the chains that bind us to bad situations. Forgiveness, in situations of abuse, is about eliminating debt so that the relationship can be severed. And there is never anything wrong with getting out of an abusive relationship.
Neither is forgiveness about letting someone get away with something. Sometimes we talk about about cheap grace and costly grace. Well, forgiving others is not offering them cheap grace, rather it is very costly. Think about the king in this parable – forgiving a debt of that magnitude would certainly cost him a lot. His net worth is going to look a lot different once those 10,000 talents come off the books. As we heard this morning from Romans, St. Paul notes that “we will all stand before the judgement of God” and that “each of us will be accountable to God.” Forgiving doesn’t mean there won’t be consequences, it just takes us out of the judgment seat, a place we really shouldn’t be anyway.
Finally, forgiveness is not the same as healing or reconciliation. Someone might wrong you and you forgiving them does not mean that the relationship will be back to normal, it does not mean there still won’t be pain and tears. Forgiveness is simply about letting go of the idea that any action can reverse what has been done. One person has said that refusing to forgive and holding onto wrongs is like drinking rat poison and then waiting for the rat to die. There is no such thing as a time machine. Wrongs cannot be undone. Forgiveness is a way of saying “I’m not going to make you pay back a debt that can never be paid” because all that does is to keep both people lacking sufficient payment. Healing may well come after forgiveness, but it does not come with it, it is merely the first step in the process of reconciliation.
Instead, forgiveness becomes a way of life. It participates in the cycle of grace. We are forgiven forgivers. The English Bishop NT Wright says that forgiveness is something like the air in our lungs. You have to exhale in order to make room to breathe in. Forgiveness is the process of letting out those things that fill us with anger, resentment, or entitlement so that we can breathe in grace, mercy, and peace. And we know what happens if we refuse to exhale and take in fresh air, don’t we? We suffocate. This is what Jesus is getting at when he says that we are to forgive from our heart. Forgiveness is as vital to our livelihood as is our heart and lungs. We expel and let go of the debts that others owe us in order that we might receive into our souls the liberating grace of God.
The parable shows us that forgiveness is to be not an isolated event but a way of life. The debt that was forgiven the first slave had strings attached to it. The forgiveness was clearly expected to transform him and from his liberation, he was to offer that same liberation to others. Just was we have been forgiven by God through Christ, we are to forgive others by the power of the Spirit working in us. But we know that we often fall short of this. Parables are something like windows – they allow us to see into the Kingdom of God, but sometimes when we’re looking through a window, we’ll see catch a glimpse of ourselves in the glass. And I know that when I read this parable, I see myself in that wicked slave who still holds grudges and judges others even though he has been forgiven.
This parable drive us to our knees, asking for mercy because we fall short of the mercy that we have been given. And our knees is a great place to be before our Savior and Judge, Jesus Christ. At one point in the gospels, the disciples are overwhelmed by the call of discipleship and ask, “Who then can be saved?” And Jesus replies, “For humans it is impossible, but for God all things are possible.” The debts that we have incurred against God and others are insurmountable, and yet we are forgiven from having to pay those debts off.
Tomorrow is a major feast in the Church Year: Holy Cross Day. Tomorrow is the 1,685th anniversary of the dedication of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem – the church that stands over the site where Jesus was crucified, buried, and rose from the dead. It was built after St. Helena, Constantine’s mother, found the true Cross that Jesus was nailed to at the site. The Cross is the sign and seal of our forgiveness and a reminder of our call to forgive as we have been forgiven.
Some of you regularly make the sign of the cross by putting three fingers together and touching your forehead, sternum, left breast, right breast, and then center; some of you, perhaps, have never done so. As we think about forgiveness, giving thanks for debts we are released from, praying for the strength to forgive others has we have been forgiven, and in marking Holy Cross Day, you might try it, remembering that it was on the Cross that Jesus said “Father, forgive.” And that sign of grace and love seen on the Cross is what allows us to “enjoy our forgiveness.” ☩ Amen.
