Matthew 18:21-35 Pentecost 17 Pastor Nathan P. Kassulke Sunday, September 27, 2020 “Jesus Guides His Church to Forgive as God Forgives” Isn’t it easy to think of ourselves as good Christians? We make the effort to be in church week after week, or we tune in online when we could be doing a whole host of other things at home. We give our offerings. We avoid so many of the things that really bother and frustrate us. We know that there are lots of people who are obviously much worse than we are. It is easy to think of ourselves as good Christians. I mention these things to you because I imagine that’s how Peter felt when he asked Jesus his question, the question that launched the entire rest of the lesson in front of us today from the Gospel of Matthew. Peter’s question was, “Lord, how many times must I forgive my brother when he sins against me? As many as seven times?” And I’m not sure how you feel about that question. Do you think that Peter should have known better? Should he have suggested a higher number? A lower number? It seems very likely that Peter had heard advice attributed to certain rabbis that said you should forgive someone three times before reaching your limit. So I suspect that Peter thought he was a pretty good Christian to double that number and then some. Jesus had been talking to his disciples about sin and forgiveness. He had made a promise that the sins that they forgave would be forgiven in heaven. He had encouraged them to lead others to repent of their own sins, and to do so in the most private and confidential way possible. And that got Peter thinking. Forgiveness can be abused. Someone can say that they are sorry and then come back and do the same thing, and it can happen again and again and again. How many times? How many times, Jesus, should I forgive someone who sins against me? Seven times seems pretty generous, doesn’t it? As it turns out, no, seven times is not particularly generous. Jesus said to him, “Not seven times, but I tell you as many as seventy-seven times.” Peter was a little off. He owed forgiveness seventy more times than what he had suggested. Maybe more. Some translators think that Jesus’ words could mean seventy times seven. But here’s the thing: this isn’t a math problem. Jesus wasn’t really trying to give Peter a number to keep in mind as if every time he forgave someone, he could punch a card and when seventy-seven times were through, that’s the end of forgiveness. Peter thought that he was a pretty good Christian who was willing to forgive, but Jesus was about to guide his Church to forgive in a way that was incredibly more powerful. And so he told a story. Jesus was a master teacher who often told stories, we usually call them parables, as he taught spiritual truths. There were plenty of people who didn’t get the point of his parables and his teaching, but even with Jesus’ closest disciples like Peter, sometimes he would drive home his point with a story that illustrated what he was talking about. That’s exactly what he did in response to Peter’s question about forgiving others. The story was about a king. I know we don’t deal directly with kings and royalty, but we can understand that the king would have been the most powerful and therefore very likely the richest person in the country. And this particular king had servants who owed him money. He decided that it was time to deal with the accounts. One by one he called in those who owed him money and to see how things stood. One of the first servants to come to the king owed him a huge amount of money. He owed ten thousand talents. That’s a big amount. It’s millions of dollars. A laborer in those days could earn a denarius for working an entire day. We’ll talk more about the denarius in a minute, but if you would save up 6,000 of those coins, it would equal the value of one talent. But this man didn’t owe one talent, he owed ten thousand talents. There was no way that he could pay the king back. Well, the recourse for the king was to sell the man and his family and everything that they owned. Even that wouldn’t be enough to pay back such a large debt, but it would teach a lesson. The servant was distraught. He fell on his knees. He begged that he be given time and promised that he would pay back the debt, even though he had to know that there was no way he could ever do that.
