Upper Path Valley Presbyterian Church

Matthew 18:21-35
June 24, 2007

Lesson Number One
Rev. Meagan M. Boozer

“For this reason the kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who wished to settle accounts with his slaves. When he began the reckoning, one who owed him ten thousand talents was brought to him; and, as he could not pay, his lord ordered him to be sold, together with his wife and children and all his possessions, and payment to be made. So the slave fell on his knees before him, saying, ‘Have patience with me, and I will pay you everything.’ And out of pity for him, the lord of that slave released him and forgave him the debt. But that same slave, as he went out, came upon one of his fellow slaves who owed him a hundred denarii; and seizing him by the throat, he said, ‘Pay what you owe.’ Then his fellow slave fell down and pleaded with him, ‘Have patience with me, and I will pay you.’ But he refused; then he went and threw him into prison until he would pay the debt. When his fellow slaves saw what had happened, they were greatly distressed, and they went and reported to their lord all that had taken place. Then his lord summoned him and said to him, ‘You wicked slave! I forgave you all that debt because you pleaded with me. Should you not have had mercy on your fellow slave, as I had mercy on you?’ And in anger his lord handed him over to be tortured until he would pay his entire debt. So my heavenly Father will also do to every one of you, if you do not forgive your brother or sister from your heart.”

Let us pray: Oh Father, those who have ears, let us hear what the Spirit is saying to the Church. This we pray in Jesus’ name, Amen.

Let’s just say that someone comes to visit you. On the way out the door, he falls and hurts himself. Let’s just say that he hurts himself badly enough that he needs some medical attention. And, let’s just say that he decides to sue you for personal injury to the tune of one trillion dollars. One trillion.
Now, you may say: “Go ahead. Sue me for one trillion dollars. All I have is a couple thousand in the bank, my car (which I’m still making payments on) and my house (which is worth a whole lot less than a trillion dollars). So, go ahead sue me. You’ll never see anything close to a million, a billion, or a trillion dollars from my pocket.”

We all realize that suing a regular person, like you or me, for that much money is ridiculous: it’s an outrageously, unreasonable amount to expect to collect.

Jesus’ story is similar in some ways to this example. He has made up the story in such a way that the servant who owes the lord money, owes him so much money, that the servant could never, ever repay it. Sort of like someone asking you or me for a trillion dollars. Never, ever gonna happen.

Here’s what’s happening here: Jesus is making a point. He’s not telling a real story. He’s telling a made up story to make a point. That’s what parables are all about – making a point for life instruction and spiritual growth. The actual definition of the word parable is: a short simple story intended to illustrate a moral or religious lesson. Throughout the summer, the adult Sunday school students are meeting together to study 10 different parables. I will be preaching on the same parable we are studying that morning during the Sunday school hour. (New students are always welcome!)

Rev. Kenneth Collins says this about biblical parables:
“Jesus taught in parables for two reasons. The first reason is that Jesus is a rabbi, and like all rabbis of those days, he taught in stories and parables. The rabbis who had the best stories had the best following. The people followed Jesus because they were entertained by his stories, and since they were used to parables, they didn’t expect to be able to understand them right off.
The second reason Jesus taught in parables was because, as he says in the passage of the sower and the seed, he wanted to disguise the truth. [Why would he want to hide or disguise the truth? Rev. Kenneth W. Collins says it was like Jesus was planting a sort of ‘time bomb.’] The people flocked around Jesus and listened to his stories. Like good jokes, they were repeated until they had a wider audience than the people who originally heard them from Jesus’ lips. The point of the parables was concealed from the people, but the Pharisees often caught on to the implications of the message, which made them fear the political consequences of his ministry.
Later, after Jesus had been crucified and had risen from the grave, the apostles found fertile soil for their message in the hearts of regular people like you and me. All the apostles had to do was explain the parables the people had heard weeks or months before from Jesus, this time with the events of Easter as proof of Jesus as the resurrected Son of God, and the time bomb of spiritual truth and faith exploded! This is what Jesus meant when he told the disciples that what they heard in secret (the meaning of the parables) would later be shouted from the housetops! At that time the people understood and were saved by the thousands! That’s why Pentecost yielded so many converts so quickly. Jesus prepared the masses, and the apostles reaped the harvest.”

