Matthew 18:21-35
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Why does a sermon on forgiveness feel like sitting down with the kids to have another “family discussion” about doing your chores? Why does it seem like a chore itself, as if we’re going to talk again about something that is so hard, sometimes so foreign to us that we’d rather not talk about it at all? It often seems to inspire only guilt, for forgiveness is something we’re supposed to do, according to the tenets of our faith, but which our culture teaches us NOT to do. Frankly this is precisely what I think is going on with Peter’s question to Jesus, a question that I think may have even more weight for us now than the parable that follows.
Remember that the passage before this, the one we read last Sunday, was also about forgiveness. It was about conflict resolution and used the powerful phrase – “whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.” It establishes the idea that we are practicing the kin-dom of God right here and now with the ways we treat one another, perhaps even more than practicing…actually enacting! And the whole discussion, weighted down heavily with Jesus’ love for the dramatic, which we are getting only the tail end of with this passage, begins with Jesus saying to his disciples that they must become humble “like a child” to enter the kingdom and that if your “eye causes you to stumble, tear it out and throw it away; it is better for you to enter life with one eye than to have two eyes and to be thrown into the Gehenna of fire.” This is not a polite talk over tea, but rather Jesus asserting (again) to his disciples that they have some reprogramming to do, a little reboot, to use our technological language, where the action of love causes us to relate to things differently, to judge things differently, even to see things differently.
In our Wednesday night book study we are reading a book called The Sin of Certainty, by Dr. Peter Enns. In this book Dr. Enns makes the assertion that we have gotten faith wrong. We have been taught that faith is more about accepting a set of beliefs about Jesus rather than living our lives in the way of Jesus. He writes that we have, “misunderstood faith as a what word rather than a who word – as primarily beliefs about rather than primarily as trust in.” He gives an analogy – a healthy marriage is not based on being right, or even about certainty. It’s isn’t about having accurate knowledge of one another. It is based on relating, meaning a dedication to seek relationship, to continue searching, to walk, however ramblingly, in the same general direction.
Enns asserts that when we make our faith about correct belief, we limit God with the confines of our ability to think about God, requiring that God submit to our theology, our “God talk.” Our scriptures – see the book of Ecclesiastes or Job, or most of the parables of Jesus – contain lots of stories about how God defies our expectations and breaks all of the rules, even the rules we think God dictated. Even God’s name, as we discussed a couple of weeks ago with a passage from Exodus, is declared by scripture to be – I will be what I will be. The very name is fraught with uncertainty.
When Peter asks what he asks, it isn’t an attempt to understand forgiveness more fully, or to wrestle with how he might reshape his own heart to be more forgiving. It is a question rooted in certainty.
OK, Jesus…sure, forgiveness, got it.
So, how many times do I have to do this before I’m off the hook?
I mean, once I forgive someone 3 times, then I can move on, right?
Isn’t that what you just said? First go to my sister in person, then take a friend, then the church.
That’s three times by my count. Then I can disparage them, right?
Then I can get even?
Peter takes the “what must I believe” approach to his faith…just tell me the requirements, Jesus, give me the list of things and I will check them off! The parable seems to anticipate this response. Jesus sets it up by saying that Peter should forgive “seventy times seven”, a phrase that is meant to be as hyperbolic as the rest of the passage. It’s like saying a bazillion-kajillion, a ridiculous number that would leave Peter with the distinct impression that Jesus is saying forgive endlessly. Then Jesus tells this story that compares God to an angry overlord with a rhetorical flourish which makes clear that Jesus think those who are caught up in the counting, those who are unable to extend to others mercy may not connect it to the mercy shown to them. And if they aren’t giving out the same measure of mercy they have received from God they become trapped in a life of calculated interactions and emotional scarcity.
The parable is not about equations, it is about recognition and relationship. The slave recognizes the mercy given to him, but takes it as a calculation. So, perhaps if the “the lord” in the story had some reason to ask for mercy, he would have granted it but no such thing occurs when another person asks it of him, for that person had not shown him mercy…his calculated relationship demanded no return. We do the same thing when we love only those who love us, when we don’t recognize that giving and receiving are the same thing, when we forgive only those who forgive us. At some level, Jesus teaches his disciples again and again, we show mercy because we wish to be shown mercy, or, perhaps more to the point, because we have been shown mercy.
It’s like “Pay It Forward”, that movie about a kid whose school project to “make the world a better place” produces a plan where the recipient of a favor does a favor for three others rather than paying the favor back. It is a tragic movie that kind of started a trend for people thinking about how they might relate to “favors” in their lives. This is the same concept – that we love only to the point that we accept how we are loved…that we have compassion when we are shown what compassion is…and that we forgive because we have been forgiven, maybe not by the person or situation we need to forgive, but this way of being in the world, this path of Jesus, isn’t about calculations.
