To Know Forgiveness By Heart

Matthew 18:21-35
Then Peter came up and said to him, "Lord, how many times should I forgive when my brother or sister sins against me? Up to seven times?”

Jesus said to him, “I don’t say to you ‘up to seven times’ but rather seven times seventy times. For this reason the kingdom of heaven may be compared to a ruler who wanted to settle accounts with his slaves. Now upon beginning his reckoning, one was brought to him owing ten thousand talents; and since he didn’t have the money to repay, the ruler ordered that he, his wife, his children, and all that he had be sold and repayment to be made.

“So, falling down, the slave prostrated himself before the ruler saying, ‘Be patient with me and I will repay you everything.’ And being moved by sympathy, the ruler of that slave released him and forgave him the debt.

“Now that same slave, upon leaving, happened upon one of his fellow slaves who owed him a hundred denarii; and seizing him by the throat he said, ‘Repay what you owe.’

“So, falling down, his fellow-slave implored him saying, ‘Be patient with me and I will repay you.’ But he did not what to and instead went and threw his fellow-slave into prison until he would repay the debt.

“So, upon seeing this, his fellow-slaves were extremely distressed and they went and reported to the ruler himself all that had taken place. Then his ruler summoned him and said to him, ‘You wicked slave! I forgave you all of that debt because you implored me. Weren’t you compelled to show mercy to your fellow slave, just as I had mercy on you?’ And in anger his ruler handed him over to the extractors until he would repay the debt.

“So also will my heavenly Father do to you if you do not each forgive your brother and sister from your hearts.”

It happened ten years after her father died of alcoholism at the age of 56. Jacki Whitford woke up in the middle of the night with tears streaming down her face. She was a 43-year-old woman. She thought she had dealt with her father’s disease and his death. But on this night, ten years after his passing, she had a dream.

“I was standing in a thick fog by a mailbox in front of my mother’s house,” she said. “My father came slowly forward through the fog. He was about thirty and he looked good. He put his arms around me, and he seemed to be telling me that everything was okay. I cried so hard because I wanted to hold on to that feeling forever.”

The journey that began for Jack Whitford was a journey toward forgiveness: forgiveness for her father for his alcoholism and forgiving herself for thinking she was somehow responsible for his disease. It was forgiveness long overdue and it did not come easy. Forgiveness is work. It doesn’t happen overnight. It doesn’t happen just because we want it to. Forgiveness is something God does and which God enables us to do. And even though, in God’s time, it might take place in a flash, immediately -- in our time and space, it is a journey of healing with very few landmarks along the way.

Forgiveness is what today’s gospel lesson is about. And even with this parable it is sometimes no easier for us to understand how it works than it was for poor Peter who had his note pad out ready to write down the number of times you could legally forgive before justifiably turning your back on a person. As Jesus reminded him, it’s not a matter of counting marks on a pad -- 7, 77, 7 times 70 -- it really doesn’t matter -- forgiveness is a matter of the heart and the truth of the matter is that we don’t know our hearts very well.

This morning I’d like to walk through this strange little parable from Matthew with you and try to discover what it is that Christ might be saying to us through it. I want to begin by saying that I am no expert on forgiveness. Translating the Greek here is a lot more comfortable for me than getting a hold of forgiveness. But I want to make several claims. One is that forgiveness is what we are made to do as God-created people. Secondly, without forgiveness the world can seem like a pretty God-forsaken place. Each of us has wounds that have been done to us and wounds we have caused. Those wounds are important because God is acting in them, bringing healing by bringing forgiveness.

Peter’s question to Jesus, you’ll remember, was “How many times must I forgive?” Jesus’ answer, which must have been extremely frustrating for Peter, was, as it often was, a story--a parable--and a complicated parable at that. Peter just wanted a straight answer for future reference. Jesus wanted something more and giving an easy-to-remember number of times to forgive just wasn’t going to be sufficient.

Jesus seems to be saying that limited forgiveness is not the rule in the Christian community. You can’t limit God’s forgiveness and we shouldn’t limit ours. Infinite mercy--that’s what Jesus seems to be about and that should make us a little nervous.

