“So my heavenly Father will also do to every one of
you, if you do not forgive your brother or sister from your heart.” (Matthew 18:35)
I
really love the collect for Pentecost 16, Year A in the Evangelical Lutheran
Worship book:
“O Lord God, merciful judge, you
are the inexhaustible fountain of forgiveness. Replace our hearts of stone with
hearts that love and adore you, that we may delight in doing your will.”
That’s
so cool that God’s love is an “inexhaustible fountain” which makes us find “delight”
in doing what God wants us to do. Granted, we don’t always find delight in
obedience to God. Forgiveness, the subject of the gospel lesson for Pentecost
16 (Matthew 18:21-35), is something we sometimes have to do through gritted teeth.
In
Jesus’ parable of the “Unforgiving Servant,” we see a rich guy—probably some
kind of landowner or taxing authority—and his servant or slave or serf or
something. The slave owes the boss money. Lots of money. Like twenty years’
salary worth of money. He’ll be dead before he can pay off this note. Jesus
doesn’t tell us how the guy got so deep into the hole. He may have been the
victim of predatory lending, he may have just been a doofus with money, or he
may have gambled himself into the crapper. All we know is he owes way more
than he can pay, and he comes groveling and whining before his lord, begging
for more time.
Then
the lord does something rather unexpected for the uber wealthy. He puts aside his
rapacious greed, feels sorry for the poor slob, and forgives him the entire
debt! I’ll bet the folks listening to Jesus said to each other, “Yeah! Like
that would ever happen!” In the world of this text debt slavery was an
everyday occurrence. A debtor could be sold if he was a slave or tossed in the clink
for non-payment if he was a freeman. And that was not just in Jesus’ time. That
stuff still goes on all over the world—even in the United States.
If
you’ve ever had a big debt like a student loan or a mortgage or even a car
loan, you know how good it feels when you finally get out from under it. When
you make that last payment on the once maxed-out VISA card, you feel like you’ve
just lost forty pounds and you want to go skipping down the avenue whistling “Zippi
Dee Do Dah.”
But
not this guy. Oh no. Now that he’s debt free, he wants to start spending all
over again. He finds one of his buddies who owes him a few bucks. He was
probably acting like a big shot by loaning the guy money he’d borrowed from their
landed master in the first place. Now, instead of chilling out and being
grateful to have his life back again, he chucks his buddy into debtors’ prison
when the other guy can’t pay. Some fellow serfs see this as a really
mean-spirited act, so they snitch on the unforgiving serf to the lord, who, disgusted
by the guy’s lack of either gratitude or compassion, has him jailed until he
can pay off his original debt (which he probably can’t do).
(Just
for fun, the Greek here literally reads, “And being angry, his lord delivered
him up to the tormentors until he should pay all that was owing to him.” The
Greek word for “tormentors” is basanistais, which could also be
translated as “jailors.” I guess jailors in Jesus’ time were pretty rough dudes.
Basically, the serf was handed over to the collection agency.)
In
the Greek of Matthew’s gospel the word for debt (opheile) is interchangeable
with wrong, sin, or guilt. Hence, in Matthew 6:12, Jesus tells us to pray that
God will forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors. I guess we’ve
substituted the word “trespass” in our liturgical use of the Lord’s Prayer because
trespassing is crossing a line which ought not to be crossed. It doesn’t carry
with it the financial connotation of the word “debt.” Nevertheless, in
Jesus’ day, any wrongdoing—weather it was to God or anyone else—was an
obligation for which one would have to atone or pay off. To forgive an injury
would be to release someone from that obligation or cancel their debt. And sometimes
we just want people to pay up.
I always like to ask which character
we identify with in this parable. Are we the ungrateful, unempathetic,
self-involved debtor? Are we the uncharacteristically generous but ultimately
judgmental lord? (One can be both, you know.) Are we the servant whose small
debt has landed him in big trouble? Are we the self-righteous snitches who talk
against someone instead of talking to them?
One thing’s for sure: we’re
probably not Jesus. We might, however, be Simon Peter who asked Jesus the
question about forgiveness in the first place. You have to wonder if Peter was
getting to his last nerves with someone and just wanted to know where the red
line would be before he didn’t have to forgive but could cold cock the guy.
Jesus has to teach him there is no red
line. We are to forgive. Period. Like the serf in the parable, we all have been
forgiven debts we could never repay on our own. We need to bathe in that
inexhaustible fountain of God’s mercy and find the delight which comes from
obedience to God’s will. Forgiveness does not depend on the contrition of the
wrongdoer. It depends on the heart of the one who is wronged. Jesus told us
what we loose on earth will be loosed in Heaven, but what we bind on earth will
be bound in Heaven. When we fail to learn the delight of forgiveness, we are delivered
up to the tormentor. And the tormentor is ourselves.
May you find delight in the will of
God this week, my friend. Thank you for reading. Leave a note and let me know
you were here, okay?
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