September 11, 2011–Pentecost +13

God Forgives without Limits
Matthew 18:21-35
Pentecost + 13 – September 11, 2011

It's pretty clear to me today what the take home message of this gospel lesson is. I'll admit that there are lots of times that I have to spend a lot of time trying to dig below the surface of the various stories in the Bible, trying to figure out what God's word is to us, to our congregation, in our day and time. Sometimes, Jesus' words seem mysterious, wrapped up as they are in images and understandings from a context that is so very different than our own. Some days, I'm right there with the disciples in the stories, saying to Jesus, “Explain to us this parable.”

But this isn't one of those days. The “Parable of the Unforgiving Servant” isn't one of those parables. It's pretty obvious, isn't it? “Forgive one another as you have been forgiven.” That's it. “Forgive one another as you have been forgiven.” A simple message, but even with all its clarity, it's still a tough one to hear. These are hard instructions to live out. Oh, we like the part about how we ourselves have been forgiven well enough. It's just that other part, the part about how we are to forgive others that gives us pause.

We pick up this story where we left off last week, where Jesus was talking to the disciples about reconciliation and restoring relationships, where he was giving them some guidelines about how to handle a situation where someone had sinned against them, how they could go about trying to bring that one back into the fold. So it's not terribly surprising when Peter follows up with this question about forgiveness.

Now, I give Peter a lot of credit. He's been paying attention all these days and weeks and months that he's been with Jesus. He knows by now that if you're gonna be a follower of Jesus, forgiving others is part of the package. Being a disciple of Christ means that you will be expected to forgive other people. He was listening way back at the Sermon on the Mount, back in what we call chapter 6 of Matthew, when they asked Jesus to teach them to pray, and he did. And part of that prayer was to teach them these words, “Forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.”

So, what Peter wants to know is, “Just how far do I have to carry this forgiveness thing? Just exactly how many times to I have to forgive the same person who sins against me? Seven?”

Now seven was actually a pretty high number. The standard expectation was that you should forgive someone 3 times, but after that, they were on there own. So Peter's gone quite a bit beyond that. He's raised the expectations by a large margin.

But despite that, despite his good intentions, what Peter is trying to do is the same thing we all do – he's trying to put a limit on forgiveness. He's trying to figure out how far he has to go before he's off the hook. And Jesus comes back with the answer, “No, not seven times, but seventy-seven times.” In other words, as many times as they need to be forgiven, Peter, that's how many times you are to forgive them.

And that right there, that idea that we are supposed to forgive without limit, is where we struggle. Because as wonderful as it is to receive forgiveness ourselves, it is so hard to forgive someone else. And never mind forgiving them 77 times or 7 times – sometimes forgiving even one time seems too much. Some things seem completely unforgivable.

It's a beautiful, ironic coincidence that these words would come to us on this day, of all days, that the lectionary, planned out years in advance, would schedule these readings about forgiveness and mercy and compassion for the tenth anniversary of September 11, 2001. There are many other situations – global inn scale down to the community level and even more intimate, on the personal level – where we find it nearly impossible to forgive someone or several someones for what they have done to us. But the events of that day 10 years ago are staring us in the face this morning; the media has been filled with recollections and reflections and retrospections all week, still trying to make some sense of those horrific events that touched our nation so deeply, that wounded us – physically, emotionally, relationally – so badly that we still carry the scars. And it is hard to hear these words on this day, challenging to hear God speaking to us through these words of scripture, reminding us to forgive one another as we have been forgiven. Because forgiveness does not come naturally to us. We incline toward revenge and retribution, making the other pay what they owe us.

And that is an option left open to us – not just regarding 9/11, but in all of those painful situations of life where someone hurts us so badly that forgiving them seems impossible. We see it in this parable – God does not force us to forgive. Like the servant forgiven his huge, immense, unimaginable debt (what he owed the king was like 30 or 40 lifetimes of wages), yet who goes after the man who owed him a relatively minor amount in comparison, we can choose not to forgive. But that leaves us in a prison of our own making, trapped by the past, unable to embrace the new life that God offers, to be embraced by the healing, forgiving love of God revealed on the cross, the love that died to make itself known.

There's the good news in this take home message from Jesus today. “Forgive others as you have been forgiven.” Forgiveness may not come so naturally to us, but it is offered freely to us, offered time and again without limit by the one who commands us to forgive from the heart. That's what Jesus does, over and over again – in his encounters with people in his earthly ministry to his final moments on the cross, we see him offering forgiveness. Mercy. Compassion. New life. A fresh start. Setting us free from our sinful selves, releasing us from our grudges and grievances so that we experience this new life in him, so that in following him, we may be formed to live a life like his – learning even to forgive, because we know that we too have been forgiven. May the Spirit move us toward that life-giving forgiveness, today and everyday.

Amen.