So, if we buy into his idea of a parable being a sort of time bomb - what bomb was Jesus throwing out in this parable about people owing money?

In order to really understand it, we have to look at the whole picture. Let’s go back to the text and begin two verses earlier this time in Matthew 18:21.

“Then Peter came and said to him, “Lord, if another member of the church sins against me, how often should I forgive? As many as seven times?” Jesus said to him, “Not seven times, but, I tell you, seventy-seven times.”

There are two ‘bombs’ here:
First, look to see about whom Peter is asking his question. An irritable neighbor? A cut-throat co-worker? A critical parent? A self-absorbed sibling? “Lord, if another member of the church…” Peter is asking about a fellow believer! This is bomb number one! In responding to Peter’s question with such intention, Jesus is showing us that forgiveness must be practiced with particular urgency within the kingdom community; this community, in other words; between all of us as brothers and sisters in Christ. Yes, some of us have biological family members here (husbands, wives, fathers, mothers, children, grandparents, aunts, uncles, sisters, brothers, nieces, nephews, cousins, etc.), but the most important distinction that must determine how we treat one another is our common status as children of God – brothers and sisters in Christ. John is my husband, but more importantly, he is my brother in Christ. We must take the importance of our responsibility to forgive one another right here in the church family with particular urgency. Which leads to the second time bomb: The use of the number ‘7’ in regards to forgiveness. Seven is a very special number in the Holy Bible.
In the Book of Revelation the number 7 is used throughout. There are 7 churches, 7 Spirits, 7 stars, 7 seals, 7 trumpets, 7 vials, 7 dooms, and 7 new things. Seven symbolizes completeness and/or perfection. This number is used over 600 times in the Bible. It is used 54 times alone in Revelation, which is the book of the Bible that tells us about the completion and the perfecting of all things visible and invisible. And so, when Jesus tells Peter that he must forgive his brother or sister 7 x 70 (or in some translations 7 + 70, or any combination of numbers with sevens in it), Jesus is telling him (us) that he (we) must forgive completely, perfectly, always, with no exceptions.

The slave in the parable owed so much money to the king that he could never have paid it back, even if he would have lived twice the normal length of life and worked 24/7. He could never have repaid his debt.

Like the debt that we owe to God.
How many times have you sinned in your life? 7? 77? 777? 7,777? If we take the biblical symbolism of the number 7 and apply it to our sin, we can say we have sinned 7 times – in other words, we are perfect sinners. Complete sinners. Through and through sinners. No one notebook or room or house full of notebooks could hold the list of times we have sinned against God by the way we have treated others and disregarded God’s instructions for our lives.

The debt that we owe to God is unrepayable. From the moment we were born, we were in the red (in debt) to God.

In the parable, the slave’s debt was forgiven as an act of mercy.

For our lives, our debt to God is forgiven as an act of mercy. We read in Romans 5:8. “God proves His love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” In 8:1, “There is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.” We’re still in the red once we come to believe in Jesus’ payment of our sin debt on the cross, but the red is no longer written in ink, it’s written in blood. Our sin debt to God has been PAID in full. It has been forgiven.

Therefore, we are called to forgive others: perfectly, completely, without excuse, and without constant reruns.

Forgiveness is non-optional for the child of God.
What God has done for us,
we are to pass on to others.

