Pentecost 15 -2020
Matthew 18:21-35
Marian Free
In the name of God who longs to gather us under his/her wings as a mother hen gathers her chicks. Amen.
God can’t make it right.
I don’t often, if ever, begin where I left off the previous week, but it seems particularly appropriate this week. Chapter 18 of Matthew is best considered as a whole. In it the author of Matthew has gathered the sayings of Jesus that have advice as to how to live in community. It includes an exhortation to become as a child and warns the community not to do anything that would hurt the vulnerable among them. Jesus continues with a dramatic and gruesome encouragement to look to their own lives and remove from themselves all that causes harm. Jesus’ concern for the outcast is illustrated by the parable of the lost sheep (which is also a not so subtle reminder that he expects the majority to remain in the fold while he is off looking for the one that is lost). In last week’s reading from the gospel, Jesus gave the community some advice regarding dispute resolution suggesting at the same time that what was bound on earth was bound in heaven.
Finally, Jesus responds to Peter’s question about forgiveness, specifically forgiveness of a fellow member of the community.
Peter, who obviously knows Jesus’ attitude to forgiveness, asks a question intending, it seems, to demonstrate his own magnanimity – forgiving seven times seven is surely generous! Jesus plays Peter at his own game – not seven times seven but seventy times seven! Peter’s question indicates that he has in fact learnt nothing. It also exposes his own small-mindedness. In God’s eyes there is no limit to forgiveness. In fact, God does not even keep count! Peter’s question alone reveals that he believes that forgiveness has its boundaries, that it can be used up if a person goes too far.
By way of illustrating Peter’s niggardliness, meanness and lack of generosity, Jesus tells a parable about an extraordinary debt – something like $2.5m in today’s terms. No one would have a hope of paying back such an amount, let alone a slave and surely no one, not even a king, could afford to lose (forgive or overlook) that sort of fortune. Yet, in response to the man’s pleas, the king forgives the debt – every cent. There is no suggestion of paying it back with interest and no hint of indebtedness. The slate is wiped clean, the slave owes nothing at all. You would think, wouldn’t you, that the slave would leave the king’s presence overwhelmed with gratitude, wonder and a deep sense of humility, but no, the man has learnt nothing from the experience. (One notices in retrospect that he has not even thanked the king!)
Perhaps then we should not be surprised to learn that his first action on leaving the king is to grab hold of a fellow slave and demand the repayment of a paltry amount. Unlike the king, the first slave is completely deaf to the pleas of his fellow slave and has him thrown into prison. He has learnt nothing. The king’s generosity has not touched his heart. It appears that he simply could not understand that his slate could be wiped clean, nor could he believe that repayment would not be exacted at some future date. His failure (or inability) to truly grasp the generosity and magnanimity of the king has denied him the benefits of forgiveness and has shut him off from the generosity that was so freely offered. (One could argue that he was already in a prison of his own making or, as Kavanaugh suggests, the state of his soul had been so hardened that no amount of compassion and kindness could soften it[1].
Peter’s mistake was to believe that there was some sort of mathematics of reconciliation (Kavanaugh again), that forgiveness was a numbers game that could be measured and doled out. Jesus’ response and the accompanying parable give the lie to this point of view. God simply does not operate in this way. God’s forgiveness knows no limits. There may come a time when we turn our backs on God, but God never turns God’s back on us.
In our “tit for tat” economy, we find it hard to believe in something for nothing. If someone hurts us, we expect some form of recompense and sadly we attribute to God our own smallness of mind and meanness of spirit. Yet surely the message of the cross is this – humankind had done nothing at all to warrant, let alone earn such self-sacrificial love, but God extended that love anyway.
It is our foolish pride, our unnecessary self-consciousness and our stubborn independence that cuts us off from the love of God. It is not God, but our failure to believe that we are loved and forgiven that locks us out of the kingdom. If we shut ourselves off from God’s boundless love, if we fail to believe in God’s limitless forgiveness and if we refuse to allow ourselves to be carried back to the fold, there is nothing that God can do.
If we shut ourselves off from God’s love, if we refuse to be gathered into the fold, there is ultimately nothing that God can do for us. If having been forgiven a debt of the size of that of the slave, we still don’t understand God’s goodness and boundless generosity, there is little more that God can do to prove that love. If we don’t want to be held in God’s loving embrace, or to be carried on God’s shoulders back to the fold, God is not going to force our hand. We have to swallow our pride and relax into God’s all-embracing, forgiving love and, when we do, we will discover in ourselves the same expansive generosity that will allow us to love and to forgive – not seven times seven, but seventy times seven.
[1] https://liturgy.slu.edu/24OrdA091320/theword_kavanaugh.html
Tags: debt, forgiveness, gathered into the fold, generosity, living in community, mathematics of reconciliation, niggardliness
Swallowsrest 