Unforgiving

Propers: The Sixteenth Sunday After Pentecost (Lectionary 24), AD 2023 A

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for You know his sins are great.

Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

The Parable of the Unforgiving or Unmerciful Servant appears only in Matthew’s Gospel, and arises in response to a specific question from Simon Peter to Jesus Christ:  “Lord, if another member of the assembly sins against me, how often should I forgive? As many as seven times?”

In asking this, Peter has every right to believe that he is being magnanimous. First century rabbinical discussion recommended forgiving an offender three times, based upon the witness of the Prophet Amos that God forgives wrongdoing thrice over. And who can be more forgiving than God? By more than doubling the expected standard, Peter’s being generous. I mean, imagine how this would play out.

If someone in your community wronged you, and you forgave them, and wronged you, and you forgave them, and wronged you, and you forgave them, and wronged you—how many of us would still be sticking around? No-one wants to be a doormat. No-one wants to be abused. Yet if Peter swings the door wide, Jesus blows it off its hinges. “Not seven times, I tell you, but 70 times seven!”

And He launches into a story, as He is wont to do. “For this reason,” He says, “the Kingdom of Heaven may be compared to a king who wished to settle accounts with his slaves.” Note, right off the bat, that the Kingdom of Heaven—which is to say, the reign of God inaugurated in Jesus Christ—can be compared to this story, insofar as it deals with forgiveness. This is a parable of Christian life together, not a roadmap to the hereafter.

One slave owes the king 10,000 talents, a ridiculous, brobdingnagian sum. Quick lesson in New Testament economics: A denarius is roughly one day’s wage. An unskilled laborer, with good, steady employment, could expect to earn 300 denarii per year. A talent is 6,000 denarii, 20 years’ income, which would be a lifetime’s earnings for most. This slave owes 10,000 talents, 10,000 lifetimes. And the only reason it’s not more than that is because a myriad—literally 10,000—was the highest number the Greeks had. Because honestly, who needs more than a myriad of anything?

So the king decides that since there’s no way he’s ever getting his money back out of this guy, he will sell the slave along with all of his family and all of their possessions to at least remunerate some of his loss. Yet the slave falls down, prostrating himself, begging the king to just give him time, and he’ll pay back the whole massive sum. And the king, who is no fool, refuses. Instead, he does something better: He forgives him all his debts. Everything. Every last denarius.

This is beyond magnanimity, as Jesus’ hearers well would know. The Roman Empire was a slaveocracy. Those who fell into debt and could not pay would be scourged and sold as property. The enslaved were then classed as chattel, as disposable, as subhuman. Poor people feared debts for good reason. Little wonder that Jesus taught His disciples to pray, “Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.”

The slave in the story is doubtless overjoyed, just as the hearers of this tale would be taken aback, gobsmacked. Hebrews loved hyperbole. But now the plot thickens. This same slave, having been forgiven the world, having had his person, his possessions, and his family all saved, now goes out and immediately comes across a fellow slave who owes him 100 denarii. Now obviously that’s pocket-change by comparison. You can pay off 100 denarii in a few months; yet I bet many in Jesus’ audience could be enslaved for less than that.

“Be patient with me and I will pay you,” quoth the second slave, the same words as the first. Yet the first is not so forgiving, and he whose debt was absolved 10,000 talents casts his fellow into prison for a paltry hundred silver coins. This gets back to the king. Honestly, how could it not? And in his wrath the king calls him in and says, “You wicked slave! I forgave you all that debt because you pled with me. Should you not have had mercy on your fellow slave, as I have had mercy on you?” And the king imprisons him, and tortures him, until he has paid the final farthing.

“So My Father will do to you,” Jesus says, “if you do not forgive your brother from your heart.” Now that’s some scary stuff, isn’t it? We start off with a merciful king, and end up with a wrathful one. Yet let us not be too hasty. This is a parable, a story, after all. And it can be compared with the Kingdom of Heaven, as Jesus tells us at the outset, only insofar as it illustrates how often we are to forgive. God forgives us more than we could ever conceive. Who are we, then, to withhold our own meager forgiveness from others?

Oftentimes Christians feel conflicted about the justice and mercy of God, as though they contradicted each other, as though they were mutually exclusive. And that’s because down here they often appear to be. We treat mercy and justice as opposites. You can have one but not the other. Justice to the oppressor is mercy to the oppressed, right? Similarly, to forgive can seem unfair. Do we let bad guys get away with it? And if so, how often? Three times? Seven? 70 times seven?

But God does not work in this way. He is not schizophrenic, flicking from justice to mercy, with all of us fearing the flip of His coin. Rather, as the great preacher George MacDonald well understood, justice and mercy in God are both one and the same. They both become truth. A perfect justice culminates in mercy, and a perfect mercy offers us opportunity for restitution, to rectify the wrong, to heal what we have harmed.

This becomes clearer when we better understand forgiveness. Because forgiveness does not mean forgetting. Forgiveness does not mean that there are no repercussions. Forgiveness does not mean that we must abandon justice, for justice is the public face of love. In the context of the Bible, forgiveness simply means that we relinquish claims to vengeance. That’s it. It doesn’t mean that we have to be push-overs, patsies, or pansies. It doesn’t mean that we have to feel good about bad things done to us. And it sure as heck doesn’t mean that we need to remain in abusive or hurtful situations.

All it means is that we refuse to return evil for evil, harm for harm. We let our vengeance go. We don’t lose truth. We don’t lose justice. We sure as heck don’t lose love. But we refuse that part of us that wants to hurt them back, to hurt the world back. And we must do this from our heart—which does not mean that we have to force ourselves to feel a certain way, to pretend that we’re happy when we’re angry and hurt. No. All it means is that we’re honest when we say we won’t strike back. To forgive from the heart has to do with integrity, not emotions.

And that’s what we are called to do, seven by 70 times. God forgives us all the harm that we have done to Him; which is really to say, the harm that we’ve done to His children. This does not absolve us of our responsibility to love our neighbor, to feed the hungry, to liberate the oppressed. To the contrary! God forgives us so that we can do these very things; forgives us our debts, that we forgive our debtors; liberates us from death and hell, that we can liberate all. We are not freed from love, but freed to love.

God’s love is unconditional. His mercy is everlasting. His grace is infinite. Yet if we respond to our liberation by refusing to liberate others, then we never truly understood our freedom in the first place. We still are in our chains. We’ve returned to our bondage, to the fleshpots of Egypt. The message of the parable cannot be that God will only love us, only forgive us, if we do this thing, if we follow His command: “You’d best forgive your neighbor or I’ll take My mercy back!” God, no.

But we must see that grace is all or nothing, that love of God and love of neighbor are in fact the same. To forgive and to be forgiven are one, just as justice and mercy are one. They cannot be separated, cannot be opposed. In Christ are all forgiven. In Christ are all set free.

Our neighbor’s salvation is our own; that is the Kingdom of God.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

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