Proper
19A 2014
Father Adam Trambley
Sept 14, 2014 St.John’s Sharon
In last week’s gospel, Jesus talked about prayer, but only
after first describing how we can reconcile with those who have harmed us. This morning’s gospel reading is directly
after last weeks, and Jesus takes up this idea of forgiveness more directly and
more emphatically.
Simon Peter, of course, prompts the discussion. He heard Jesus’ instructions that when
someone sins against you, you should go directly to that person and work it out. He understood Jesus’ emphasis on forgiveness
and reconciliation and restoring relationship with our brothers and
sisters. But Matthew has taken Peter’s
falafel six times in the past few weeks.
It’s great to be the generous forgiving one, but at some point enough is
enough, right? We can almost imagine
Peter asking “Lord, if another member of the church sins against me, how often
should I forgive? As many as seven times?” while he casts a smug glance in
Matthew’s direction.
Now let’s face it, six times is a lot to forgive
someone. Six is a lot more times than we
want to forgive. Once could be a
mistake. Twice, and there could be
extenuating circumstances. But three strikes
and you’re out, buddy. By about the
third time someone offends us in some way, even if the offense is almost
entirely a figment of our imagination, we feel entitled to be upset,
unpleasant, rude in return, and still feel morally superior for being generous
the first two times. Somehow we think
everyone else should further our comfort and convenience, and that we should be
rewarded anytime our behavior might possibly indicate that we are not the
center of the universe. So if we have
already gone so far as to forgive six times, then move over Mother Theresa and
somebody please put a call in to the Nobel Committee.
Now, honestly, forgiving somebody who really hurt us even
once is hard. That reconciliation takes
strength, courage, prayer and usually support from the community around
us. But following Jesus means doing that
hard work. Jesus is the one on the cross
who said, “Forgive them, Father.”
But we also know, when we are on the other side of things,
that being forgiven six times isn’t really enough. We hurt the people closest
to us a lot more than that, and if they just wrote us off after somewhere
between two and seven times, we’d all be renting rooms by the week at the
Sharon Hotel. Jesus knows how much
forgiveness we need, too, and that’s why his response to Peter is, “Not seven
times, but, I tell you, seventy-seven times.”
Jesus knows how hard it is to forgive that freely, but we all need that
much forgiveness from God and from each other if we are going to have any
chance to live as a loving community. We
can’t put a limit on how often we forgive.
Just to note here, for the mathematically precise, that
seventy-seven times is just a poetic way of saying a whole lot more than
seven. The assumption is that you can’t
use your fingers and toes to count that high, so just keep forgiving. If anyone out there is keeping a list of
offenses and forgives people the seventy-sixth time but not the seventy-eighth
time, please call and make an appointment to see me. I think we have some things to talk about.
Then Jesus tells a story that changes the focus from
continual forgiveness of repeated offenses to a requirement to forgive offenses
no matter how large. A king, who
represents God, has a slave, who represents us.
That slave owes the king a ridiculous amount of money – ten thousand
talents. A talent was about seventy
pounds of gold and was the denomination that provinces would use to pay their
tax obligations to the Roman Emperor.
Ten thousand talents is an astronomical amount of money, and probably no
one alive but Caesar could ever have repaid it.
Imagine being called in to the boss and told to bring in seven hundred
thousand pounds of gold. The slave
appeals for mercy, and the King forgives the entire amount – he doesn’t even
have to pay back the office papyrus he used surreptitiously to draw up his
fantasy chariot team. Then that slave
goes out and encounters someone who owes him one hundred denarii, which is
about ten thousand dollars. Not a small
sum. Not ten thousand talents, but
probably not something he could easily lose.
When his debtor begged for mercy, the slave who has just been forgiven
everything decides to send him to prison until he pays up. The crowd isn’t impressed, and tells the King
what happened. The King changes his mind
and hands the ungrateful lout over to the torturers until the unpayable debt is
paid in full. Then Jesus says that’s
what will happen to us if we don’t forgive our brothers and sisters from our
hearts.
