Sermon by Nanette Sawyer | September 17, 2023

Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost
September 17, 2023
The Gathering

Sermon

Rocky Supinger
Associate Pastor

Matthew 18:21–35

Peter gets a bad wrap sometimes. If you’re not familiar with this convention, the Gospels often depict Peter as the voice of all the disciples, and his voice can sound in turns faithless and dim.

It’s Peter who calls out to Jesus walking on water and says, “Lord, if it is you, command me to come to you on the water,” which Jesus does, and Peter promptly freaks out and sinks.

Jesus says at one point, “If one blind person guides another, both will fall into a pit,” and Peter says, “Explain this to us,” like it’s not obvious.

Peter is the one, when Jesus is trying to explain to his disciples that his life is leading toward a cross, who pulls him aside and rebukes him — “God forbid it!” — so that Jesus turns on him and calls him a stumbling block and a Satan.

In the Gospels, Peter is a frequent stand-in for all the things the disciples don’t understand and get wrong about Jesus’ teaching and mission.

But not here. This question of Peter’s is spot on. He’s been sitting here listening to Jesus talk about sin and forgiveness. The beginning of this portion of Jesus’ teaching is a question from some of the disciples about who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven, and Jesus pointed them to a child and started talking about how the one who becomes humble like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven and woe to anyone who puts a stumbling block before such a child.

He told a story about a shepherd who had 100 sheep and one of them “went astray,” so the shepherd left the 99 to go search for the one. Then, in the passage we read last week, Jesus gave the church a process for handling sin, for confronting someone who sins against you, in order to forgive them, restore them, and be reconciled to them.

Peter has been listening to this, and he asks a question that must be on everyone’s mind: how often are we supposed to forgive someone who keeps hurting us?

It’s a serious question that we dismiss at our peril. Church is a community of love and grace and reconciliation and forgiveness, yes. But is there a limit to the church’s mercy? It’s a question about frequency of offense, not magnitude; Peter is not asking the severity of offense that should be tolerated — “Should we forgive someone who tortures puppies?” — but about repetition.

How many times can people be welcomed back to church who repeatedly behave in a way that offends people, that harms people, even?

It’s not a theoretical conundrum, but a practical consideration about how we love one another in church. I mean, “Let us build a house where love can dwell and all can safely live,” right, from our song earlier? It’s a housekeeping question Peter is asking. A home-maintenance question.

Is it loving to permit hurtful behavior to persist unchecked? Is that loving to the ones being hurt? Is it loving to the ones doing the hurting, to never confront them, to help them change?

Is the church the kind of community that gives people not just second or third chances but fourth, fifth, sixth, seventy-seventh chances to correct bad behavior? Peter’s question is a good one; somebody put Peter on the Community Life Committee.

It’s actually too good a question for a straightforward answer. There are clearer answers available to Jesus than this. Some rabbis of the period taught that forgiveness of a brother or sister could be limited to three instances of unrepentant sin, because by that point the repentance was clearly not genuine.

Jesus’ own advice right before this is almost exacting in its clarity and detail: if a brother or sister sins against you, confront them privately, then take two or three witnesses, then take it before the whole church …

In light of that, Peter can expect a policy or a procedure about how often to forgive repeated offenses. Instead he gets, “Not just seven times but as many as seventy-seven times.”

[stares blankly]

“Therefore the kingdom of heaven is like …”

“Here we go again! I asked ‘how often?’ I want a number, not a story.”

It’s always a story with Jesus. It’s always some parable.

Question: Who is the greatest?

Answer: There was a shepherd who had 100 sheep …

Question: Where does your authority come from, Jesus?

Answer: A man had two sons …

Question: How often should I forgive a brother or sister who sins against me?

Answer: A king wished to settle accounts with his servants …

Some things are too true to be taught simply in propositions or precepts. The kingdom of heaven (the kingdom of God in the other Gospels) is that kind of thing.

The kingdom of heaven is what Jesus’ life and teaching are all about. Use a different word if you like — call it the “realm” or the “commonwealth” or the “kin-dom” if the dated vocabulary of royalty doesn’t work for you — but understand that this is Jesus’ shorthand for the love and the freedom and the power of God at work in Jesus’ life in the world, then and now. The kingdom of heaven is the gospel, the best good news the church has to hear and share with the world.

It’s too good to be left to principles to be grasped with the mind, though there are some of those:

“Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.”

“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”

“Whoever becomes humble like a child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven.”

But more than grasp it with our understanding, Jesus beckons us to see it and hear it and feel it:

“The kingdom of heaven is like yeast that a woman took and mixed in with three measures of flower until all of it was leavened.”

“The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field, which someone found and hid; then in his joy he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field.”

“The kingdom of heaven is like a merchant in search of fine pearls.”

Jesus’ teaching is an invitation to perceive and to receive a world of new possibility, a way of life where the last are first, the least are the greatest, and the meek are blessed. We perceive it by finding ourselves in the story Jesus is telling.

