The Gospel for this week really feels like it’s the first part of a two-part sermon, the second part being the one we heard last week. Because while last week we heard about what to do if another member of the church sins against us, this week we hear a parable about the only way we can hope to do what we heard about last week right and well, if it is grounded in this expansive forgiveness.
Our reading for this morning starts out with Peter coming to Jesus with that well-known question, “Lord, if another member of the church sins against me, how often should I forgive? As many as seven times?” Because we know Jesus’ response to Peter so well, we lose weight of Peter’s original proposition. Seven, if you recall, is the number used in the Old Testament to represent completion. Seven is also a reference to the story I referenced last week. After Cain killed Abel, God promised Cain that even though he was being cast away, a sevenfold vengeance would happen to anyone who harmed him. Peter’s proposal of seven was reversing that initial obligation of retaliation.
But Jesus, as Jesus is wont to do, upended the entire retribution structure with his response. “Not seven times,” Jesus said to Peter, “but, I tell, you, seventy-seven times.” Or seventy times seven times. The Greek number system is different than ours, and the phrase used here could just as correctly be translated seventy-seven, as the NRSV does, or seventy times seven, as the King James Bible does. So either seventy-seven or four hundred and ninety could be correct. And really it doesn’t matter at all, because the point Jesus was making with all those sevens was if you’re counting at all you’re missing the point. Jesus’ response to Peter wasn’t about upping the ante, but about changing the very nature of forgiveness, which the following parable demonstrates.
But before we get into the parable, let’s refresh our memories a bit about the way Jesus used parables. Because scholars are pretty sure Matthew laid a little bit of commentary around this parable. Matthew remembered this parable as a help illustration of forgiveness for the church. But Jesus always used parables to disorient the listener and unsettle their expectations to reveal the surprising proclamation of the kingdom of God.
“For this reason,” Jesus began, “the kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who wished to settle accounts with his slaves.” We are told that the first slave owed ten thousand talents. If we were well-versed in ancient Roman money, this amount would instantly key us in that something weird was going on. Ten-thousand was the largest number in the Roman mathematic system. And a talent was the largest unit in the Roman monetary system. Scholars are divided on the exact weight, but it was somewhere in the neighborhood of fifty pounds of silver. One talent equaled about fifteen years of wages for a laborer. And this guy owed ten-thousand of them. That’s one hundred and fifty thousand years worth of debt! Commentaries are quick to point out that with this kind of amount it was probably not a personal debt. More likely it was the result of mismanagement or poor contracting with subject nations to raise taxes. But even so, this number is astronomical. To put it in perspective, the annual tax income for all of Herod the Great’s territories was nine-hundred talents per year. Ten-thousand talents would have been more than the taxes of all of Syria, Phoenicia, Judea, and Samaria combined. Clearly ten-thousand talents, the largest amount of the largest unit of money, was less about accurate accounting and more about getting the point across that this guy is in an obscene amount of debt. Despite his arguing in verse twenty-six that he just needed time, the servant’s situation was hopeless. He was never going to be able to be right with the king.
And the king forgave him for everything. He didn’t give him more time, or work out a payment plan, or offer something in exchange for the debt. He simply forgave it, wiped the slate clean, allowed the man to start over. What had once been an incomprehensible burden was gone with the wave of a hand.
But what happened next has to make us wonder if the man fully realized the tremendous grace he’d received. Because immediately upon leaving the king’s presence he came across another slave who owed him money. One-hundred denarii, the parable tells us. Now, let’s be real, one-hundred denarii is no small sum. A denarii is roughly a day’s wages for a laborer, so we’re talking about a third of someone’s yearly income. But compared to the one hundred and fifty thousand years, one-hundred denarii is pocket change. Yet when the man who had just been forgiven this huge amount came across someone who owed him a lesser amount, he responded with vengeance, throwing the man into prison until he could pay his debts. Which opens up a whole interesting conversation about the effectiveness of punishing someone for being poor that sadly we don’t have time to go into right now, but we totally should. The fellow slaves, acting as placeholders for the reader, were rightly enraged at this injustice and reported the action to the king, who returned to hold the first slave to account. “You wicked slave! I forgave you all the debt because you pleaded with me. Should you not have had mercy on your fellow slave, as I had mercy on you?” And in anger his lord handed him over to be tortured until he could pay his entire debt.