Jesus parable tells us two very important truths: that we
desperately need God’s forgiveness and that we cannot receive God’s forgiveness
if we do not forgive one another.
I hope I don’t need to convince anyone that we need God’s
forgiveness. We have sinned and turned
against God in any variety of ways. Since
God created everything, including us, when we hurt others, mess up his
creation, or even hurt ourselves, we are incurring a huge debt we can’t pay
back. We may as well owe all the gold in
the Roman Empire because we have nothing of our own to repay God with. God gave us everything we have, including our
bodies, our time, our labor, and anything else we like to think of as our
own. So without God’s forgiveness, given
to us in the gift of his Son Jesus Christ, we are hopelessly lost. We can only ask God for mercy, and, just like
in the story, when we ask we receive it.
Our only requirement is to go out and forgive others, as well.
When I was younger, I use to think this requirement was just
plain mean, as if God was waiting for a legalistic “Gotcha” to withhold his
forgiveness from us. But God is always
waiting to forgive us. The problem is that when we don’t forgive others we
erect barriers between ourselves and God that make our own forgiveness
impossible.
See, forgiveness is not really about us and the person who
sinned against us. Forgiveness is mostly
about us and God, with the offending party playing a very minor role. When we forgive, we claim our faith in God as
God of the past, of the present, and of the future. Forgiving our brothers and sisters
acknowledges that God was with me no matter what offense, injury or harm was
done to me. Forgiving acknowledges that
God is with me right now in this moment to strengthen me to act out of his
boundless love even for my enemies. And
forgiving acknowledges that God will continue to be with me in the future even
as I go forward having lost whatever it that was taken from me – whether
dignity, property, relationships, status, or life itself – and that God will
provide what I need so I don’t have to resent someone else because I am afraid
that I won’t have enough for whatever I think I’ll need. Forgiveness is about faith that God will be
God for us, and that no one else can take that fundamental relationship away.
When we refuse to forgive, however, we decide that God
cannot make right what someone else did wrong.
Unforgiveness professes that our injury is beyond the reach of God’s
love and mercy. Hardheartedness toward
others is our decision that we prefer the self-pity of resentments and anger to
the healing presence of God. By not
forgiving someone, we put our emotions and our lives in their hands, instead of
in the hands of God. We bind ourselves
to the one who hurt us instead of to Jesus.
We decide to hitch our future to the fear and hurt done by another human
being instead of holding the hand of our Almighty Father in heaven as we walk
through even the valley of the shadow of death.
Remember last week when Jesus said, “Whatever you bind on
earth will be bound in heaven”? When we
refuse to forgive, we bind ourselves to the sin committed against us. When we hold onto sin, whether our own sin we
refuse to repent of or the sin committed against us that we refuse to forgive,
we put up a huge wall between us and Jesus who took all sin to the cross and got
rid of it. If we don’t want to forgive
and hand the sins over to Jesus, we’re telling him to stay on his side of our
walls. I’m not sure a better definition
of hell than being stuck in a place with a huge wall between us and Jesus, and
that hell can happen in this life, and usually we put the wall up
ourselves. How ironic that when the King
hands the slave over to the torturers at the end of the parable, it is really the
slave himself who has built the jail and designed the torture.
God’s love and mercy is so great, however, that he can
forgive even our unforgiveness. When our
hardness of heart has isolated us from God and neighbor, Jesus is always
willing to help us tear down our walls and forgive. He will help us with the difficult work of
healing our pain, seeing a way forward, and loving those who hurt us. He is always waiting to forgive us and help
us to forgive others.
There is an old monastic story that I like, where someone
goes and asks an old monk what they do.
He says, “We fall and we get up.
We fall and we get up.”
Forgiveness, the getting up and helping each other up, is at the center
of the Christian life. We ask
forgiveness for ourselves, and we forgive others, whether one time or
seventy-seven, whether small inconveniences or unspeakable harms, and God’s
mercy is always there for us.
