Matthew 18.21-35 (NRSV)

Matthew 18.21-35 (NRSV) (SERMON)

Forgiveness

²¹ Then Peter came and said to him, ‘Lord, if another member of the church sins against me, how often should I forgive? As many as seven times?’ ²²Jesus said to him, ‘Not seven times, but, I tell you, seventy-seven times.

The Parable of the Unforgiving Servant

²³ ‘For this reason the kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who wished to settle accounts with his slaves. ²⁴When he began the reckoning, one who owed him ten thousand talents was brought to him;²⁵ and, as he could not pay, his lord ordered him to be sold, together with his wife and children and all his possessions, and payment to be made. ²⁶So the slave fell on his knees before him, saying, “Have patience with me, and I will pay you everything.” ²⁷And out of pity for him, the lord of that slave released him and forgave him the debt. ²⁸But that same slave, as he went out, came upon one of his fellow-slaves who owed him a hundred denarii; and seizing him by the throat, he said, “Pay what you owe.” ²⁹Then his fellow-slave fell down and pleaded with him, “Have patience with me, and I will pay you.” ³⁰But he refused; then he went and threw him into prison until he should pay the debt. ³¹When his fellow-slaves saw what had happened, they were greatly distressed, and they went and reported to their lord all that had taken place. ³²Then his lord summoned him and said to him, “You wicked slave! I forgave you all that debt because you pleaded with me.³³Should you not have had mercy on your fellow-slave, as I had mercy on you?” ³⁴And in anger his lord handed him over to be tortured until he should pay his entire debt. ³⁵So my heavenly Father will also do to every one of you, if you do not forgive your brother or sister from your heart.’

I am indebted to the work of William Barclay  and Suzanna de Dietrich for inspiration for this reflection.

My text this morning is written in Matthew 18:27:

And out of pity for him, the lord of that slave released him and forgave him the debt. 

Forgiveness is one of the most important virtues; but at the same time it is the most difficult to attain. Even when one struggles through the problem and gets to the point where you think you can forgive – even utter the words – it does not always work. Rabbi David Nelson tells a humorous, but true story of two brothers who went to their rabbi to settle a longstanding feud. The rabbi got the two to reconcile their differences and shake hands. As they were about to leave, he asked each one to make a wish for the other in honour Yom Kippur, the Jewish New Year. The first brother turned to the other and said, "I wish you what you wish me." At that, the second brother threw up his hands and said, "See, Rabbi, he's starting up again!"

The South Africa I was born and grew up in, descended into violence and bloodshed. Both the state police and the African resistance movements did the most despicable things to each other. When democracy eventually dawned there was a great deal of hatred. Then, the Archbishop of Cape Town, Desmond Tutu, revived the African (and I would contend Christian) notion of ubuntu.

What is ubuntu? It is the idea that a person is only really be a person (a self) through other persons. It claims that the idea of a solitary individual is a contradiction, because we only really become fully human when we are in relationship with others. As Desmond Tutu put it (and I paraphrase): “I need you with all your giftedness and weakness, so that I can be me with all my giftedness and weakness.” At the core of ubuntu is the idea of restorative justice, because we need justice – acknowledgement of wrongdoing – but we also need each to forgive each other so we need to be restored to each other. How we relate to others defines who we are. Ubuntu might be an African concept, but I am convinced that it applies everywhere. Forgiveness is at the core; without it, there can be no hope; no way forward.

In our reading, Peter once more acts as the spokesman for all the disciples asking: ‘Must one pardon seven times?’ which is just another way of saying always. Matthew is referring back to Genesis where Lamech avenged himself 77 – fold (Genesis 4.24) and as de Dietrich comments, ‘... to the absolute of vengeance is opposed the absolute pardon.’

Jesus goes on to illustrate this point be using a parable about a debtor who had absolutely no chance of paying off his debt, who is released from his responsibility, but who refuses to be as merciful to those who are in his debt. To put it into context, in today’s money the difference is between £3 million and £5. How can any Christian, who has received so much from God ever crush another by refusing to forgive them? Nothing can compare with the graciousness of God; this means that there is nothing any person can do to offend us so greatly that means we ought not to forgive them, because ‘... one who does not pardon his neighbour excludes himself by that fact from communion with God.’ Jesus repeats this teaching several times and, as de Dietrich concludes, makes the point that ‘... he who shuts out mercy shows that he has understood nothing of the love of God, of the extraordinary pardon of which he himself is the object’ (see 5.7, 43-48; 6.12-15).

This is hard ...

The words are relatively easy, and in our minds we know that they are true, but when people have been hurt and degraded in the deepest way, like black people under the Apartheid government in South Africa, where loved ones were brutally tortured and killed, where others were murdered by necklace killings and other horrors, we realise that what Jesus is talking about here is also the fact that, this is all impossible for humans. Here too, we are totally reliant on God’s unmerited and deserved grace, for otherwise it will never happen.

