Forgiveness: A Meditation on Matthew 18

Then came Peter to him, and said, 

Lord, how oft shall my brother sin against me, 

and I forgive him? till seven times?

Jesus saith unto him, I say not unto thee, 

Until seven times: but, Until seventy times seven.

Forgiveness may be among the hardest things for people to offer each other, even while knowing it is the thing everyone needs most.  In the Gospel lesson for this week from Matthew 18, St. Peter asked Jesus a seemingly generous question, thinking that forgiving his neighbor up to seven times was far beyond any custom or social necessity.  And who would quibble?  If my neighbor stole my lawnmower once and asked forgiveness, what kind of heroic soul would authentically forgive the same neighbor for stealing from him seven times?  In practical terms, Peter’s suggestion seemed beyond gracious, and frankly beyond what almost anyone is ever willing to do.

Jesus, however, knew that while Peter was heading in the right direction regarding grace for his neighbor, he had failed to see the depths of his own need for grace, which had given him a false sense of piety with his offering.  First, Jesus bowled Peter over with a symbolic calculation that multiplied his number by 70 (a number which signified completeness or totality) and then illustrated the point with a parable.  In that story, a king began settling accounts with his servants whom he had trusted to steward his resources well.  Coming across a servant who owed him 10,000 talents— a sum beyond imagining which the servant had lost of his king’s wealth— the king issued the decree that this incompetent embezzler be sold, together with his wife and children, so that some recovery of his debt might be made and some approximation of justice be satisfied.  Since a talent of gold was more than a year’s wages for a worker (around 75 pounds of gold would be over $1M dollars in contemporary value, so 10,000 talents would be somewhere north of $100B,) even this would repay only a tiny fraction of what was lost.  The servant begged his master to have mercy and patience with him, making an impossible promise to repay everything, knowing that he couldn’t live long enough to even make a dent in that much debt.  The king, moved with compassion for the doomed servant and his family who stole unfathomable riches from his treasury, did the unthinkable:  he forgave the servant the entire debt.  Rather than selling the servant off, punishing him, or enslaving him under that debt for the rest of his life, the king forgave it and freed the servant from the debt and justice he was owed.

In converse, that same servant went out and found a fellow servant who owed him 100 denarii— roughly 100 days wages for the average worker.  It was not an insignificant sum, as I’m sure most people would think 1/3 of their annual paycheck was nothing to sneeze at.  He seized his fellow servant and demanded payment.  When the servant asked for patience and mercy to repay the debt— something that given time and effort, he could probably do— the first servant mercilessly threw him into debtors prison to work off the sum he owed, caring nothing for the impact it would have on the man and his family to be locked away in slavery for months, no longer able to support, house, clothe, or feed his wife and children.  The king’s other servants were grieved over what they saw, and reported the abuse to their master.  The king’s fury was swift and devastating, demanding to know why this wicked servant who received so much life-saving grace from him, could not extend even the smallest amount of grace to his neighbor.  Thus the king gave the unforgiving servant back his unplayable debt, and handed him over to the torturers until every penny was repaid— an imagery of hell’s eternal torment, where infinite time cannot erase the debt and scandal we have caused in the universe, perverting and destroying God’s good creation, and wasting His riches on our pride and debauchery.

And so, Jesus’ Word comes to everyone today, just as it did to St. Peter and the Disciples.  This Word reminds us that every human soul is a debtor before God, and everyone who lives, lives by His grace, mercy, love, and compassion.  To receive the forgiveness of God, a debt we could never live long enough to repay and which we could never deserve, yet not reflect that same grace and forgiveness to those whose petty sins against us are mere droplets compared to the ocean of our own sins against God, is to sin not only against the Law but against Grace.  We who live by grace through faith in the Son of God have had our incalculable debt forgiven by the sacrifice of Jesus upon His Cross, where the infinite merit of God alone could be our salvation.  Thus standing by grace through faith in Jesus, we have no appeal to God according to justice and the Law, as if to demand something be owed to us, when instead of the hell we deserve, we have instead been given the Kingdom of Heaven as our inheritance.  We are a people marked by grace, living in the faith and love and compassion which was given so freely and undeservingly to us, and called to reflect the same to everyone around us.

Hear the Word of the Lord which comes to you, that you might by faith and repentance live in the mercy and compassion of your saving King.  Let go the debts of justice you think you’re owed by those who have sinned against you, and instead reflect God’s love and forgiveness to them, so that they, too, might know the same unfathomable riches which you have freely received.  Forgive your neighbor, not because he deserves it, nor because you think he might repay you later— but because you know that you are a debtor who’s sins are washed away in the blood of Christ, and that God’s love for you is for your neighbor, too.  Hear the Word of Christ, turn from your demands for justice or vengeance, that both you and your neighbor might be forgiven and live.  Amen.