I want you to picture your sin or mine as a big heavy pillar. Before I give my life to Jesus, and trust that he has saved me from my sin, that pillar is weighing on me. I might not think it is weighing on me, but it is. It is leaning on me, keeping me from living freely. Once I take Jesus’ gift of salvation, God stands that pillar up. My sins are still there. Hopefully they will help me remember how not to make the same mistakes again, but they are no longer in my way, hindering me from where I want to go.
Just like we can remember our sins, God can remember them, too. But God chooses not to hold them against us. He doesn’t use them to keep us down. He doesn’t use them to beat us over the head. He will only use the memory of our sins to remind us how far we’ve come, and how amazing is the forgiveness of our debt. We must choose to do the same for others.

President Eisenhower once described his personal policy on forgiveness in this way, “I make it a practice to avoid hating anyone. If someone has been guilty of despicable actions, especially towards me, I try to forget him. I used to follow a practice – somewhat contrived I admit – to write the man’s name on a scrap of paper, drop it into my bottom drawer and say to myself, “That finishes the incident, and as far as I’m concerned, that person.” That drawer became over the years a sort of private wastebasket for crumpled up spite and discarded personalities. Besides, it seemed to be effective and helped me avoid harboring useless black feelings.”

Now, Eisenhower may have been a great general and an effective president, but his practice bears no resemblance to true biblical forgiveness. Brothers and sisters in Christ should not fill drawers, boxes, notebooks, or wastebaskets with discarded people because of offenses recorded, rehearsed, and rerun. Especially in the family of God, there should be no such hindrances to ministry.

Stephanie Dourick writes, “Forgiveness can be given, but it may not always be received. It cannot be bestowed as either a triumph over another person, or as the means to secure their humiliation or compliance. Forgiveness is most healing, most profound when it grows out of humility and realism, a hard-won sense that, whether you are entirely to blame in these events and I am blameless, there is in each of us insufficiencies and imperfections that can be our greatest teachers.”

To live in unforgiveness is to live in darkness.
To live in unforgiveness is to live in intentional sin.
To live in unforgiveness is to choose to live with earplugs in your relationship with your Creator. You cannot hear from God if you live in unforgiveness.

Now, there are times you need to talk to someone about the hurt you have experienced through the words or behavior of another person. Talking to someone to work through your own thoughts and feelings about it is a healthy thing as long as the ultimate desire is for you to be healed from the hurt, instead of you finding vindication in order to demean or dismiss the other.

I was really hit between the eyes in preparation for this sermon. There have been some people over the years who have hurt me very deeply. Now I have said, over and over, that I forgive them. “Of course I do. No problem with forgiveness for me.” And yet, at times I have spoken of the hurts that were brought upon me in casual conversations, naming the person who did the hurting. (Understand, there is a great difference between speaking of these things in counseling in order to find healing, and speaking of these things in casual conversations.)

Why would I speak casually about these things?

I think we do this (rerun the injustices against us) to somehow build up our own goodness, to bring attention to our right to be pitied. It’s not pointing to God, it’s pointing to me. I am sickened to think how often I have done it (but it just reminds me again of the enormity of the debt I owe to God).

As brothers and sisters in Christ, we are called to forgive each other completely and perfectly. We must not put names or offenses on a piece of paper and keep it in a bottom drawer or anyplace else in our memory boxes for future whipping or belittling. That’s not forgiveness. That’s the way of the unmerciful servant in the parable.

(If you do this, and can’t seem to stop, then I ask you to please come and talk with me so that we can find the way of healing for you.)

I challenge us all, right now, to choose to live in the present, with the Holy Spirit’s great hope for the future – making the most of our relationships with our brothers and sisters in Christ right here in Christ’s body, the Church.

2 Corinthians 5:16-21
From now on, therefore, we regard no one from a human point of view; even though we once knew Christ from a human point of view, we know him no longer in that way. So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new! All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation; that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting the message of reconciliation to us. So we are ambassadors for Christ, since God is making his appeal through us; we entreat you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God. For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.

Amen.

Upper Path Valley Presbyterian Church

06-24-2007