I’ll be playing some catch-up this week, posting a few sermons I’ve gotten to preach in the last few months—which has been an absolute joy! All of them will be edited down from full sermon to blog post, but hopefully the points will hold ;)
This one I preached in September to a small church of lovely people in Richfield, Utah. The text was Matthew 18:21-35, which I (highly) suggest you read here.
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In chapter 18, Matthew tells the story of Jesus having a conversation with his disciples about what the Kingdom of Heaven is like, and more specifically about what it means to be in relationship with other believers. When Peter asks the question, “How many times should I forgive someone who keeps sinning against me, Jesus? Up to seven times?” I don’t think he got the answer he was expecting. Peter thought he was being generous. Jesus tells him he doesn’t get it.
“Not just seven times, but seventy-seven times. The number isn’t what matters. Your capacity to forgive must be limitless. And not only that, but the consequences of not forgiving are pretty severe.”
The parable Jesus then tells—the Parable of the Unforgiving Servant—is one that I’ve struggled with a lot, not only because forgiveness is hard, but because it seems to end with a God who is ready to give us up to torture if we fail. I don’t happen to have anyone who owes me money like the wicked servant did (that I know of), but there are people that I have struggled to forgive. I start to ask…
Is it fair to let someone off the hook who has hurt me so many times?
And what if I can’t do it? What if I fail?
Will God cast me aside if I don’t have it within me to forgive?
I think the bad news is that, by ourselves, we can’t forgive. We will always fail.
In the Reformed tradition, we call our situation “total depravity.” It means that without God, there is nothing in us that is not mired in sin. It means that out of our own capacity, there is no way we can forgive as many times as is necessary—if even at all. It is part of our own debt that we are broken and fallible human beings. And Jesus points out exactly that in this parable.
The wicked slave owed the king 10,000 talents. A gold talent was the most valuable coin in the Roman empire. If a laborer or slave worked for an entire day, they would only make a coin called a denarius. A gold talent was worth 6,000 denarii. That means it would take that slave more than 15 years to make the equivalent of one gold talent. And this slave owed the king 10,000 of them! It’s more than he could make in thousands of lifetimes. It is an unpayable debt. It would have cost him his life.
We are in a situation where no matter how hard we work, no matter how many times we try to forgive, it will never be enough to pay off what we owe to God.
Thankfully, the parable comes with some good news first. It doesn’t start with the king condemning the wicked slave for not showing mercy. It starts with the king taking pity on his slave and forgiving those lifetimes worth of debt. The good news—the news, Jesus says, that the entire Kingdom of Heaven is built on—is that God acted first. God looked at the magnitude of our sin… our total depravity… and in the face of limitless debt, God showed us limitless grace.
As Jesus is sitting here talking with his disciples, they don’t yet understand what that will cost… but we do. To forgive us that debt, and to make it possible for us to have restored relationships with God and other people, Jesus paid that price with his own life. It is a free gift of grace. That’s why when the king condemns the unforgiving slave he says, “Should you not have had mercy on your fellow slave as I had mercy on you?” It is only in the fact that we are already forgiven that we are able to forgive others.
Paul
knows this, too, when he’s writing to the church in Ephesus. He says:
“Do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, with which you were marked with a seal for the day of redemption. Put away from you all bitterness and wrath and anger and wrangling and slander, together with all malice, and be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ has forgiven you.” (4:30-32)
And
again, in Colossians (3:13):
“Bear with one another and, if anyone has a complaint against another, forgive each other; just as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive.”
God
doesn’t expect that we can do it alone—in fact, he knows that we can’t; that’s
why he stepped in to make it possible. In
dying on the cross, Jesus became both the model and the means by which we are
able to forgive.
You must forgive your brother and sister from your heart, Jesus says—sincerely and completely. This isn’t what I want to do. But if Jesus paid my debt… he paid theirs too. Who am I to hold onto it?
That doesn’t make it easy. The pain that other people cause us is still very real. But it’s still only a few hundred denarii in the face of ten thousand talents. It’s worth letting go so Christ can heal us and make us whole.
I
don’t know who’s on your list to forgive.
I don’t know if the ink is fresh, or if it’s been dry for a long time. Maybe this parable feels like a comfort, or
maybe it feels like a warning. But at
the end of the day, if we choose to hold on to someone else’s debt to us, we
exclude ourselves from the kingdom of heaven… because in the kingdom
of heaven, there are no debts. They’ve
all been paid. It is marked only
by limitless grace. Thank you, God,
for that.
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