Poor Peter seems to be at it again this morning. After totally nailing who Jesus is, he seems to spend the rest of Matthew’s Gospel not quite getting the point being made. So last week, if you remember, Jesus laid out for his disciples what they were to do if conflict arose in their communities. How they were to approach each other, talk it out, and try to move forward. This morning we hear that Peter took the opportunity to sort of push the question a little bit. OK, Peter says, so this whole talk it out thing is great, but really, let’s talk details. If someone sins against me, how many times do I have to forgive them? Like seven times? Which, if you think about it, is kind of a lot of times. Takes seven times to make a habit. Also, interesting fact, seven is a number that shows up a lot in the scriptures. God created the world in seven days; the Israelites marched around Jericho seven times, for seven days, holding seven trumpets; it took Solomon seven years to build the temple. Seven is a number that represented completeness in the Israeli tradition. So there’s some theological backing to Peter picking seven as a “complete” amount of forgiveness. It’s a good, solid, biblical number of times. But Jesus ups the ante. Not seven, but seventy-seven, or seventy times seven. Either way, the point is multiple sevens, which is like more than completeness.
The point Jesus makes with Peter here is that there is a fundamental difference between the account-based system Peter is proposing and the radical nature of God’s forgiveness. The problem really comes down to a problem of scale. As humans, we are finite creatures in a finite system. We exist in a world bound by space and time, numbers and math. There’s nothing good or bad about this, it simply is. In fact, there’s really something sacred about it, because in the incarnation, Jesus came and bound himself by the same finiteness. When Jesus was on earth, he was under the same laws of gravity and physics that affect all of us. So when Peter tried to assess a number to forgiveness, it comes out of this reality of his finitude. There really is only so much to go around. But here’s the problem Peter’s facing, God is not bound by the same finitude that we are. So God’s reality exists on level that is not mathematical or logical. To help make sense of this, Jesus uses a parable.
The kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who wished to settle accounts with his slaves. One slave owed him ten thousand talents.
I tried to translate ten thousand talents into modern currency to give you a sense of the comparison, and here’s what I learned. A talent was worth like fifteen years worth of wages for an average laborer. But more than that, a talent was the largest increment of money that existed. And the concept of infinity as a number didn’t exist yet, so ten thousand, a myriad in the Greek, is the largest number that there was. So ten thousand talents is the largest possible amount of money that there could be. The slave could not owe the master more money, because there wasn’t an amount higher than this. You know when two kids are bickering about something and the first one is like, yeah, well I’m right times infinity, and then the other one is like, yeah, well I’m right times infinity plus infinity. That’s basically what Jesus has done to Peter’s argument with this parable. It’s a reduction to absurdity.
And even though the slave owed the king basically all of the money that existed, when the slave begged for mercy, the king granted it. Which is pretty amazing. The king just threw away all that he was owed. And we might have judged the king for his poor money management, were it not for what happened next. That very same slave, having just been set free from this astronomical debt, comes across someone who owes him money. One hundred denarii is the debt, about a hundred days wages. So no small sum either, but not all of the money that had ever existed. And we would expect for the forgiven man to show mercy, right. That would be just, that would be fair. It would be a way for the man to pay back for the mercy he’d received.
But he didn’t. Instead he demanded what he was owed, throwing his fellow slave in prison until he could recoup his losses. And everyone was, of course, disgusted with the first slave, and went and told the master. And the master called the first slave in, chastised him for his failure to show mercy, and threw him in prison. And so too, ends the parable, will your heavenly father do to you, if you do not show mercy. Pretty cut and dry.
At least, it seems pretty cut and dry. But here’s a couple things about parables. First, because we are analytical beings, we tend to try to make parables allegorical, to assign each character a roll. God is the king, or the farmer, or the sower, we the servant, the plant, the weed, angels are harvesters, etc. And that works, to a point. But one theologian I love remarks that using parables to explain concepts is like using riddles to give directions to the airport. Parables get us thinking in the right direction but trying to make these sorts of direct connections always sell them short. God instead exists for us in the intersections of the parables, in the ways the characters come together and in how those interactions change us.
Second, parables can be read as either prescriptive or descriptive. We tend to read them prescriptively, if you do this, then this will happen. But in the Greek, “if” and “when” are the same word. So sometimes parables are more descriptive. They don’t describe the consequences of our actions; they describe the world we already live in.
So what if this parable Jesus shares this morning, might be more descriptive than prescriptive. What if that last like is better read this is “when you don’t forgive” rather than “if you don’t forgive”? What if Jesus is telling Peter, when you do not forgive, you hold yourself captive?
All of us carry scars of places where we have been hurt by other children of God. Some scars are visible, some are invisible, but all of us carry them. And God wants desperately to heal those scars, to bring us to a place of wholeness. But those scars came at a cost, a cost we had to pay. And when we are focused in recouping our cost, when our hands and our hearts are full of what we are owed, we don’t have space to hold the gift of mercy and grace which God is extending to us. But when we are able to let go, when we are able to open our hands and our hearts, we find that we have been invited into a different system altogether, a system that is based not on accounting, but on abundance. That less than what the other person deserves is somehow more than we can imagine.
That’s the power of forgiveness. Not that it changes the other person, but that it changes us. Forgiveness is not about love, or even about liking. It’s not about restoring relationship necessarily, and it’s certainly not about forgetting. But it is about deciding that the past will not hold you captive anymore, that whoever has sinned against you will not be permitted to live rent free in your soul, and you will live into the promised reign of God. Forgiveness is about giving up the pain so that God can heal your hurts, mend your scars.
This is hard, God knows it’s hard. Forgiveness takes time, like love it cannot be forced. But we can practice forgiveness. We can practice and like any muscle it will grow stronger. And seventy times seven times God is with us in the practice, coaxing us into an existence that is more than we thought we deserved, more than we think we could be.
As I was prepping for this sermon I came across the story of the first African-American to integrate the New Orleans public school system. Ruby Bridges was six years old when her parents enrolled her in the all-white William Franz Elementary School. The public response was swift and immediate. Looking back, Bridges remarked that the first day she drove to her new school she, “thought it was Marti Gras. There was a large crowd of people outside the school. They were throwing things and shouting, and that sort of thing goes on in New Orleans at Marti Gras.” She couldn’t imagine all that commotion was about her. The first day the chaos was so great she spent the entire day sitting alone in the school office, surrounded by U.S. Marshals. By the second day, every other student had been pulled from the school, and every teacher but one had resigned. Ruby Bridges was the only student at William Franz Elementary.
But while the students were gone, the crowds outside only got worse. Ruby continued to be escorted to and from school by U.S. Marshals. Crowds shouted obscenities and set up disturbing displays, people threatened her home and her family. Through all of this, little Ruby Bridges marched to school.
To support Ruby through this time, famous child psychiatrist Robert Coles offered to meet with Ruby once a week in her home. On one meeting, Coles remarked he’d noticed Ruby reciting something under her breath every day as she walked to and from the school. Ruby responded that she was reciting a line from the Bible her parents had taught her to say, a line that they hoped would shield their young daughter from the hatred and the violence that she faced every day. Every day, twice a day, as she walked through angry crowds to integrate her school so other kids would not have to suffer as she had, Ruby Bridges recited, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they are doing.”
That is the power of forgiveness. It is a power that says your sin, your anger, will not have control over me. Not because I am weak, but because I am strong. It is a power that allows us to stand up in the very face of evil and live forward into the coming kingdom of God. Amen.
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