A Sermon on Matthew 18:21-35
by Rev. Chris Bohnhoff
Will you pray with me? Mother/Father God, release us from the torture of unrealistic expectations, we pray, from the agony of long-held grudges, from the pain the isolation grudges produce. Help us to soften our certainties that we may see reality as it is, not as we think it should be. Amen.
What a bummer of an ending to our scripture passage, don’t you think? If you don’t feel forgiveness in your heart every time you have a chance, God will torture you until you do! Yikes!
This sermon is about an alternate reading. Imagine this: imagine Jesus with the disciples. As they talked about the messy parts of life in community, Jesus, as he was wont to do, pointed out situations when loving your neighbor takes more work than simply following a set of rules, and taught the disciples what to do about it. Just as he finished explaining that when you have a problem with someone, you should work it out together in community, and that even if you can’t work it out, you shouldn’t ever stop loving them, Peter asks a question.
But Jesus, he asks, how many times should we forgive someone? Like, the specific number, because I know there will be a test, and I’m kind of an honor roll star student. Is it seven times? That’s what I wrote down in my notebook.
It had to have been exasperating being Jesus at times, preaching love as an orientation and posture as the basis for life in a world so focused on rules, on knowing the answer, on the shortcut of black and white reasoning.
Imagine Jesus in his exasperation (after turning his head for a quick second to roll his eyes at Peter) deciding to take a different approach to get his point across. Jesus decides to try going over the top. He gives not a teaching, but a parable – an allegory meant to make the audience realize that they’re not even asking the right question. Parables ask the hearer to question their assumptions, hopefully leading to new ways of looking at the world and God’s place in it.
No, Peter, not seven, replies Jesus; seventy-seven, an impossible number of times to forgive someone. He goes on to describe a fantastical situation where a slave owes his master an astronomical sum. So big that it’s as if he said a made-up number, like a bazillion. The master feels pity and wipes out the impossibly large debt, only to see the slave immediately lose his mind with someone who owes him a sum of money that the disciples can at least relate to, and the parable ends with everyone angry, suffering, unforgiving and unforgivable. The author has the scene end with Jesus saying, in essence, “And that, my friends, is what will happen to you if you don’t forgive. God will torture you.”
The thing is, nobody in this parable forgives or even wants to forgive. The king comes close, wiping away the slave’s debt, but he does so out of pity, which is different than mercy. Then he doesn’t forgive again when opportunity number two comes along. The slave clearly doesn’t forgive. Heck, even Peter is trying to find out how many times he needs to forgive before he can stop forgiving and get back to the easier road of blame and punishment. What do we do with this parable?
First, and maybe most importantly for 21st century Christians, let’s remember that this is a parable, not a teaching. And it’s a parable in response to Peter’s question about forgiveness, so it makes sense that we focus on what the parable’s plot points bring up about our assumptions about forgiveness and what we believe about the forgiveness God offers.
Jurgen Moltmann, one of the great Christian theologians of the late 20th century, pointed out that the one thing that set the God of Israel, Yahweh, apart from all the gods who came before, was that Yahweh was not a “tit-for-tat,” eye-for-an-eye deity. Remember how at the end of the Noah story, God put a bow in the sky signifying that God’s days of wrath and smitings were in the past? Unlike other gods, Yahweh gives plenty of chances for repentance. Yahweh forgives. Jesus and the Jewish prophets before him preached that we should do the same. Meanwhile, the Roman Empire of Jesus’ time took on the tit-for-tat-ness of their theology in which they believed that gods did punish people.
The idea that God forgives without ceasing is there foundationally, deep within our tradition. But the cultural water we swim in, the systems we internalized from a young age, teach that for many actions, there is one correct reaction: tit-for-tat. When one does something bad, punishment follows, not forgiveness.
The king wants to be generous and good, he really does. He forgives the slave who he must have known had no real hope of repaying his debt. Good on him, forgiveness! But he, like all humans everywhere, just couldn’t keep the forgiveness going. The slave makes another mistake, and the king gets pulled back into the old mire of tit-for-tat. The outcome is the same as if the king’s first forgiving hadn’t even happened.
It’s a stark contrast: the human pull to vindictiveness versus God’s unceasing forgiveness. Jurgen Moltmann quotes from scripture when he writes, “the link between act and consequence” – that is, the link we humans make – “contradict the God who ‘forgives all your iniquities and heals all your diseases and redeems your life from the Pit (Ps 103:3-4).’ This God is [Godself] the power of the new life, which overrules fate and cancels the connection between act and consequence, and instead of endless retaliation and consequences puts life’s new beginning. The divine principle of compassionate justice breaks through the curse of the evil act and repeals it: ‘[God’s] mercies are new every morning (Lam 3:23).’ This is the freedom of the new beginning. There is no other freedom. This is the birth of life in the face of mercy.”[i]
Moltmann enlarges the stakes of mercy, already high as a gateway to repaired relationship and the deliverance of justice, to a gateway, maybe even the gateway to freedom. In other words, when we drop our need to pay back an eye for an eye; when we drop our assumption that this cause must produce that effect; when we humbly admit that maybe we don’t know what will happen next. . . These are the times when we are best imitating God’s mercy and most open to the new life that God is always offering creation.
On its surface, the parable is about settling of financial debts, where one party is clearly owed something and the other owes. But if we open to it, it goes right to one of the foundational constructs of human rationality: that, based on past experience, when one thing happens, we know what will (or should) happen next, and when it doesn’t, we have the right to label that thing wrong and worthy of punishment. It turns out that mercy is the key, not only to fixing relationships, but to seeing God’s work all around us.
Here’s an example. Every day, I walk our dog along Minnehaha Creek downstream from here. This year, the creek looks bad: low water levels, stagnant pools, toxic blue green algae blooms. My cause/effect brain looks at it and wants to rail at humanity for bringing about climate change and catastrophic alterations to ecosystems all over the world. Sometimes I do. On some walks, I grieve. But when I soften myself and notice what is instead of what should be, my vision expands. I see egrets and great blue herons that I may have walked by otherwise. I notice neighbors who have taken it on themselves to fill water bags at the bases of new trees planted by the parks service. I see new life, despite drought and any number of other challenges in the urban natural environment. That seeing brings me joy. It brings me hope.
My friends, whether we’re talking about another person, or an ecosystem, or a global political system, if we want to see where God is seeding new life, and God is always seeding new life, we must drop our certainty that we understand how one event follows another. People and systems change – they forgive, they repent, they grow, sometimes through no logic that we from our limited perspectives can understand.
There is a time and place for punishment, certainly. But may we practice mercy and not jump to labeling things and people evil and deserving of our judgement and retribution. And may we practice mercy with ourselves and with our ancestors as we continue to grow in our presence to what our world is right now, not what we wish it were. And may that enlarged presence to the real enable us to co-create a new future with our God. May it be so. Amen.
[i] Jurgen Moltmann, Ethics of Hope, (Augsburg Fortress Press: Minneapolis, 2012), p. 174.