Colllect
Heavenly Father, you sent your Son
to pay the price of lavish forgiveness for the outrageous debt of our sin.
Grant now that we might offer irrepressible, irresponsible grace to those who
sin against us, that in us the world might see the salvation you offer through
the blood of your Son, Jesus Christ Our Lord, in whose name we pray, Amen.
Sermon
On
May 5, 2000, President George W. Bush defended his proposed spending plan for
Congress, stating, "It's
clearly a budget. It's got a lot of numbers in it." We could say something
similar about this story from the Gospel of Matthew: It's clearly a parable.
It's got a lot of numbers in it."
Indeed, Jesus'
parables often contain lots of numbers: the four different types of soil and
the varying percentages of increase yielded, the three measures of meal, the
decreasing disbursements of money to three servants, the exact inventories of
sheep and coins. But even so, this is a very mathematical parable indeed. From
Peter's projected forgiveness budget to Jesus' multiplication problem to the
very specific audits of the two different debts, Our Lord frames forgiveness in
very numerical terms.
I must confess
that this does not make the parable my favorite. I'm not much of a numbers
person. Novelist Frederick Buechner speaks of "that great watershed of the
young: do you like science and math, or do you like English. . . ? If it's the
first, then your life goes one way, and if it's the second, then your life goes
the other way, and the whole thing's usually settled before you even get to
high school." I knew early on which was my chosen path. It occurred to me
one day that there is an infinite sequence of numbers, yet, on any given math
problem, only one of those numbers is
the right answer! What are my chances against those kinds of odds? Ask me,
however, who is the hero in Shakespeare's Julius
Caesar, Caesar or Brutus, and I can write page after page arguing for
either one and stand an equal chance of being right.
So I majored in
English.
When I took the
GRE a few years back as part of my doctoral work, I scored in the one hundredth
percentile on language: That means that if there are one hundred people in a
room, I know more words than any of them. On the math portion, I was in the
single digits: That means that not only am I not smarter than a fifth grader,
even in a head-to-head with a third grader you'd want pretty good odds before
you bet on me. (I was, however, offered a scholarship to Texas A&M.)
One reason I love
the writing of the great Christian apologist C. S. Lewis is that he flunked the
math entrance exam to Oxford not once but twice and only got in because they
eventually waived that requirement for World War I veterans!
But though my own
calculation skills basically consist of counting one, two, several, for this
story we must put ourselves through the pain of doing a little arithmetic.
Still, Jesus makes this easier because what we're really dealing with here are
figurative amounts, round sums.
Peter, for
instance, when wanting to know how long to run a tab on someone else's
offenses, goes for a figurative figure: There was this idea from the Old
Testament that you should forgive someone three times. For instance, if you
read Amos 1 and 2 you find the repeated phrase where God vows not to forgive
various nations "for three transgressions and for four," as if that
fourth one violated the divine redline. So Peter figures he's safe when he
doubles down on that minimum then throws in an ace kicker and gets to seven,
which is the Old Testament number for completion or perfection, as in the seven
days of creation, or the seven years of feast and famine predicted by Joseph.
So Peter picks a big number, but it's still a number. In other words, he wants
to know what is the statute of limitations on forgiveness. If not "three
strikes and you're out," perhaps seven strikes?
Then Jesus looks
at Peter, blows up his bookkeeping, shreds his ledgers and rocks his world: I do
not say to you, up to seven times, but up to seventy times seven.
And we're not
just talking about four hundred and ninety times, either. Jesus takes the
perfect number and multiplies it by itself to a factor of ten. In Jewish
thinking this kind of math really means an infinite amount. In Genesis 4.24
Lamech, the descendant of Cain, vows revenge himself "seventy-seven
fold," which is sort of the square route of God's own vow of seven-fold
vengeance on behalf of his family. Jesus plays on that equation to describe
forgiveness as replacing revenge. To put it in the kind of round numerical
language that I can grasp, Jesus says, "Peter, I want you to forgive a million kabillion times!"
Of course, a
number like that is a little hard to grasp, so Jesus turns it into a story
problem. Or a story joke, because that's what this really is.
A king conducts
an audit and comes up ten thousand talents in the red. A talent was fifteen
years' worth of the average daily wage. Let's run those numbers: According to
the U. S. Census Bureau, the median American income in 2012 was $51,017 per
year. So fifteen years' worth of wages - one talent - would work out to
$765,255. And remember, we're talking about a ten thousand talents, so add
three zeroes and you wind up with $7,652,550,000.00!
Basically, you
couldn't owe that much money. There wasn't that much money. And it was a slave
who stole it. This would be like the Fed auditing everyone involved in the last
savings and loan scandal and finding out that one guy stole all the money, and
he was the janitor! This would be like learning that Detroit is bankrupt because
one secretary in the city's Department of Parks and Recreation stole the entire
eighteen billion dollars the city now owes!
Essentially,
Jesus says, this man owed a million
kabillion dollars.
Then comes the
next laugh: Like a hapless minor character in a gangster movie, the guy goes
down on his knees to the loan shark and asks for a little more time to pay. But
time is not on his side! The meter is running on his debt and he can't even
keep up with the interest payments! This is like paying the minimum on your
credit card every month while the principle remains untouched and the interest
streaks skyward like a North Korean nuclear rocket!