Jesus goes on to illustrate his point with a story about a king, a ruler, who wanted to settle accounts with his slaves. Now I know what you’re thinking. “Okay, there’s a king in this story; that must be God. And the slaves must be us.” But don’t be too hasty here! Parables are meant to be a little fuzzy about who they’re referring to. That’s why they’re stories.

Anyway, the king brings in a slave who owes him 10,000 talents. We don’t know exactly how much money that is, but it is a lot--more than any slave could ever hope to repay in any lifetime. It’s obvious that this poor slave will never be able to repay this amount of money. How in the world could he have gotten into such a predicament? So the king is totally justified in his day and age in ordering the slave to be sold along with his wife and children and all his worldly goods until he can repay.

But here’s where the legal part of this story ends. Justice has been determined. The king has ordered the sentence to be carried out. But the slave falls down on his face before the king and says, “Be patient with me and I will repay!” How ridiculous! How pitiful this slave must have looked, laid out there in front of the king saying that he will repay a bazillion dollars when he knows, and everyone in the room knows, that there’s not a chance in high heaven he’ll be able to do it.

Maybe there is a chance in high heaven, though, because something totally unexpected happens now. The king is moved by sympathy, the text says, and suddenly everything is changed. The king lets the slave go and not only does he let him go, but he forgives him the debt. Every last penny of the bazillion dollars is forgiven.

Now it’s the king who’s being ridiculous. What would happen if the world really operated like this? People going around forgiving outstanding debts and letting them go with no consequences? Why, they’d start expecting compassion instead of justice! Where would that lead us? Chaos, that’s where!

It’s because the world doesn’t operate this way that the ruler’s action stands out. It’s not an easy thing that he does. This was a large sum of money, even for a king. The precedent he is setting in showing sympathy for the slave is a dangerous one. But he seems to recognize that this is the right thing to do. And if Jesus were to stop the story right here it would be a lesson on unlimited mercy -- it would underscore what he had told Peter. But the story doesn’t stop here. The plot only thickens.

The first slave, who has just had his bazillion dollar debt wiped out walks out of the king’s court and sees a second slave who owes him $8000 (that’s 100 denarii in the story). It’s nothing to sneeze at but it’s nothing like the bazillion dollars he’s just been relieved of finding. But the first slave is indignant that he has not been repaid so he grabs the reprobate by the throat and snarls, “Repay me what you owe me.” Unlike the ruler, this slave literally goes for the jugular.

The second slave’s response is the same as that of the first. He falls down before him and begs with the same words he had used, “Be patient with me and I will repay you.” But this time there is no change of heart. No mention of sympathy. The text simply says that the first slave “did not want to” forgive him the debt. He was within his legal rights to have the man thrown into prison until he could repay and that’s just what he did.

Now we have contrasting situations to look at. In the first case, the ruler has the right to put the slave into prison and chose not to, and in the second the slave had the right to put his fellow-slave in prison and chose to do it. But this is not about rights and prisons -- it’s about forgiveness and the world without forgiveness is an unlivable world. His fellow-slaves know this. The Bible says that they were “extremely distressed” by what they saw and they go to tell the king, not because they’re tattle-tales, but because they recognize the consequences of a community without compassion and forgiveness. They are slaves, living on the edge. They probably owed this other slave money, too! The law was not going to protect them. In this world only forgiveness could.

These last two weeks we have watched heart-breaking images of people in New Orleans. At the convention center, at the Superdome, the people we saw looking for help, crying out for food and water, they were the people on the margins like the slaves in this story. For them the system didn’t work. For most of them it didn’t work before the hurricane and it certainly didn’t work afterwards. They know that in this world, only mercy can make things right.

But back to the story. The ruler, after hearing from the other slaves, does a curious thing. In a story that’s meant to show why forgiving seven times is not enough, the ruler quits after one time! He chastises the first slave for failing to see that he should have mercy, too, and then he rescinds his debt-forgiveness offer and hands him over to the torturers, or extractors, until he can repay the debt. We might cheer that the wicked slave got his due, but we have to be a little disturbed by the ruler who seems to take back his unconditional forgiveness. And then, as if to press the point, Jesus tags a lesson onto the end of the parable. “The same thing will happen to you,” Jesus says, “if you don’t forgive your brother or your sister from your heart.”

