Friday, February 27, 2015
Today’s Scripture: Matthew 18:21-35
"For this reason the kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who wished to settle accounts with his slaves…. Should you not have had mercy on your fellow slave, as I had mercy on you?'” (Matt. 18:23. 33)
A [man] had a particular besetting sin, and he used to confess it and God would forgive him. But no sooner had he been absolved than he would trip up and sin again. One day this happened, and he rushed back to God and said, "I'm sorry, I've done it again." And God asked, "What have you done again?" For God suffers from amnesia when it comes to our sins. God does not look at the caterpillar we are now, but at the dazzling butterfly we have in us to become. In the Lord's Prayer, Jesus bids us ask God to forgive us as we forgive those who have wronged us. Not to forgive others is to shut the door to our own being forgiven. - Desmond Tutu, An African Prayer Book (New York: Doubleday, 1995), 38.
In his book Forgive and Forget: Healing the Hurts We Don’t Deserve, Lewis Smedes says that the parable of the unforgiving servant is about God and us. It promises that if we act like the unforgiving servant, then God will act like the king. “Jesus grabs the hardest trick in the bag, forgiving, and says we have to perform it or we are out in the cold, way out, in the boondocks of the unforgiven .… He is tough because the incongruity of sinners refusing to forgive sinners boggles God’s mind. He cannot cope with it; there is no honest way to put up with it.”
In the gospel of Matthew, Peter walks up to Jesus and says, “Lord, if another member of the church sins against me, how often should I forgive? As many as seven times?” Jesus answers, “Not seven times, but, I tell you, seventy-seven times” (18:21-22). Then Jesus tells this parable about the unforgiving servant.
Now some will object to this open-ended approach to forgiveness, saying that it turns Christians into doormats, fails to hold sinners accountable, and invites abusers to continue their abuse. The Chinese consider Jesus’ teaching about forgiveness unmanly.
A Chinese Christian was once explaining forgiveness to a group of people gathered in the chapel by the mission hospital. He said, “I will tell you how we obey this commandment. When you are sick or hurt, you come to the hospital and we nurse you, dress your wounds, and care for you, but you go away and revile us and lie about us. Then, when you are sick once more, you come back and we nurse you, and care for you again and again. That is forgiveness.”
Jesus is saying that forgiveness is at the heart of life in the church — it creates a distinctively merciful community. Why is this? The parable of the unforgiving servant answers this question by revealing the reason we must offer forgiveness to one another. It has nothing to do with the pursuit of justice, and everything to do with the character of God. Jesus says that the kingdom of heaven “may be compared to a king who wished to settle accounts with his slaves” (v. 23). So Jesus is saying that we can learn a little something about life in God’s kingdom by paying attention to a story about how this king deals with his debtors.
The king begins by calling a debtor to appear before him. The man owes him 10,000 talents, which is an insanely large sum of money. The king orders the slave to be sold, together with his wife and children and all his possessions, so that a payment can be made. With nothing left to lose, the slave falls on his knees before the king and says, “Have patience with me, and I will pay you everything.” Surprisingly, the king shows pity and releases the slave, forgiving him the entire debt (vv. 24-27).
That’s the kind of God we have, says Jesus, a king who has mercy on us, and who forgives us our debts. Now that’s a pleasant parable, but we haven’t reached the end. That freshly forgiven slave races out comes upon a second slave who owes him a hundred denarii, a significant sum, but it’s positively microscopic compared to what the first slave owed the king. The first slave seizes the second slave by the throat and demands that he pay him what he owes. The second slave falls down and pleads with him, “Have patience with me, and I will pay you” (v. 29).
No way, says the first slave. Not gonna happen. He throws the second slave in prison until the whole debt is paid. When his fellow slaves see what has happened, they go and give the king a full report. The king summons the first slave and says, “You wicked slave! I forgave you all that debt because you pleaded with me. Why didn’t you show mercy to your fellow slave, as I did to you?”
Jesus concludes with the words, “So my heavenly Father will also do to every one of you, if you do not forgive your brother or sister from your heart” (v. 35). There’s an unbreakable bond between the forgiveness of God and the forgiveness we are to offer one another, making it illogical and impossible for us to accept the mercy of the Lord and then refuse to extend mercy to others. Jesus summarizes this quite succinctly in his teaching of the Lord’s Prayer, “Forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors” (Matthew 6:12).
God is betting that we have been transformed by his forgiveness into the kind of people who can do the hard work of forgiving others. God knows that his mercy can have a surprising and wonderful effect, it can create a kingdom community of merciful people.
- Forgiveness is not saying the offense never happened. It did.
- Forgiveness is not saying that everything's okay. It isn't.
- Forgiveness is not saying we no longer feel the pain of the offense. We do.
- Forgiveness was saying "I still feel the pain, but I am willing to let go of your involvement in my pain."
- Forgiveness is an attitude of faith whereby we are able to turn over to God the business of how the other guy is doing.
Today’s Lectionary Readings
Morning: Psalms 22; 148
Evening: Psalms 105; 130
Deut. 10:12–22
Hebrews 4:11–16
John 3:22–36
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