One also thinks of that horrific defining historic moment when the terrorists flew Jumbo Jets into the Twin Towers in New York. I heard about it just before taking a GCSE Religious Studies lesson. Two lovely, but naughty boys came to me saying that I needed to go into the Geography department to see the television, because someone had flown a jet into a building in New York. I chided them for yet another of their attempts to delay the start of the lesson; but this time they were telling the truth. And the world has never been, and will never be the same again. It must be so hard for those who lost loved ones, so many of them, in the prime of their lives, to forgive; and it would be churlish to understate how difficult this must be. But, in the interests of the people who have been hurt, they must.

Corrie Ten Boom, the Dutch woman who suffered so heavily at the hands of the Nazis in a concentration camp gives some insight as to ‘How?’ She writes of how she had been unable to forget a wrong that had been done to her. She had forgiven the person, but she kept rehashing the incident and so couldn't sleep. Finally Corrie cried out to God for help in putting the problem to rest. "His help came in the form of a kindly Lutheran pastor," Corrie wrote, "to whom I confessed my failure after two sleepless weeks." "Up in the church tower," he said, nodding out the window, "is a bell which is rung by pulling on a rope. But you know what? After the sexton lets go of the rope, the bell keeps on swinging. First ding, then dong. Slower and slower until there's a final dong and it stops. I believe the same thing is true of forgiveness. When we forgive, we take our hand off the rope. But if we've been tugging at our grievances for a long time, we mustn't be surprised if the old angry thoughts keep coming for a while. They're just the ding-dongs of the old bell slowing down." "And so it proved to be. There were a few more midnight reverberations, a couple of dings when the subject came up in my conversations, but the force -- which was my willingness in the matter -- had gone out of them. They came less and less often and at the last stopped altogether: we can trust God not only above our emotions, but also above our thoughts."

We owe so much to Peter’s weakness of rushing into speech and being impetuous, because it always resulted in our Lord explaining things so well and clearly in order to deal with Peter’s folly. At the time, Peter’s suggestion of 7 times would have appeared generous, because it was Jewish custom to only forgive 3 times and there is good biblical precedent for this, especially Amos chapter 1. The implication is that on the 4th offence, the offender must be punished. It was not thought that if God decreed this and behaved in this way, humans could not be expected to do more!

Peter had got what Jesus was saying and wanted clarity; so he thought he was exaggerating generosity toward sinners – he takes the Rabbinic idea of 3, doubles it and adds another one for good measure. He expected to be praised for his depth of insight and graciousness. There is a sense of eager self-satisfaction in Peter’s behaviour.

Jesus replies that Peter is miles off the point; because Christians ought to be willing to place no limit of their forgiveness. Jesus goes on to teach into this situation using a parable and Barclay suggests that this parable taught certain lessons that, as Barclay suggests, ‘... Jesus never tired of teaching ...’ and I refer to Barclay’s commentary to explain these points:

Firstly, Jesus taught that people must forgive in order to be forgiven. We all recall the Sermon on the Mount where Jesus taught: ‘Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy.’ This is of course central to the Lord’s Prayer: ‘Forgive us our sins, as we forgive the sins of others.’ James also writes: ‘For judgement will be without mercy, to anyone who has shown no mercy.’

Secondly, we have already seen how massive the debt of the first servant was. Kennedy explains that nothing that any person can do to us can compare with the debt we owe to God; ‘... and if God has forgiven us the debt we owe Him, we must forgive our fellow-men the debts they owe to us.’ Barclay adds: ‘Nothing that we have to forgive can even faintly or remotely compare with that which we have been forgiven.’

We have been forgiven a debt that is impossible to pay, and so we must forgive as God has forgiven us.

We know that it is impossible if we try to do this in our own strength, but God’s grace is sufficient for us; God’s grace made it possible for the Truth and Reconciliation Commission to work and for people to do the impossible and forgive each other. Let us pray that the hurt people remember today because of the 9/11 horror, can also be put to rest, because God’s love and grace releases people from it as they are enabled to forgive.

But what about ourselves? I am sure I am not alone in finding it most difficult to forgive myself. Karl Menninger, the famed psychiatrist, once said that if he could convince the patients in psychiatric hospitals that their sins were forgiven, 75 percent of them could walk out the next day!

I close with an illustration (see e-sermons.com) that I have found most helpful in my own journey.

In A Forgiving God in an Unforgiving World, Ron Lee Davis retells the true story of a priest in the Philippines, a much- loved man of God,  who carried the burden of a secret sin he had committed many years before. He had repented but still had no peace, no sense of God's forgiveness. In his parish was a woman who deeply loved God and who claimed to have visions in which she spoke with Christ and he with her. The priest, however, was sceptical. To test her he said, "The next time you speak with Christ, I want you to ask him what sin your priest committed while he was in seminary." The woman agreed. A few days later the priest asked., "Well, did Christ visit you in your dreams?"  "Yes, he did," she replied.
"And did you ask him what sin I committed in seminary?"
"Yes."
"Well, what did he say?"
"He said, 'I don't remember'"
What God forgives, He forgets.

Today Jesus provides comfort and hope to all – sinner and sinned against alike as we read: ‘And out of pity for him, the lord of that slave released him and forgave him the debt.’ Amen.