Matthew 18:21-35
How many times must I forgive a brother or sister? Peter asked Jesus. As many as seven times? That’s a lot. No, Jesus said, not seven times, and you can almost hear Peter begin to say “Whew.” Not seven times but seventy seven times, or seven times 70 times, or a bazillion times. Why? Because God’s forgiveness knows no limit. We forgive, because God has forgiven us.
Because, Jesus said, God is like this—and then he told a story. He told a story because people remember stories. We carry stories around inside ourselves. Sometimes we might forget a story until some clue calls it to mind, and we think to ourselves, gee, I haven’t thought of that story for years. But there it is. Like a lot of rabbis and prophets before him Jesus taught in stories. And here’s the story.
A king, or maybe we could say a banker, decided to call in his loans. One of his debtors owed him 10,000 talents, which in modern currency would be like you or I owing the bank a bazillion dollars. 10,000 talents is like 30 lifetimes of income-- an impossible amount. The debtor begged his creditor, have patience with me and I’ll pay you back every cent. This was a desperate lie. There was no way that he could pay the debt, unless he lived for about 2000 years.
In the prophetic tradition of parable-preaching, the king is and isn’t God—that’s the way it is with parables, it’s not a strict allegory. So the king is—and isn’t-- God, the servant is—and isn’t-- Israel, or we could say the church or the nation or all of us together. Everything we are, we owe to God. We could not possibly begin to repay God for the gift of life, for the earth our home, for the land and sky and sea and all the riches that we put to use as if they were our own. If God were to require payment, we would be in deep trouble. We could whine, plead, and try to make some desperate kind of deal, but really, we could never, ever pay for all that God has given us.
Fortunately, God doesn’t demand payment. Life is a gift. We are all benefactors of a generous God, a benevolent ruler, a merciful judge.
In the parable, after having been forgiven of this enormous, impossible, unpayable debt, after being saved from slavery along with his wife and children, the debtor, we’ll call him debtor #1, runs into a guy, we’ll call him debtor #2, who owes him some money-- a lot of money, but not a ridiculous amount. 100 denari=100 days pay, so whatever 100 days pay is for you, we’ll say he owed that much. Debtor #2 begs for mercy, promises to pay the debt, which he could do. But the one who was shown mercy does not emulate his former creditor. Debtor #1 seems to forget immediately the mercy that he received, his brain is like a sieve, the memory of desperation and mercy and relief was there and then gone. Rather than forgive as he was forgiven, the unforgiving servant has debtor #2 thrown into prison.
I believe this is where Jesus ended the parable. But the author of the Gospel of Matthew seems to have been uneasy with open endings, and was always adding material, expanding and explaining parables. What’s the point of telling a parable if you’re going to explain it? But the author is a literary artist. Matthew’s conclusion to this passage puts a beautiful literary parentheses around the parable, frames the parable with these two phrases about forgiveness: Peter’s question “If a brother or sister sins against me” opens the parentheses and “if you do not forgive a brother or sister” closes it. Thus the parable is framed by our relationship to each other, as brothers and sisters, and by sin and forgiveness.
Every Sunday we pray “forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors.” As if God’s forgiveness was conditioned upon our forgiving others. But according to the parable, it’s actually the other way around. God forgives us first. God has forgiven us our debt. We couldn’t begin to pay it anyway, but the least we can do in response to God’s mercy is to show mercy to others.
The quality of God’s mercy is not strained, as Portia testified in The Merchant of Venice. It pours down from heaven as the gentle rain. It is twice blessed, it blesses the one who gives as well as the one who receives. On earth as it is in heaven, earthly power is most like God’s “when mercy seasons justice.” When mercy seasons justice. I love that phrase.
As I remember 9/11/2001, the worst terrorist attack in the United States immediately inspired grace and mercy. I remember how strangers—even in New York, of all places (I like a lot of Midwesterners, had the idea that New York City is the last place on earth to look for kindness)-- helped each other find their way to safety. I remember that as some people ran from the cloud of dust as the towers fell, others ran toward it. I remember the generous expressions of sympathy from people all over the world.
But, I also remember how, in the days after 9/11, the cry for justice became a call to vengeance, and I remember how, as a nation, we disagreed over the measures of mercy and justice. We still disagree to this day, I know. Ten years later we still argue how things might have been different if only, if only…. Until we learn to forgive as we have been forgiven, to give as we have received from God, to show mercy as we have seen mercy, until then we live in a kind of hell of our own making. We torture ourselves.
On this tenth anniversary, I remember, and I hope that we can move into the future as better people, as people who have learned from the past and are ready to repent, as people who are ready to excel in showing mercy.
It is from the third verse of the hymn “America the Beautiful” that I take the title for this sermon, and it is my sincere hope that we may prove heroic in loving, and generous with mercy.
“O Beautiful, for heroes proved in liberating strife, who more than self their county loved, and mercy, more than life. America, America, may God thy gold refine, ‘til all success be nobleness and every gain, divine.” May it be so. Amen.