Where would Peter find himself in this story, I wonder? Maybe a different place here than later. Peter, who is so concerned about counting offenses, will come to deny that he even knows Jesus, and not just once or twice but three times. It seems important that Peter’s coming betrayal is given a number.

He’s the servant. Peter is the servant in the parable. We’re all the servant in the parable: recipients of an incalculable mercy we don’t deserve — that we may not even have been asking for.

It is absurd, actually, the amounts of debt and forgiveness of debt in this parable. I used the Common English Bible translation, which is a contemporary version that translates first-century currencies into modern equivalents, so it kind of misses how much money “ten thousand bags of gold” is in Jesus’ time. The literal is “ten thousand talents.” A talent is the largest denomination of currency in Jesus’ day, and ten thousand is the highest number that was counted.

So this guy owes the highest amount of the highest possible amount of money. There is no way for him to pay it back, ever. His plea for patience is pitiful because it’s impossible.

It’s absurd to think about how a person could actually accrue that much debt. You’d have to be trying, like a team tanking for a better draft pick. The debt he owes is so dramatic, so exaggerated, the translation should just say “a bajillion dollars.”

It’s a sum that boggles the mind, like $1.7 trillion in federal and private student loan debt held by Americans or the $17 trillion dollars of credit card debt or the $32 trillion in U.S. national debt. It’s an impossible amount of money to get your head around.

And then it’s not. Because then it’s gone. A debt of ten thousand talents becomes a loan (did you catch that?) of no talents in the whimsical snap of a finger before lunch. The king has compassion on a subject who cannot make up for what he’s done, and the pitiful pleading debtor is completely, utterly, without qualification or condition, forgiven.

Not refinanced. Not given more time to pay. Not reduced. Not put on probation.

Forgiven.

When we know ourselves to be the forgiven servant in the economy of the kingdom of heaven, perhaps we stop quantifying the forgiveness we parcel out to one another. When we come to live inside this story, we learn grace as our default posture toward one another.

And grace changes us. Grace frees us from whatever binds us and conscripts us into the service of the one whose name and nature is mercy. Marjorie Thompson says this about forgiveness:

“To forgive is to make a conscious choice to release the person who has wounded us from the sentence of our judgment, however justified that judgment may be. It represents a choice to leave behind our resentment and desire for retribution, however fair such punishment may seem. … Forgiveness involves excusing persons from the punitive consequences they deserve because of their behavior. The behavior remains condemned, but the offender is released from its effects as far as the forgiver is concerned. Forgiveness means the power of the original wound’s power to hold us trapped is broken.”

The unforgiving servant ends up in a worse place than he started, and not because he reoffended, but because he chooses servitude to a power other than the power of mercy and forgiveness that he so freely received.

So Jesus warns at the conclusion of the parable that the same fate will be ours if we don’t forgive one another from our heart. It’s an echo of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus’ longest teaching session in all the Gospels, where he says, “If you do not forgive others, neither will God forgive your trespasses.” I take that to mean not that God’s forgiveness of us is contingent upon our forgiving others, but rather that, if we are not able to forgive others, have we really received the gift of God’s forgiveness of us?

The king in the parable, at great cost, freed someone from bondage, to release them from the punitive consequences of their actions, yet that person chose to remain in bondage. This is what refusal to forgive does to us.

It’s like the anecdote about former prisoners of war having a conversation, where one of them asks the other if she has forgiven her captors yet and she answers, “No, I will never do that.” To which her compatriot observes, “Then they still have you captive.”

Grace changes us and those around us — even those who have hurt us — if we let it.

Which is why we pray “Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors” each week — because the wisdom of that prayer Jesus taught is that both halves of it need the other. But we can easily become like the unforgiving servant and cling to the first half — ”forgive us our debts” — while neglecting the second.

Pastor Matt and I were leading the afternoon service one Sunday last spring and I did this: saying the Lord’s Prayer, I said, “Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our debts — and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.” I didn’t realize I’d done anything different until after the service, when Matt whispered to me, “You don’t want to forgive your debtors?”

I literally omitted the second part. Freudian, perhaps. Fatigue, maybe. Instructive all the same.

We are freed by forgiveness. Freed to forgive.

If we choose to remain in the grip of whatever was done to us, we will find ourselves short-circuited in other areas of our life. It is the nature of a gift to be shared, and our ability to share, to give, is affected by our willingness to forgive.

One more nugget from Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount that informs his response to Peter’s question about forgiveness: “When you are offering your gift at the altar, if you remember that your brother or sister has something against you, leave your gift there before the altar and go; first be reconciled to your brother or sister, and then come and offer your gift.”

Jesus wants us to be people who give and people who forgive, and it seems that our ability to do the former depends on our willingness to do the latter.

So may God forgive us our debts and help us to forgive our debtors, so that, together, our story before a watching world might be grace and mercy, pure gift all the way down.

Amen.