L.
R. Tarsitano—Saint Andrew’s Church,
The Twenty-second Sunday after Trinity—November 7, 2004
The Life of Forgiveness
“And his lord was wroth, and delivered him to the tormentors, till he should pay all that was due unto him. So likewise shall my heavenly Father do also unto you, if ye from your hearts forgive not every one his brother their trespasses” (Matthew 18:34-35).
The pious Jews of our Lord’s day had a “three strikes and you’re out” doctrine of forgiveness. Once one man had forgiven another man who had wronged him three times, he never had to forgive him again. This very limited theory of forgiveness was the background of the question that St. Peter asks at the opening of this morning’s Gospel: “Lord, how oft shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? till seven times?” (Matthew 18:21). Peter had doubled the conventional number of acts of forgiveness, and added one for good measure. Surely, he appears to have thought, I will please my Master with this expression of generosity.
It is easy to imagine, then, St. Peter’s being surprised by the Lord’s response. Instead of praising him and saying, “Peter, you are, indeed, a forgiving fellow,” our Lord answers, “I say not unto thee, Until seven times: but, Until seventy times seven” (Matthew 18:22).
One can almost see what happened next. Peter began to do the arithmetic, “Seven times seventy equals 490.” To forgive 490 times is a lot of forgiveness, but Peter was still missing the point of what our Lord Jesus Christ was trying to teach him. Instead of throwing out more numbers, however, all of which would have been irrelevant to what he wanted Peter to understand about forgiveness, our Lord offers him a parable to show him what forgiveness looks like from the divine perspective—from his own perspective as the Son of God and from the perspective of his Heavenly Father.
In the parable there is a king, who represents God Almighty, and two servants, who represent the human race. One of the servants owes the king ten thousand talents, an impossible number, roughly comparable to fifty years of the Gross National Product of a good-sized kingdom, the equivalent in our modern money of “a zillion dollars.” No human being could hope to live long enough to pay such a debt. Nevertheless, when the servant asks for mercy, the king forgives him this debt.
The very same servant, however, is owed what is called “an hundred pence” by one of his fellow servants, the equivalent of one hundred days’ salary for an ordinary worker in those days. In human terms, one hundred days’ salary is a lot of money, but it is the sort of money that can be paid back with due diligence, and it is an infinitesimal and inconsequential fraction of ten thousand talents.
The fellow servant asks, then, for mercy, but the first servant, who had been forgiven so much, refuses to listen to his pleas, and he has the man cast into debtor’s prison, one of the more idiotic and self-defeating institutions of the ancient human justice system since a man in prison cannot possibly earn the money he needs to pay his debts. Sending the fellow servant to prison, then, is an act of pure spite and sadism, since the hundred pence that are owed can never be recovered in this way.
But the parable doesn’t end here. If it did, the lesson would be only that the forgiveness of God is infinite in comparison to the warped forgiveness, really the lack of forgiveness, of fallen human nature. There would be no point to the parable, then, since we already know that God is better than we are.
What the servant who had been forgiven the ten thousand talents has forgotten, however, is that he is still only a servant, no matter how much forgiveness he has received or how important he thinks that makes him. He is not the king, so he has no right to judge his fellow servants as if he were their king. Nor does he control his fellow servants, who turn to their true king to report these events, a report that stands here for the prayers of the faithful as they seek both justice and mercy from the throne of heaven.
The king hears his servants’ cries for justice, and he calls the servant that he had forgiven the unpayable debt of ten thousand talents before him: “O thou wicked servant, I forgave thee all that debt, because thou desiredst me: Shouldest not thou also have had compassion on thy fellowservant, even as I had pity on thee?” (Matthew 18:32-33). And then the king renders his verdict, giving the wicked, unforgiving servant exactly what he has asked for by his own actions towards others: “And his lord was wroth, and delivered him to the tormentors, till he should pay all that was due unto him.” Thus, given his debt, the wicked servant will suffer forever.
Our Lord, however, just in case Peter or we still do not see the point of the parable, adds this final, inescapable explanation of the message that his Father in heaven has sent him to deliver to us: “So likewise shall my heavenly Father do also unto you, if ye from your hearts forgive not every one his brother their trespasses.” These words are more than a warning or even a threat. They are an absolute divine promise that the unforgiving will go unforgiven into hell.
Even before the tally of our sins, each of us owes God an infinite, unpayable debt simply for our existence. We can never repay God for giving us life. Our sins, then, which are offenses against the God to whom we owe everything, add, if it is possible to say such a thing, an infinity of debt upon an infinity of debt. When God forgives us our sins and gives us eternal life, he asks for no payment, for nothing in return for his forgiveness. If, however, we are to say that we are the servants, let alone the children of such a God, then we must forgive one another, including our worst enemies, in the same way—asking for no payment, looking for nothing in return.
In fact, one of the few sure ways that we can have confidence that we are, indeed, forgiven our sins is to practice forgiveness ourselves. It is impossible for fallen human nature on its own to forgive because sin makes each of us enemies to God and enemies to one another. It is only in a new life in Jesus Christ, a life that begins with God’s gracious forgiveness of our sins, that we can forgive others as we ought to do. This power to do right and to be free of sin in Jesus Christ is the basis of St. Paul’s admonition in today’s Epistle: “[Be] filled with the fruits of righteousness, which are by Jesus Christ, unto the glory and praise of God” (Philippians 1:10-11).
If we are living in Jesus Christ, and if the Holy Ghost is dwelling in us for Jesus Christ’s sake, then we will be able to fill our lives with the fruits of God’s righteousness, including our forgiveness of others, to the glorification of our Father in heaven. We will have to struggle, of course, against the remnants of our old fallen human nature—against the equivalent of the unforgiving servant in each and every one of us. But the struggle itself, as we fight to forgive and to have mercy, despite our every inclination to do otherwise, is the proof of our membership in Jesus Christ and the proof of our fellowship with the Holy Ghost. It is the proof of our Heavenly Father’s grace and love at work in us, cleansing us, and healing us.
We know that heart-ache and a broken heart are real, and so does Jesus Christ. His heart ached when his friends abandoned him or when he contemplated his crucifixion. His heart broke, he felt the pain, when his friend Lazarus died and he wept before his tomb. When he went hungry for the sake of the kingdom of his Father, when he took the blows and beating of his tormentors at the last, and when he struggled on the cross just to breathe, gasping for the breath to announce that his work of salvation was accomplished according to his Father’s will, our Lord felt mercy and forgiveness in every atom of his body—not as an abstraction, not as a thought, but as the reality of his life as a man.
As the members of that same crucified and resurrected Body, as the members of Jesus Christ, we must learn to experience mercy and forgiveness in the very same way. Forgiveness must become, body and soul, the reality of our lives as the forgiven of God who offer our Father’s forgiveness, in our Father’s Name, freely, when we forgive those who sin and trespass against us.
We can, if we are insane enough, count the offenses committed against us or the times that we have offered mercy. But we have been infinitely forgiven, so it is infinitely that we must also forgive others, longing for every human being’s forgiveness and salvation in the bowels of Jesus Christ, God made man. As that same Lord Jesus Christ makes clear, there is no salvation apart from forgiveness.