And that’s when the king did something surprising. He forgave that gigantic debt. He erased every bit of what the servant owed him. Just like that. Now, we’re not going to try to force every detail of a parable to make a specific application to our lives, but it’s really not hard to see how we are like that servant, is it? We owe a debt to our king. Our king is the King of the Universe, the Creator of all things, God. He expects and demands perfection, and we have failed to deliver it again and again and again. The debt of our sins piles up in an overwhelming heap that we have no hope to ever pay back. And we like to deny that, to think that we can do enough good things to make up for the bad. We like to think that as long as we are better than most people, God will probably not be too disappointed in us. We like to think that we can even put a dent in the amount we owe and God will look on that favorably and reward us. But all those efforts are completely futile and worthless. There is no way that we could even begin to pay back what we owe. Do you want to try to put a number on it? Do you want to estimate how many times you have sinned in just one day? And do you want to do the math that says multiply that by every single day of every single year of your life? It is an absolute understatement to say, that’s a big number. Meanwhile, even a much smaller number, one, is the number of sins against our holy God that would condemn us to hell forever. The king looks at us in a pitiful heap on the floor, and he says, “Get up. I forgive you.” And we have to step away from the parable for a bit to remember that our king sent his own Son to pay our debt, down to every last painful penny by living in our place and dying on the cross for us. When we had absolutely nothing to give to him, he gave us everything that we needed. So how do we respond? By forgiving others seven times? By forgiving them seventy-seven times? Jesus continues the story. That servant, who had his million-dollar debt forgiven went out from the king’s palace. He found another man not far away, a fellow servant. This man owed the first a few hundred dollars. Remember the denarius? If you have more than one, that makes two or more denarii (kind of like cactus and cacti – denarius and denarii). The second servant owed the first one hundred denarii. And even for this much smaller sum, the response was the same. There was no way servant two could pay back servant one. He just didn’t have the money. So servant one did exactly what he had begged the king not to do. He took legal action. He had the man thrown into prison expecting him to somehow pay back every bit of his debt. Do you get the picture? The other servants in Jesus’ story did. They reported to the king this behavior that was incomprehensible to them. The king was rightly furious and punished his servant. It simply didn’t make sense that the servant who had such a huge debt forgiven would go to someone else to demand repayment of a comparatively small debt. The king’s anger and his punishment made sense. As Jesus guides his Church, he wants the members of that church to forgive as God forgives. He wants them to do as they pray in the Lord’s Prayer, “forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us.” He wants us to remember that our immense debt of sin has been forgiven, completely wiped out. And he wants us to keep that in mind as we deal with those who sin against us. Not three times, not seven times, not even seventy-seven times, as many times as my brother sins against me, because thankfully that is how God treats me. And yes, we need to realize, admit, and confess that we have fallen well short of this. We have treated others harshly while trying to explain away and rationalize our own sins. We say, “I can’t deal with this anymore. I don’t need this sort of negativity in my life. I have to teach a lesson to those who insist on sinning again and again and again.” Just think what it would mean if God treated us that way. Just think what it would mean if our king had not forgiven our debt. It is sometimes easy to think of ourselves as good Christians. Like Peter, we can think we are being generous to others, but that’s when we make the wrong comparisons. Let’s follow Jesus as he leads and guides his Church. Let’s rejoice that God has graciously and generously forgiven us, and then let’s forgive others as God forgives us.
The Text: Matthew 18:21–35 Then Peter came up and asked Jesus, “Lord, how many times must I forgive my brother when he sins against me? As many as seven times?” Jesus said to him, “Not seven times, but I tell you as many as seventy-seven times. 23 For this reason the kingdom of heaven is like a king who wanted to settle accounts with his servants. 24 When he began to settle them, a man who owed him ten thousand talents was brought to him. 25 Because the man was not able to pay the debt, his master ordered that he be sold, along with his wife, children, and all that he owned to repay the debt. 22
“Then the servant fell down on his knees in front of him, saying, ‘Master, be patient with me, and I will pay you everything!’ 27 The master of that servant had pity on him, released him, and forgave him the debt. 26
“But when that servant went out, he found one of his fellow servants who owed him one hundred denarii. He grabbed him and began choking him, saying, ‘Pay me what you owe!’ 28
“So his fellow servant fell down and begged him, saying, ‘Be patient with me, and I will pay you back!’ 30 But he refused. Instead he went off and threw the man into prison until he could pay back what he owed. 29
“When his fellow servants saw what had happened, they were very distressed. They went and reported to their master everything that had taken place. 31
“Then his master called him in and said to him, ‘You wicked servant! I forgave you all that debt when you begged me to. 33 Should you not have had mercy on your fellow servant just as I had mercy on you?’ 34 His master was angry and handed him over to the jailers until he could pay back everything he owed. 32
“This is what my heavenly Father will also do to you unless each one of you forgives his brother from his heart.” 35