Now this is a mess we’ve wandered into here. Is Jesus really saying that we should forgive because if we don’t we’ll face the same punishment as the wicked slave? If that’s the case, then how can we really be doing it from the heart? And is Jesus legislating compassion? How do you command your heart to show mercy?

These are the kinds of questions we preachers love to wrestle with. We can spend hours exploring the swamp when most people would rather just get on through it. But I suspect there’s a lot more personal question we might want to ask after having gone through this parable with Jesus: How do I forgive from my heart when I’m not even sure I want to forgive?
Sometimes the hurt is so deep and the wrongs are so wrong that to forgive seems impossible. And forget about forgetting! That can never happen. How does a Tutsi in Rwanda forgive the Hutu clans who burned their home, took their land and murdered their family? How do we forgive great outrages like that? How do we forgive what happened here on September 11 four years ago? Where do we find the capacity for that?

Or on a more personal level, how does the adult child forgive the parent who physically or sexually abused them for year? How does the wife or the husband forgive the spouse who has been unfaithful? Who do we forgive ourselves for the truly hurtful things we have done to others and done to ourselves? Even the torture chamber doesn’t seem as bad as the state of unforgiveness. How can Jesus tell us to forgive from the heart and make it sound…possible?

It’s an unnatural thing in this world to forgive. It can only happen when the world we occupy every day is interrupted by a God who also cannot abide an unforgiven world. It can only happen when a cross breaks the plane of our unredeemed existence. It can only happen in the heart of Jesus.

And that is the heart from which we are to forgive. I said at the beginning of this sermon that we don’t know our own hearts. I believe that. You see, our hearts are not the sentimental organ of the body, filled with all the fickle emotions of human existence. Our hearts are not the places where we concoct plans for revenge and plot to do harm to those who have done us wrong. Our hearts are not even the places where we put together all our best intentions in a Herculean effort to be good, to really try to be good. That’s not what Jesus is talking about in this parable when he says that we must forgive from our heart.

What he is talking about is the heart we have not yet discovered. That heart which we perhaps had a glimpse of as a child -- a heart that was made by God and made for God. A heart which knew that its ultimate destiny was not to be distorted by sin and failure and loss and hurt. The ultimate destiny of the human heart is, as St. Augustine put it, to find its rest in God.

That’s the heart of Christ, the heart we don’t even know we have. It is given to us in God’s work on the cross. It is given to us as we are forgiven, as we claim God’s forgiveness. And because we are forgiven we can forgive. The first slave was able to show mercy because he had first been shown mercy by the ruler. He had the capacity for it. When he didn’t show mercy, it had to be extracted from him. He had to find that spot in himself that knew what forgiveness was all about.

It’s not really about the threat of punishment at all. The punishment is holding on to that fear and anger and resentment until it eats us alive. When we come to see that our lives are in Christ, then we can let go of the hurt and welcome the healing that forgiveness is. We can come to know forgiveness by heart and the journey to healing has begun.

But what if the person we want to forgive won’t change and won’t stop hurting? Forgiveness is not the same thing as reconciliation. We are called to forgive, but reconciliation may take much more time and may not come at all. As when Jacki Whitford forgave her dead father, even though he could make no response to her at all.

Forgiveness doesn’t mean allowing the hurt to continue. We can’t remain in abusive situations or allow others to remain in them just because we want to forgive. Mercy demands action in these cases. But when we get beyond being a victim and begin to reclaim God’s image for ourselves, we can also get beyond the power the hurt has over us and refuse to accept its power in our lives.

What does it take to forgive? It takes God. How many times do I have to forgive? More than you can count. How long does it take? It takes your whole life. When does it begin? It can begin right now. And just who am I again? You are God’s own child and deep down in your heart, you know that. You’ve had the power of the Spirit all along, because you were made for God. Thanks be to God.