“Forgive as We Forgive.  Yikes!”

(Matthew 18:21-35)

Then Peter said to Jesus, “Lord, how many times should I forgive my brother or sister who sins against me?  Should I forgive as many as seven times?”

 Jesus said, “Not just seven times, but rather as many as seventy-seven times. 

Therefore, the kingdom of heaven is like a king who wanted to settle accounts with his servants.  When he began to settle accounts, they brought to him a servant who owed him ten thousand bags of gold.  Because the servant didn’t have enough to pay it back, the master ordered that he should be sold, along with his wife and children and everything he had, and that the proceeds should be used as a payment.  But the servant fell down, kneeled before him, and said, ‘Please, be patient with me, and I’ll pay you back.’  The master had compassion on that servant, released him, and forgave the loan. 

When that servant went out, he found one of his fellow servants who owed him one hundred coins.  He grabbed him around the throat and said, ‘Pay me back what you owe me.’

Then his fellow servant fell down and begged him, ‘Be patient with me, and I’ll pay you back.’  But he refused.  Instead, he threw him into prison until he paid back his debt.

When his fellow servants saw what happened, they were deeply offended.  They came and told their master all that happened.  His master called the first servant and said, ‘You wicked servant!  I forgave you all that debt because you appealed to me.  Shouldn’t you also have mercy on your fellow servant, just as I had mercy on you?’  His master was furious and handed him over to the guard responsible for punishing prisoners, until he had paid the whole debt.

My heavenly Father will also do the same to you if you don’t forgive your brother or sister from your heart.”

I think we’ve all had the experience of going to a movie, reading a story, seeing a play or experiencing a real-life situation in which we see a character making a huge mistake.  It’s so clear to us.  We want to shout to the character, “NO! Don’t’ do it!!!”  Yet they are so focused on themselves that they walk right into trouble, seemingly having no idea of what they’re doing.

Our Matthew story today is something like that.  After hearing that the king graciously forgave servant #1 his unthinkably huge, outrageous debt, we watch that same servant turn around and refuse to even grant his fellow servant a bit more time for his considerably smaller debt.  Servant #1 just threw servant #2 right into prison.

When I hear that story I want to say to servant #1, “Don’t do it!  Can’t you see what’s going on here?  The king has granted you an incredible gift, and you can’t even show some of that generosity to your fellow servant?  I simply cannot believe this….”  I feel really ticked off at this guy.

Well, as with all good stories (and this is a good one), I got drawn right in, and, hopefully, you did too.  The story was told with language in the 3^rd person, that is, “The servant said that.  The king did this.”

At the end, though, the finger points at the hearers (us).  “And Jesus says, “So also my heavenly father will do to you if you do not forgive your brother or sister from your heart.”

WE are being addressed here, but why?  WE know how wrong that servant was.  We could never be so stupid or insensitive or inhumane or ungrateful as the servant….  Could we??

Well, let’s have another look at the story.  Jesus is telling us that God, like the king, offers boundless grace—amazing grace—to us.  The incredible dollar amount of the debt that servant #1 owed the king is forgiven in the parable.  The story of this amazing act of forgiveness is a way to show us exactly how God acts toward us.  As we’re told in the first few sentences of the reading, forgiveness has no limit.  Seventy-seven times is an eternal number.  That’s the truth in our relationship with God, and it’s the truth in our relationship with each other. 

So, knowing this, knowing the endless times that we have been forgiven and the endless times that we are told that we must forgive, why do we find ourselves turning around to our neighbors, friends, family and other people in our lives, refusing to forgive?  We have forgotten God’s generosity to us. 

Knowing all this, why do we find ourselves, like servant #1, seeking revenge, being spiteful, holding a grudge, staying angry for days or months or years, getting even, considering no one but ourselves?

Now, in our parable we are dealing with unthinkable amounts of money, but this whole forgiveness thing hits us where we are every day from small, piddly things to large, even, huge grudges.  Perhaps you find yourselves reminding your spouse of his or her wrongdoings from the past—over and over and over—seemingly unable to let go of them. 

Or maybe you find yourself hanging on to that incident that happened between you and a coworker—going over and over it in your mind.  Every time you think of it your anger erupts like a volcano.  Or you remind your child again and again of a mistake she or he made in the past.