It's hilarious!
In fact, it's so funny that the king, no doubt through tears of laughter,
perhaps out of sheer admiration at the guy's clueless bravado, tears up the
note! He waives both principle and interest. He takes out the royal ledger,
slashes a line through the debit side and scrawls on the credit column,
"Paid in full."
This man forgives
the slave a million kabillion dollars.
Then suddenly the
joke's over. The first slave hunts up a coworker who's into him for a hundred
denarii. Again, to keep the math manageable, that's a fraction of the original
debt by a factor of roughly half a million. This was a half-a-millionth of what
he had just been forgiven! But Slave One demands payment from Slave Two and,
when Slave Two doesn't immediately cough up, Slave One turns the matter over to
a collection agency and has the guy thrown into prison.
Jesus just lets
that image hang in the air for a moment, then says, in essence, "And
Peter, I want you to forgive a million
kabillion times, because you have been forgiven a million kabillion sins."
I don't know if
that made much sense to Peter at the time. Probably not. Jesus had nicknamed
him "The Rock," but so far he has only lived up to his nickname in
terms of his swimming ability and his mental capacity. He probably shook his
head and thought that this was one more of those crazy things Jesus said that
sounded good but that nobody in his right mind would try to put into practice.
He probably told himself that Jesus' job was to defeat the Romans and establish
a kingdom where the Jews, and especially Peter, got what they wanted, not to go
giving advice about actual day-to-day living.
We're a lot like
Peter, aren't we? I mean really: How many times have you read some teaching of
Our Lord like this one and thought, "Well, that makes a nice poster for my
wall but if you actually try to act that way you'll get clobbered. After all,
we have to live in the real world." Somewhere along the line we got the
idea that Jesus' job is to pay for our sins and take us to Heaven when we die
and that between then and now Jesus can just mind his own business and we'll
see him next Sunday, thank you very much.
But what if
that's wrong? What if Jesus expects us to be actual, practicing disciples of
his? What, for instance, if Jesus truly expects us to forgive a million kabillion times?
Jesus' parable
may not have made sense to Peter that day. But it did eventually. Because one
day not long after this, Peter will stand outside the courtyard at the house of
the high priest Caiaphas with the threefold debt of a triple denial of Christ
still hot upon his lips and burning in his ears, and in that moment he will
hear a rooster crow and remember his Lord saying, "Before a rooster crows,
you will deny Me three times." And in that moment Peter will know what it
is to sin a million kabillion times.
And three days later his risen Lord will meet him on the other side of an empty
tomb and tell him that all is forgotten, that the slate is wiped clean, the
debt paid by the blood shed on the cross. And in that moment Peter will know
what it is to be forgiven a million
kabillion times.
This parable may
not make much sense to you today. In all honesty, you may confess that you want
to obey the commandments of Christ but that you just can't imagine a
forgiveness this reckless, this irresponsible, this radical. Well, if that's
where you are then that's where you are. Confess to Jesus that you just don't
get it, but that you want to. And don't be discouraged. Because I can testify
from personal experience, as can many a seasoned saint listening right now,
that one day you will find yourself on the wrong side of a rooster's crow, on
the debit side of a debt so great that you finally and fully realize the
crimson stain of your own sin. And in that moment, you will know what it is to
be forgiven a million kabillion sins.
. .and you will find the freedom to forgive others a million kabillion times.
Until then, you
may, as I do, find that you just have to keep forgiving the same sin over and
over again, not because the other person keeps committing it, but because you
keep holding onto it. C. S. Lewis suffered greatly as a boy at the hands of a
sadistic school teacher. When, only a year or so before his death, he finally
managed to forgive that person, he described the experience this way:
Last week, while at prayer, I suddenly discovered. . .that I had
really forgiven someone I have been trying to forgive for over thirty years.
Trying, and praying that I might. When the thing actually happened. . .my
feeling was, 'But it's so easy. Why didn't you do it ages ago?' So many things
are easily done the moment you can do them at all. But till then, sheerly
impossible. . . .
If that's your situation, then don't despair and don't condemn
yourself. If you find you can't forgive, the answer is to keep on forgiving:
Even if that means you have to forgive a
million kabillion times! And one day, on the million kabillion and first try, you'll find you've really done it,
and marvel at how easy it finally is.
But maybe you
have the opposite problem. Maybe you understand the first part of this parable
perfectly - the part about the man who owed such an insurmountable debt. You
feel such overwhelming conviction of sin that you tremble at the idea of
undergoing the eternal audit of an entirely holy God. And you can see your need
to forgive the people around you. Their wrongs against you, while real, shrink
to insignificance beside your own compost heap of sin that stinks in the very
nostrils of God. You would gladly forgive others a million kabillion times. What you cannot even imagine is that God
has forgiven you a million kabillion
sins.
But there is a
cross that says God has! There are wounds in the hands and feet of the slain
Lamb who sits at the right hand of the Father in glory that bear witness to
your forgiveness! There is an empty tomb that insists that love outlives all
wrongs. There is a fountain filled with blood drawn from Emanuel's veins, and
sinners plunged beneath that flood lose all their guilty stains! And if you
will give up your efforts to pay and amidst the laughter of God embrace
salvation, you will be forgiven a
million kabillion sins.
