HAS HE SAID HE IS SORRY? GROUNDS FOR FORGIVENESS
Matthew 18.21-35
Warner M. Bailey
Just how merciful was the king if he was ready to sell his servant and his estate as partial payment for the debt? Was it really possible for a king’s servant to run up such a fantastic debt? Can I really believe that the servant would have been so unmoved by the forgiveness of the sum that he would have tried to gouge his fellow-servant that way? How forgiving is the king, really, who would imprison a servant and have him tortured forevermore? What is it, actually, that God will do to every one of us who does not forgive from the heart? What does it mean to forgive from the heart? Does it mean to forgive warmly, feelingly, sincerely, genuinely, authentically? Was it easier for the rich king to forgive than the desperately poor servant? These questions lead us to the heart of Christian forgiveness. What does a deeper study of the parable tell us?
Such astronomical sums as 10,000 talents were not to be found in the dirt-poor Jews of Galilee and Judea. Yet in the glittering empires of Persia, Greece, Rome and Egypt such sums were possible to be amassed. A certain Joseph, son of Tobias, was a tax collector who offered his services to the Egyptian king Ptolemy Philadelphus to collect taxes totaling 16,000 talents from the regions of Coelesyria, Phonecia, Judea and Samaria. Jesus and his hearers may have known such stories. Here we have a king calling to account his servants who were tax gatherers in his empire. When the chief tax-man could not come up with the 10 million dollars he had obligated himself to collect, the king ordered him and his estate to be sold into slavery in order to re-capture something of the loss. The servant cries in anguish for more time to put the squeeze on his district in order to come up to scratch.
Then the king upsets how we think such matters ought to be resolved. The king has pity; he takes the outstanding bill owed to him and commutes it into a loan of 10 million dollars which he makes to the servant, and then he eats the loan himself. In the twinkling of an eye, the servant finds the burden lifted off his shoulders.
I invite you to see that in this kingdom a different style of justice operates. I do not believe that the king found it easy or a trite matter to forgive, to wipe off the books, what he had coming to him. Ten million dollars lost from a district shot a great big hole in the stability of his empire. The bungling of the most responsible job in the empire’s administration ripped open a large gap in the network of those the king trusted to carry out his orders. The loss of that much money and the loss of control over that most important of subordinates are powerful motivators for the king to sentence the servant and his family and estate to slavery. They are powerful enough motivators to move the king to turn a deaf ear to the desperate plea of the servant for more time. Your number’s up. You’ve had your chance. You messed up. Get out.
But another set of motivators are operating more powerfully than the ones we use, which overrides the decision for judgment and dismissal. In this kingdom, the importance of money and control took second place to the importance of human relationships. The rule of revenge took second place to the rule of showing pity to a person who had hurt you who himself was hurting under the pain of hurting you. The savage consequences of broken trust were commuted to the opportunity to reconcile and to teach. The king swallows his hurt, eats his financial loss, and sacrifices his chance to teach his subordinates who’s boss, all to the purpose that the most dominant themes of his kingdom be honored–human relationships, showing pity, reconciliation and teaching new character. The ten million dollars was nothing when compared to the plea of the servant–as irrational as it was–which tells you how precious to the king that prayer was for all its imperfections.
The king is free to choose one of two futures which will be the fate of his servant. He draws the future of forgiveness into the suffering of the present with the purpose of creating a new character in the person of his servant. The king pays a price that his servant may be saved from his past and liberated for a new future.
That is the way God forgives us. When we say in the Lord’s Prayer, “forgive us our debts,” the picture of the king forgiving the servant’s debt should jump into our minds. When we hear the Words of Institution spoken over the cup, “This is my blood, poured out for you for the forgiveness of sins,” we are to draw a straight line between the death of Jesus on the cross and the price the king paid that his servant might be saved from his past and liberated for a new future.
