Sermon Text

It seemed a reasonable enough question for Peter to ask. It was a subject that was in current dispute. Forgiveness and who could dispense it was a topic for lengthy and sometimes heated discussion in that day. People who were expecting the Messiah were talking about it, and they expected the Messiah to talk about it, too.

So, after years of discussion and debate, the Rabbis had decided that forgiving someone 3 times was sufficient for the requirements of righteousness to be satisfied in interpersonal relations. Peter, knowing his Master to be an extraordinary man, and seeking to gain his approval, asked if forgiving someone 7 times were enough to satisfy the “higher righteousness” Jesus had spoken about. But the answer Peter received told him clearly that there was to be no arbitrary limit placed on forgiveness. Our forgiveness of one another is intended to mirror the gracious forgiveness God extends to us.

Jesus accentuated the contrast between seven and seventy times seven by telling a story, which was his favorite way of teaching. He told a story about a steward, a trusted servant and business manager, who was forgiven a debt of 10,000 talents, but who ungraciously refused to forgive a debt owed to him of only 100 denarii.

Now, I don’t know about you, but talk of talents and denarii leaves me pretty cold. I mean, I have had a hard enough time during our trips to other countries dealing with the different currency there. I mean, I know we call our dollar a “buck,” or a “simoleon,” or “moolah,” but whoever heard of calling a one or two dollar coin a “loonie” or a “toonie”?? That’s what they do in Canada. Then there’s Pounds, and Euros, and Rials, and Rupees, and Rubles, and Pesos, and so many more. Sure, I heard about talents and such as a child in Sunday School, but how much could they be worth, really?

So, I did a little arithmetic of my own to try to bring the magnitude of this contrast Jesus makes into better focus. A quarter, 25 cents, is approximately 1/16” thick. If a quarter were worth 100 denarii, then this debt of 10,000 talents would have amounted to a stack of quarters just over 540,000 miles tall!

Such is the incredible scope of God’s forgiveness. And there is no escaping the story’s insistence that God’s forgiveness of us and our forgiveness of each other are inseparably linked. We say it every Sunday, but I wonder how often we really think about it: “Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors.”

Don’t misunderstand me now, God is not just some kind of heavenly scorekeeper, marking down our willingness to forgive in the “+” column and our unwillingness in the “-“ column. The God who encounters us in Jesus Christ and through the Scriptures doesn’t work that way. God is always ready to forgive, and in Jesus Christ has made provision for whatever forgiveness might be required, but there is something about an unforgiving heart that refuses God entrance. God will not force us into relationship, will not coerce us into loving one another, and so God cannot forgive an unforgiving person, because to be unforgiving closes the doorway of life against God from our side.

If we think seriously about it, we realize that forgiveness – both the willingness to forgive and the willingness to accept forgiveness – are necessities for our life together. We realize that, but we often forget it. We’ve tried other ways of living together for millennia, but the ways of anger, retaliation, and revenge haven’t worked. They have only poisoned us, made us cynical, insular, afraid, unforgiving. Why do people think of Jesus’ way as being weak, when the other ways are so weak that they bring only disaster?

The way of forgiveness is the way God has intended for us, the way toward our health and well-being. It is the way to which we are called by the Christ. And his word to us is that we will set no arbitrary limits on forgiveness. 70x7=490 – we can “do it in our heads.” But this is God’s arithmetic – we have to “do it in our hearts.”