The overall thrust of this parable seems on the surface pretty obvious. We are to forgive as we have been forgiven, expansively and without regard to the weight of the wrong or the deservingness of the other. Because we have been forgiven by God, so to are we to forgive. Forgive more, more fully, more graciously, more expansively.
Forgive more is definitely the message if we read this parable in isolation. But Jesus didn’t give us just this parable alone. And reading this parable after the teaching from last week about how to approach someone who has sinned against us, and then taking these things out of the world of parables and in to the actual world, we can pretty quickly see how difficult this is. Here’s a super silly example that happened to me this week, where I had to put this forgiveness and calling out thing into practice. On Thursday while I was working on this sermon, a three-year-old with a very dirty face wandered into my office. Turns out this three-year-old had found my snack stash for the afterschool program and had helped himself to the better part of a box of chocolate cookies. Here’s my thought process as I’m working through this with these two Gospel readings in my mind. First off, they’re not even really my cookies. I didn’t do anything to earn the cookies, I don’t really deserve the cookies. David brought the cookies for the afterschool kids, if the cookies belong to anyone, they’re David’s cookies or the bus kids cookies. I should be asking David’s forgiveness for squandering his gift. Also, this guy is three. His concept of whether or not it’s ok to eat a whole box of cookies and who may be the rightful owner of the cookies is fairly limited. And Teresa and Val and I work really hard to make sure that the Co-op members know that this is a place where they are welcome, and where their children are welcome. Childcare is a major barrier for women in poverty, and we really strive to be a family-friendly space. This is not just for the members themselves, but it is really important to me that the kids also feel welcome here. Kids in poverty are dealing with a ton of stress, and I want the church to be a place where they know they are loved and treasured and cared for. So of course I’m going to forgive the cookie bandit.
But forgiveness and grace are not the same as niceness. And in fact, pretending it’s ok is actually a detriment to him. One because it’s dangerous for him to be wandering around places where he doesn’t belong. But two because part of healthy childhood development includes setting healthy boundaries. If I really care about the well-being of this child, which I do, I need to be proactive about setting up rules for him and making sure those rules are enforced. Even though he’s forgiven, I do also need to let him know that rifling through boxes and stealing cookies is not appropriate behavior and will not be tolerated. I need to enforce with his mom that she has to be responsible for him when he is in the building, but I need to also be careful of her feelings, so she knows that my feedback comes from a place of welcome and support, and not from a place of condemnation. So fellow and I had a conversation on Thursday, which his mom was a part of, about how he cannot be running around eating cookies, and how if he wants a cookie he has to ask his mom, and she can give him one, but he cannot go finding them on his own. On Thursday I was on my game, he was in a good mood, his mom was comfortable, and it was a good conversation. We set boundaries, he grew, his mom grew, and I grew, and our relationships with each other were strengthened because we were able to be honest about what the problem was and how we could fix it together. But he’s three, so we’ll probably have this conversation a lot more times. Not about cookies, I’m forgiving but I’m also not dumb, the cookies are in a new, out-of-reach home now, but about other things. And there will be days where I will not be as tolerant as I was able to be Thursday and I’ll get mad, or call him out for something he didn’t actually do. On those days, I hope Teresa or Val or Gwen or someone else in the building will be able to call out my mistake and help me see how I could have handled it differently. There will be days when he’ll not be in as easy-going of a mood himself, and he will not be open to hearing my correction. I hope on those days there will be someone who he will be able to hear better, or that I’ll have the patience to wait until he’s calmed down and we can try again.
This is a story about a three-year-old and cookies, but you can see how the example could be extrapolated forward into all sorts of struggles and conflicts. Forgiveness and reconciliation are not straightforward processes. There is generally not a clear right and wrong, but a hundred different complex greys that muddy the waters. Some sins need binding, and some loosing, sometimes we are to call out and sometimes we are to let slide. But the pairing of these stories assure us that when, not if but when, we get it wrong, we are forgiven completely by God again and again, even though we do not deserve it. May the confidence of God’s unending forgiveness of you give you the strength to forgive others and to move forward in love, and the comfort to forgive yourself and try again when you fall short. Because it is only through the amazing grandness of God’s unfailing love that we may come to live that love out ourselves. Amen.
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