Maybe you’re not even aware that you’re harboring a grudge, that you’ve really not forgiven someone.  You only know that he or she rubs you the wrong way.  You seem to never see eye-to-eye.  You’re bugged by almost everything he or she does.

…Or perhaps you’ve never forgiven yourself for something that’s in the past.  If we can’t forgive ourselves, we may be doubting that God can possibly forgive us and can accept us as we are?

And if we doubt that God really accepts and forgives us, if we don’t know what that Amazing Grace feels like, we are going to have trouble forgiving others.  You know, it’s very dangerous to think that God acts the way that we act.  It is dangerous to talk that way because the truth is, we are never, at any point in our lives, cut off from God.  In spite of that language at the end of the parable, we are never cut off from God’s love and forgiveness. 

God DOES love, accept and forgive us.  Jesus exemplified that forgiveness.

Like the king in the story, God forgives ALL our debts—even all ten thousand bags of gold of them.

And we can and must respond to God’s incredible generosity, God’s overflowing love, by sharing it with those whom we come in contact.  We can’t act like that shocking servant—though we have.  We’re supposed to do what we really wanted that servant to do—forgive his fellow servant as he had been forgiven.  It’s the obvious choice—but only if you’re watching from the outside.

It takes courage to forgive…because you have to give something up—a bit of pride, maybe, a way of living that has been comfortable, though probably not very happy.  We have to give up that superior feeling (I’m better than that turkey.  Listen to what he did to me.”)  We have to give up that anger that prevents us from or ALLOWS us to keep from looking at ourselves realistically—warts and all.  It DOES take courage to forgive—AND it takes determination.

But we Christians are called to forgive each other.  It is what comes from being so magnificently forgiven.  It is the natural and good and right response.

Recall your reaction when you saw that servant—whose huge debt had been forgiven—that servant who refused to forgive his fellow servant.  …We don’t want to be like him.  We can change our way of living and thinking.

The king was willing to work with servant #1.  Let’s not be like that guy who turns around and hurts his fellow servant.

I daresay that most of us could benefit by taking a look at how we might be holding on to those times when we haven’t been forgiving.  I know that I need to do this constantly. 

Back in the day, I held grudges against colleagues who had been on my ordination committee.  I held on to that long after they gave me a hard time.  Poor me!  Preaching this text over the years has helped me work through that issue, and I realized that I have made those same kind of judgy mistakes in my life by thinking I knew it all about another person. 

I held on to grudges against my former spouse for many years, but those grudges served no one, but, rather, ate me up inside.  You know what they say, “Holding a grudge is like taking poison and hoping the other person will die.” 

So, forgiveness serves not only the greater good, but it also serves us.  Of course, our not being forgiving doesn’t usually throw the other person in jail as in our story.  Sometimes that other person doesn’t even know they need our forgiveness.  But we know because it gets in the way of our experiencing God’s wonderful, amazing grace. 

Well, you know what we say when we recite the Lord’s Prayer: “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.”  Forgive us as we forgive.  Yikes! 

On Friday we observed the 25^th anniversary of the September 11^th, 2001 attack on our nation.  We don’t need to understand why this happened nor do we need to receive any apology, but we do need to come to a place of forgiveness because God forgives limitlessly. 

In order to stop the insanity and hatred and move forward we need to believe in a God who says that forgiveness has no limit.  As we talked about last week, evil actions manufactured by evil people is not really what we’re talking about here.  This is about people who are sucked into an evil narrative and, then,  execute it.  They are so in need of God’s forgiveness. 

I’m reminded of the attack on our own Capital on January 6, 2020.  These were people who believed a false narrative and acted upon it.  I have to believe that they are within God’s love and forgiveness.  …I know, this is hard, folks.  They must receive the consequence of their behaviors, but that does not put them outside of God’s love. 

Finally, any decisions we make about others that says they are worthless is very dangerous.  This is God’s business.  We are in the Jesus House because God has forgiven each of us without limits, and we have to believe that forgiveness extends to all God’s people.  This does not say that we who hopefully live in a just world do not receive the consequences of our behaviors because no one is above the law in this world.  It is to say that God has the final word on forgiveness.  Amen.