Given that Jesus’ parable is so harsh, so direct in a way that perhaps does not jive with our own image of God, I thought I’d give us another, from the pages of Dr. M. Scott Peck:
“The story concerns a monastery that had fallen upon hard times. Once a great order, as a result of waves of anti-monastic persecution in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and the rise of secularism in the nineteenth, all its branch houses were lost and it had become decimated to the extent that there were only five monks left in the decaying mother house: the abbot and four others, all over seventy in age. Clearly it was a dying order.
In the deep woods surrounding the monastery there was a little hut that a rabbi from a nearby town occasionally used for a hermitage. Through their many years of prayer and contemplation the old monks had become a bit psychic, so they could always sense when the rabbi was in his hermitage. “The rabbi is in the woods, the rabbi is in the woods again ” they would whisper to each other. As he agonized over the imminent death of his order, it occurred to the abbot at one such time to visit the hermitage and ask the rabbi if by some possible chance he could offer any advice that might save the monastery.
The rabbi welcomed the abbot at his hut. But when the abbot explained the purpose of his visit, the rabbi could only commiserate with him. “I know how it is,” he exclaimed. “The spirit has gone out of the people. It is the same in my town. Almost no one comes to the synagogue anymore.” So the old abbot and the old rabbi wept together. Then they read parts of the Torah and quietly spoke of deep things. The time came when the abbot had to leave. They embraced each other. “It has been a wonderful thing that we should meet after all these years, “the abbot said, “but I have still failed in my purpose for coming here. Is there nothing you can tell me, no piece of advice you can give me that would help me save my dying order?”
“No, I am sorry,” the rabbi responded. “I have no advice to give. The only thing I can tell you is that the Messiah is one of you.”
When the abbot returned to the monastery his fellow monks gathered around him to ask, “Well what did the rabbi say?” “He couldn’t help,” the abbot answered. “We just wept and read the Torah together. The only thing he did say, just as I was leaving –it was something cryptic– was that the Messiah is one of us. I don’t know what he meant.”
In the months that followed, the old monks pondered this and wondered whether there was any possible significance to the rabbi’s words. The Messiah is one of us? Could he possibly have meant one of us monks here at the monastery? If that’s the case, which one? Do you suppose he meant the abbot? Yes, if he meant anyone, he probably meant Father Abbot. He has been our leader for more than a generation. On the other hand, he might have meant Brother Thomas. Certainly Brother Thomas is a holy man. Everyone knows that Thomas is a man of light. Certainly he could not have meant Brother Simon! Simon gets crotchety at times. Though Simon is virtually always right on our theological debates. Maybe the rabbi did mean Brother Simo. But surely not Brother Phillip. Phillip is so passive, a real nobody. But then, almost mysteriously, he has a gift for somehow always being there when you need him. He just magically appears by your side. Maybe Phillip is the Messiah. Of course the rabbi didn’t mean me. He couldn’t possibly have meant me. I’m just an ordinary person. Yet supposing he did? Suppose I am the Messiah? O God, not me. I couldn’t be that much for You, could I?
As they contemplated in this manner, the old monks began to treat each other with extraordinary respect on the off chance that one among them might be the Messiah. And on the off off chance that each monk himself might be the Messiah, they began to treat themselves with extraordinary respect.
Because the forest in which it was situated was beautiful, it so happened that people still occasionally came to visit the monastery to picnic on its tiny lawn, to wander along some of its paths, even now and then to go into the dilapidated chapel to meditate. As they did so, without even being conscious of it, they sensed the aura of extraordinary respect that now began to surround the five old monks and seemed to radiate out from them and permeate the atmosphere of the place. There was something strangely attractive, even compelling, about it. Hardly knowing why, they began to come back to the monastery more frequently to picnic, to play, to pray. They began to bring their friends to show them this special place. And their friends brought their friends.
Then it happened that some of the younger men who came to visit the monastery started to talk more and more with the old monks. After a while one asked if he could join them. Then another. And another. So within a few years the monastery had once again become a thriving order and, thanks to the rabbi’s gift, a vibrant center of light and spirituality in the realm.”
What we may want is some certainty – OK, we’ll try forgiving, but how many times exactly we have to try to forgive? What constitutes forgiveness? What is the exact measure so we can know for certain that we are in the right? Then we can tattoo that equation on our bodies and wield our righteousness like a weapon, then we can hold onto our certainty with an iron grip. But Jesus calls us instead to a riskier bargain – to be in relationship, to open up our hearts by seeing one another with new eyes and to walk boldly into a world whose foundations seem to be crumbling with a wholly different foundation – trust in our own created blessedness, in the grace given to us and in a God who is always making all things new. Thanks be to God.