Fifteenth Sunday
after Pentecost (A—Proper 19)
September 17, 2017
Text: Matt. 18:21-35
Beloved
in the Lord, it’s time to be honest with yourself, and honest with God. There are grudges you hold in your
heart. There are offenses you just can’t
entirely forgive. Perhaps there are
family members with whom you will not speak, ex-friends who betrayed you,
Church members who spoke hurtful words to you.
You do not claim the fault for the broken relationship for
yourself. You lay it squarely at your
neighbor’s feet. If others knew the sin
committed against you, they wouldn’t blame you.
No, they would recognize the justice of your grievance. Do you see what you have done? You have justified yourself. And you have damned your neighbor. So much for loving your neighbor as
yourself. You have set yourself up as
judge, jury, and executioner. Yes, you
were wronged. Yes, you were hurt. Yes, your neighbor is a sinner deserving the
wrath of Almighty God. So are you. Sinners have no business damning
sinners. Repent. And let it go. Release your neighbor. Release yourself. In binding your neighbor to his sin, you’ve
actually bound yourself to his sin.
You’re all tied up. The loosing
starts with a simple, three-word sentence.
I forgive you. It is first of
all, and most especially, the Lord’s Word to you in Christ: “I forgive you all
your sins.” And because it is the Lord’s
Word to you, it is now your word to your neighbor. “Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive
those who trespass against us,” we pray.
That is a declaration to God, to yourself, and to one another, that you
forgive the sins of all sinners who have sinned against you. All of them.
Unconditionally. And then the
harder work begins: To treat them accordingly.
Peter
thinks he is being generous. He has
begun to grasp our Lord’s teaching on mercy, and he actually proposes a degree
of mercy that, for most of us, is unrealistic.
“Lord, how often will my brother
sin against me, and I forgive him? As
many as seven times?” (Matt. 18:21; ESV).
Now, think about that. If I were
to walk up and punch you in the nose,
and there you are, bruised and bleeding with a broken schnoz, but I say to you, “Oh, I’m so sorry. Please forgive me,” and you say, “I forgive
you, Pastor,” everyone would marvel at your Christian charity. That is mercy, they would say, and they would
be right. Pastor deserved retaliation,
an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a nose for a nose. But now, let’s say, the very next week, right
here in the Church, I walk up to you and punch you again in your already sore
and disfigured nose. Now, no one would
blame you if you knocked me on my keister.
But you know what your Lord has taught you about mercy. So again, you forgive me. But let’s say that this little scenario
happens seven weeks in a row! Could you
really keep forgiving, not take vengeance on me, not call the police on me,
bear with me in patience? Even you,
model Christian that you are? Peter’s
proposal is extraordinarily generous.
Seven times your neighbor sins against you, and seven times you take it
on the nose. Incredible.
And
Jesus says, that’s not good enough. “I do not say to you seven times, but
seventy times seven” (v. 22). And
the point is not that you count up to 490 times, and the 491st time
you can clobber me. The point is that
you be merciful, as your Lord is merciful to you. Forgive, as you have been forgiven. But there are some of us… okay, all of us…
who do not understand the sheer magnitude of our Lord’s mercy upon us, and
therefore our duty to forgive one another.
So our Lord tells a parable.
It’s
amazing. The servant owes his master ten
thousand talents. This is difficult to
translate into today’s money, because all the commentators have different
ideas, and the plain fact is that there were multiple standards for the measure
of a talent in the ancient world. Let’s
just say this is somewhere in the millions or billions of dollars. This is not a debt that the servant could
ever hope to pay, not in a lifetime.
Yet, he has the audacity to tell the king that if he’s patient, gives
the servant enough time, he’ll pay back every penny. Clearly the servant doesn’t grasp the sheer
magnitude of his debt if he thinks he can pay back even a fraction. What an ungrateful wretch! Incidentally, that’s you before God. You have not even the fraction of an inkling
of the magnitude of your sin. You’re a
good Lutheran, so you know it’s big. But
part of confession is confessing you don’t even have a clue how big it is. You are unaware of most of your sins, and you
don’t think on a daily basis about how you’ve merited the eternal flames of
hell. And sometimes, perish the thought,
it even enters your mind that somehow, someway, even if just a little bit, you
can repay your Lord. Christ have mercy.
But
here is the astonishing thing. The King
forgives the servant. Your Father forgives
you. The whole debt. All of it.
