Readings (Track 1)

Last week’s reading dropped us into the middle of Jesus’ description of the sort of people we need to be for this ‘church’ to function properly: humble, attentive, responsive, and ready to engage in some fairly risky behavior when a member of the church sinned against us. (“If another member of the church sins against you, go and point out the fault when the two of you are alone.”) The obvious question: how often do we need to repeat that procedure?

There’s some evidence that similar questions had been addressed by other rabbis. Sometimes they went back to the prophet Amos. We repeatedly encounter this in the first two chapters: “Thus says the LORD: For three transgressions of Damascus, and for four, I will not revoke the punishment” (Amos 1:3). So forgive three times (somewhat more generous than the three strikes rule)? Peter, doubling that number and adding one for good measure, may have thought he was at the upper end of the possible options. “Lord, how often shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? As many as seven times?” Jesus’ response “I do not say to you seven times, but seventy times seven,” would have been a surprise. Other translations give “seventy-seven times;” in either case the point is that it’s effectively an unlimited number of times.

So Jesus explains with a parable. The kingdom of heaven is like a king who sets out to settle accounts with his servants, and immediately encounters one who owes an astronomical sum. The king orders him and his family sold to begin settling the debt; the servant begs for mercy; the king has pity, releases him, forgives the debt. (That would—we might think—have been a really good place to end the parable.)  The servant goes out and encounters a fellow servant who owes him a modest sum. The scene (calling in of the debt, the pleading for mercy) is repeated, but the servant/creditor refuses to show mercy and delivers the fellow-servant to prison. Other servants see all this, report it to the king, and the first servant is soon before the king again: “’You wicked servant! I forgave you all that debt because you besought me; and should not you have had mercy on your fellow servant, as I had mercy on you?’ And in anger his lord delivered him to the jailers, till he should pay all his debt. So also my heavenly Father will do to every one of you, if you do not forgive your brother from your heart.”

The parable hinges two things: (1) the staggering contrast between the amount the servant owed to the king and the amount his fellow-servant owed him, (2) the conviction that receiving mercy established an obligation to show mercy. Jesus’ last words (“So also my heavenly Father will do to every one of you, if you do not forgive your brother from your heart.”) leave no doubt regarding the parable’s interpretation.

“One was brought to him who owed him ten thousand talents…” That’s Jesus’ description of the predicament each one of us is in before God. It summarizes the communal confessions scattered throughout the Old Testament which are in turn reflected in our confessions (“we have erred and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep, we have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts, we have offended against thy holy laws…”). Were God to even begin to “get tough on crime” each of us would be in an impossible situation. The Good News of the Gospel is that we don’t get what we deserve.

In context, as I suggested, these verses are a continuation of Jesus’ description of the sort of people we need to be for the church to function. What they add to the preceding verses is not only the teaching that we should be prepared to forgive fellow believers an unlimited number of times, but the reminder that this willingness properly flows from an awareness of how much we’ve been forgiven. Let’s stay with this a bit longer…

In contrast to some regrettable forms of popular piety, God is not interested in emphasizing the depth of the hole we’ve dug for ourselves outside the double call to gratitude and generosity (as in this text). Today’s text is the only time in this Gospel that the crushing debt that God has forgiven is stressed, and it’s precisely in the context of the implicit obligation of gratitude and the explicit obligation of generosity. (Parenthetically, it would be hard to overestimate the role of gratitude in making forgiveness possible—but that would be another sermon.

Besides stressing the importance of forgiveness, the parable is a sort of “you are here” map. Like the unforgiving servant we’re in the space between the receipt of God’s forgiveness (our Baptism), and an accounting regarding our forgiveness of others (the Last Judgment). We don’t earn our salvation, but, as this parable warns, we’re capable of trashing it.

In other words, while our salvation is free in the sense that we don’t buy it, it is not free in the no-strings-attached sense. Jesus makes this explicit in presenting and explaining what we call “the Lord’s Prayer.” “And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.” That is, in fact, the only clause in the Lord’s Prayer that our Lord footnotes: “For if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you; but if you do not forgive others, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.” And this obligation to forgive is, in turn, also an expression of the Sermon on the Mount’s call to “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” (Mt 5:44). Implicit in all this is the logic of the parable: we’re to love our enemies because God loved us when we were His enemies (Rom 5).

“Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us.” The simplicity of the petition can be misleading, for forgiveness is some of the hardest work we do as Christians. Some things we can forgive easily; some things we may spend a lifetime trying to get to the point of being able to desire to be able to forgive. In Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer C.S. Lewis writes “Last week, while at prayer, I suddenly discovered—or felt as if I did—that I had really forgiven someone I had been trying to forgive for over 30 years. Trying, and praying that I might” (p.106).

To step back a little from the parable, to forgive, obviously, is not to say that the debt or offense doesn’t matter. The claims of justice are recognized—and suspended. As in the parable, the debt is wiped from the books. With regard to that now-cancelled debt, the person I forgive does not owe me anything. This gives the relationship a future—but it doesn’t determine what that future will be. To say “I forgive you” is not to say “I’m going to pretend that it never happened, and things will continue just as they have been.” So, for example, a Christian in an abusive relationship has the obligation to work to be able to forgive the abuser, but that obligation, that forgiveness, does not mean staying vulnerable to that abuse. As in the first lesson, the first priority is often to get Israel out of Egypt.

But back to the parable, where the first servant says “Have patience with me, and I will pay you everything.” And contrary to all reasonable expectation: “And out of pity for him, the lord…released him and forgave him that debt.” May we let that moment in the parable sink in deep and transform our very being.