Every man and woman who comes before God has their life on the line. When David Cash defended aiding and abetting his friend Jeremy Strohmeyer in the strangulation of 7-year-old Sherrice Iverson in a Nevada casino bathroom, he said, “I didn’t want to be the person who takes away his last day, his last night of freedom….I’m not going to get upset over somebody else’s life. I just worry about myself first. I’m not going to lose sleep over somebody else’s problems.” That, my friends, is the face of sin and the voice of sin speaking. That is what our culture believes so fervently and says in thousands of expressions. That culture of sin we are born into and shaped by. That culture of sin drives us. That culture of sin is an affront to God, and our lives are on the line with God because we appear before him smelling of that culture of sin.
This culture of sin Jesus was born into and was shaped by. That culture of sin Jesus carried in his own body, and he struggled every step of his life against that culture. Christians believe that when Jesus called himself the Son of Man, he understood himself as the single and complete representative of the entirety of that culture of sin. The only way God could triumph over that culture was to direct Jesus to the cross and to draw Jesus from the tomb. Because of the cross and resurrection, God has triumphed over the culture of sin, and now can offer you forgiveness of sins, salvation from your past and liberation to a new way of living. The blood of Christ is poured out for the forgiveness
of sins. The resurrected Christ protects the promise of our forgiveness in the Kingdom of Heaven.
When in the Apostles’ Creed we say, “I believe in the forgiveness of sins,” we are stating: I have experienced wonderful release, relief, and joy flooding into me. Love, faith and caring have won in the struggle for what will dominate my living. “I believe in the forgiveness of sins,” means that we have swallowed our hurt pride; we have eaten our loss; we have sacrificed the chance to wield the big stick–so that one of our own kind, a sister or brother, may be saved from their past and liberated for a new future.
But our story goes on, doesn’t it, with much more serious problems to confront. The king does not now take his servant aside and teach him any new kind of lesson. He does not make plain the consequences of his new-found release. The style of this king is not to lay down a new law of limited forgiveness, but to assume that the experience of being suddenly free from such a frightening set of consequences will just sink in by its own weight into the very marrow of the servant and radically change his behavior. If any teaching happens, it is through example, by suggestion, by nudging, by indirection.
The servant, however, takes the gift of forgiveness as a sign that he is an exceptional person, that he now has kingly powers to compel and demand and call up accounts. Or perhaps, this servant really did not trust the forgiveness, and set about to gather up as much as he could as a hedge against the king’s going back on his word. Or perhaps, the gratitude for his great forgiveness did not sink down into the bottom of his heart where loathing over his humiliating pleading made him deaf and intolerant to another’s pleas for a similar pity. Has he said he was sorry? No.
But to make all this big scene with his fellow servant and to contradict step-by-step what had been given him earlier for the lousy sum of twenty dollars against a forgiven loan of ten million dollars? How tragic! How pathetic! How sorrowful!
The consequence of forgiveness is a change in your way of living by your forgiving as you have been forgiven. “Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors.” Why is it that the sins Christians commit against each other are more damaging than any hurt from outside the church? It is because we know better! Religious wars are more heinous in their tragedy. A political campaign is blatantly scurrilous where one candidate postures himself as the most moral, the most born-again because he is the hardest on homosexuals, on national enemies, on poor people, on women. Why is it that the church shoots its wounded–the young person who feels left out, the harassed manager, the lonely spouse of a traveling executive, the single person stuck off from family? Truth to tell, our tendency is to give preference to the regular attendee, the large giver, the big worker. In small groups we retain unto ourselves the right to tune some speakers out. Using the silent treatment, speaking truth in jest, handing out left-handed compliments and oblique remarks–all jack up the toll of suffering Christians heap on each other.
The conclusion of this parable tells us with brutal honesty that our own penalties will come to haunt us when we insist that the penalties owed to us be paid in their pound
of flesh. For the king jailed and tortured the servant because he had trashed the trust of forgiveness; he had smeared the integrity of forgiveness; he had cast the pearls of his forgiveness before the swine of his unredeemed nature. Has he said he was sorry? No.
To forgive from the heart–that is the consequence of receiving forgiveness. To speak the words, “You are forgiven,” to one who says, “I am sorry. I apologize. I regret.” To bring the words of release and empowerment. “Go, and sin no more, that nothing worse befall you.” These are our challenges, personally, as a church community, and as a nation.