He does not send you out to work for Him to make up for it, even just a
little. He does not make you empty the pennies out of your pocket
to recover at least a few cents of the billions you owe Him. He wipes the slate clean. He erases the ledger. In fact, something even more amazing
happens. He doesn’t just pretend there
is no debt. He makes His Son pay
it. The whole thing. To the very last drop of sacred blood. He sends His Son to the cross for your
forgiveness. And He gives all the riches
of His Son, paid to cover your debt, to you as a gift. This is lavish mercy. This is utterly ridiculous. No human economy works this way. This only happens in God’s economy. He does it for you. He does it for your neighbor. He does it for all people. Beloved in the Lord, all your sins are forgiven.
For Christ’s sake.
Now,
if you believe that, how can you possibly hold your neighbor’s sins against
him? When you do, you’ve misunderstood
the Gospel. You don’t really believe
your sins, and the price paid for their forgiveness by the Lord Himself, are all that significant. You’re like the servant, who, having been
forgiven billions of dollars, threw his fellow-servant into debtor’s prison for
a few measly hundred dollar bills. How
did the King react to the news? “‘You wicked servant! I forgave you all that debt because you
pleaded with me. And should not you have
had mercy on your fellow servant, as I had mercy on you?’ And in anger his master delivered him to the
jailers until he should pay all his debt” (vv. 32-34). As Jesus says in another place, immediately
after giving His disciples the Lord’s Prayer, “if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also
forgive you, but if you do not forgive others their trespasses, neither will
your Father forgive your trespasses” (Matt. 6:14-15).
It is
not that God’s forgiveness is predicated on you forgiving your neighbor. That would make God’s forgiveness conditional,
forgiveness earned by a work. The Gospel
is that He forgives your sins unconditionally, on account of Christ. Rather, your forgiveness of your neighbor is
predicated on God’s forgiveness to you. Because He has forgiven you all your
trespasses, you forgive those who have trespassed against you. His forgiveness is the power that enables you
to forgive.
As a
pastor, I’ve been around the block a time or two, and I can tell you that one
of the biggest struggles Christians have in their baptismal life is forgiveness
for those who have sinned against them.
Now, some of them are just being petty.
We all do it. Some small remark
or careless action, or even just our own misconceptions of a person’s words or
actions, get us all bent out of shape.
Repent of your pettiness. Be
charitable. Put the best construction on
everything, as is your duty under the 8th Commandment. But there are also Christians who carry
within them tremendous hurts from very real abuse, betrayal, violence, and
trauma. There is no getting around the
hard edges of our Lord’s teaching here.
This Word is for you, too. You
are to forgive. In no way is this to
minimize the magnitude of your own suffering at the hands of another
person. A hundred denarii is a pretty
significant sum. The point is, though,
it’s a drop in the bucket in comparison with the billions the unmerciful
servant owed the Master. Your neighbor’s
sins may be very significant, and you need pastoral care to work through them
and their aftermath. But they are a drop
in the ocean compared with the debt your Father has forgiven you, that Jesus
paid for you with His own blood and death.
Now,
what does it mean to forgive your neighbor?
First, what it does not mean. It
does not mean that you have to get the warm and fuzzies every time you think of
your neighbor. Forgiveness is not a
feeling. It is not an emotion. Hateful feelings are sinful, and you should
repent of them, but forgiveness is not a feeling. Forgiveness is a decision. It is a declaration. God declares your sins forgiven for Jesus’
sake. You declare your neighbor’s sins
forgiven for Jesus’ sake. And then you
act accordingly, as God acts accordingly.
What does that entail? Joseph is
the model in our Old Testament reading (Gen. 50:15-21). He declares his brothers forgiven and even
confesses that God has brought tremendous good out of the tremendous evil. Remember what they did to Joseph… they threw
him in a pit, planned to kill him, but instead sold him into slavery and faked
his death. That’s pretty real sin. Serious stuff. But he forgives them. And then what? He provides for them, comforts them, and
speaks kindly to them. In other words,
he seeks their welfare. He acts for
their benefit. That is forgiveness in
action.
This
takes practice. You won’t get it
perfect. You will struggle. But you can do it, and you should. Because Jesus has done it for you. He took it on the nose for you. He took it in the hands and feet and side for
you. He took it in His whole body and
soul for you. He took it all the way to
the cross for you, and nailed it there, in His flesh, to the wood. He suffered.
He bled. He died. He took all hell for you. And your debt is cancelled. He says of it, “It is finished.” And so it is.
And so is your neighbor’s. Let it
go. What is that grudge you are holding
on to? Declare it forgiven right now,
this very minute. And rejoice. You are free.
Your neighbor is free. Jesus
Christ is risen from the dead. So now we
come to the Christian family Supper Table in the peace of the Lord that is with
us always. Here there are no
grudges. Only debts cancelled in the
bold red letters of the blood of Jesus, shed for you. In the Name of the Father, and of the Son
(+), and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
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