The Rev. Sara Warfield
Scripture: Matthew 18:21-35
When I first read this gospel, I have to admit that I thought that the king, or lord—or God, since this is a parable—is being a little hypocritical. Jesus just told Peter that he should forgive not seven times but seventy-seven times, but then he has the lord handing the unforgiving servant over to be tortured after just his second screw-up?
But as I thought about it, I realized this isn’t a story about endless forgiveness no matter what, it’s a story about what forgiveness means, what forgiveness calls us to. What kind of community deep and authentic forgiveness creates.
This is the very heart of our Christian faith. Jesus dying on a cross and rising again as a way to forgive our sins.
Now there are a few ways to approach how this forgiveness comes about. There’s atonement: the belief that Jesus had to be the ultimate sacrificial lamb to cleanse all of humanity of their sin. This stems from the Jewish temple practice of offering sacrifices to God to atone for that community’s wrongdoing. The pain and suffering of that animal is the pain and suffering they should have experienced themselves as a result of their sin.
Another way to think about it is the idea of scapegoating. Jesus serves as a scapegoat, an innocent person on whom a community invests all of their fear and discomfort and anger, and then destroys him as a way of destroying that fear and discomfort and anger—and getting back to the comfortable, if disingenuous, peace they had before.
Whichever way you may think about Jesus’ death, his resurrection serves as the ultimate forgiveness. For the atonement idea, Jesus is punished for our sins, killed in our place, as a way of forgiving those sins, but then his resurrection solidifies that forgiveness—it is once for all and for all time. Now I know this atonement way of thinking has caused a lot of harm in our world, and harm to many of us who grew up in more theologically conservative churches. I was taught in my non-denominational church that the crucifixion is essentially ongoing, that whenever I sin, Jesus feels the pain of my sin anew. That I keep hurting Jesus as long as I keep choosing to sin. But also that his resurrection means that I can continue to repent of that sin and be forgiven.
I do think there are ways of approaching atonement theology that can be helpful and life-giving, but that’s a different sermon.
For the scapegoating idea, resurrection shows us that our sin does not have the last word. In his resurrection and then Jesus coming back to us with open arms, we are forgiven. Resurrection means that Jesus overcomes the sin of humanity that killed him and calls us into a more genuine peace, a more authentic love than just simply avoiding discomfort by eliminating those who make us uncomfortable or who rock the boat.
In either approach to Jesus’ death and resurrection, the real power is in what Jesus’ forgiveness calls us into: repentance, or in the Greek metanoia: to change our hearts. That’s where the servant whom the lord forgives in our story today goes wrong.
You see, the debt that the lord forgives is massive. Inconceivable, really. One talent in those times meant around 16 years worth of wages, and this servant owes 10,000 talents. It’s hard to know how a servant could even accumulate that kind of debt let alone pay it off. But we have to remember that the parables that Jesus told, particularly in Matthew, were full of purposeful hyperbole. In this story, Jesus is saying, the lord forgiving the debt lifts an unimaginable, unconquerable burden off the servant.
But then, after, the servant runs into a colleague who owes him a hundred denarii. A denarius was one day’s worth of wages. So 100 denarii might be three or four months worth of wages. A large amount, but not an inconceivable amount. I’m sure some of us have lended a similar amount to people in our lives. But this servant, instead of forgiving the comparatively paltry amount, or even giving the colleague more time to pay, throws him into debtors’ prison until he can pay him back. Not mercy but punishment.
The lord finds out about it and—again, let’s remember that Jesus spoke in hyperbole—gives the unforgiving servant over to be tortured until he himself pays his debt back.
Why? Obviously not because the lord needs that money. It’s because the servant does not let that forgiveness, that mercy that was shown to him, change how he himself lived his life and how he treated others.
Forgiveness is not letting people off the hook for harmful behavior. It also doesn’t mean giving the offender over to be tortured, but it does mean—if possible—to share with the offender how their behavior was harmful and giving them the opportunity to repent—to apologize and to change their heart.
This is something we’re talking about in Vestry, too, and that ministry team leaders will hear more about in our leadership meeting next month. As I mentioned a few months ago, our Vestry’s theme for the year is naming sin within our different ministries, repenting, and returning to God. Forgiveness is inherent to this theme.
One small example is that I keep making changes to our altar setup without communicating these changes to the Altar Guild in a thoughtful way. So what happens is on Sunday mornings I fix whatever wasn’t changed, and the Altar Guild team for that weekend notices and thinks they did something wrong, which is not the case at all. So I need to apologize for not rolling out these changes in an intentional way—which is repentance—and promise to get us all together to get us all on the same page—returning to God. Which honestly I still need to schedule a meeting to do. I hope they forgive me and that I live into that forgiveness by communicating better going forward.
Another small example is leaving doors unlocked around our building. This may seem like a small thing, especially if nothing happens as a consequence. But what if Ali, our Office Manager, is here alone when a stranger discovers that unlocked door. Maybe it’s just one of our unhoused neighbors looking for a warm place to sleep, but she finds him and accidentally startles him. Or maybe it’s a downstairs door and someone breaks in and trashes our classroom. In the time period it may have happened, our renter was also in the building and is now potentially liable for the damage, even though it was one of us who left the door unlocked.
Luckily, repentance is easy in a situation where severe consequences have not come to pass. Wow, I need to be better at communicating with the Altar Guild. Or, returning to God is simply double-checking the doors when we leave.
Now these of course are sins with small consequences. But if we’re intentional about naming the small ways we neglect or harm our relationships—which is how I define sin—and if we can practice repenting and returning to God in these lower stakes situations, maybe it’ll make it easier to repent and return when the stakes are higher when we stumble. And we all stumble at some point.
In being willing to admit where we have sinned, where we have let down or harmed another person or our community, and to repent and return to God is how we live into the grace and mercy and forgiveness that God has granted us through Jesus’ death and resurrection. And to grant that grace and mercy and forgiveness to others is how we spread God’s grace throughout our communities and world.
Again, that doesn’t mean forgive and forget. It means forgive and offer a path to accountability, to reconciliation. If we don’t offer that path, we’re not honoring ourselves or the person we want to forgive. Now the person who caused the harm may not take the path that you offer them. That’s not up to you. It is up to you where you go from there. It might mean creating some safe distance between you and the person, to take care of yourself. And that’s when forgiveness turns into letting yourself off the hook—your happiness can’t be dependent on whether or not another person changes their behavior. It can only depend on what you decide to do—whether that’s holding onto the resentment and anger, or letting it go knowing you did everything you could.
These are the practices the Vestry is hoping our community can live into. Because this is how we build a community of love, accountability, and grace. Amen.
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