Rev. Lin Smalec Salem Church, Waynesboro, PA
Jesus’ Great Teaching Stories
“Forgiveness”
Matthew 18:21-35
12 February 2006
How many of you struggle with forgiveness? Some of you may not wish to admit it, but it is a very human struggle, isn’t it? When someone hurts us, when someone lets us down or disappoints us, it can be hard to forgive them. And maybe we can be gracious and understanding when it happens once, but when it happens over and over again - well, how can we ever be expected to forgive?
That very normal human struggle is the topic of our parable for this morning. You’ll remember that the great Bible teacher William Barclay said that a parable is “an earthly story with a heavenly meaning.” (2, pg 12). Jesus used parables throughout his ministry to teach spiritual truth. And today’s parable has a strong message for us today.
But first, let’s pray that God would help us understand His Word. Would you pray with me? Father God, open our minds and hearts and souls to the meaning of Your Word for us today. May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable to You, O God, our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.
Turn with me to the Gospel of Matthew, chapter 18. Jesus is giving his closest disciples some private teaching, as he often has in the past. Part of Jesus’ teaching is focused on the ways they - and we - are to live together in the Christian family. Let’s look at what Jesus has to say, starting at verse 15 (READ 18:15-20).
Jesus gives a careful, orderly process here for dealing with upsets within the church body. Verse 18 is important - READ. Remember our study last week about the Kingdom of Heaven? Jesus reminds us of that concept here - that what we do in the earthly Kingdom of God has implications in the heavenly Kingdom of God.
Now how many of you are fond of loopholes? Do you know what I mean? Some of us like to search for exceptions or qualifications to the rules and regulations of life. My good buddy Peter is no exception. He listens to what Jesus has just taught about forgiveness and reconciliation, and then he tries to find a loophole. Let’s pick up at verse 21 (READ 18:21-22).
We need to understand the background of Peter’s question. There was a common Jewish teaching that said: “If a person transgresses once, forgive them; if a second time, forgive them; if a third time, forgive them; if a fourth time, DO NOT forgive them.” (2, pg 86) So any good Jew was only required to forgive a person three times. Peter doubled that and added one, so he probably figured he was truly going over and above the expected if he forgave a person seven times. Peter expected an “Atta Boy!” from Jesus!
Instead, Jesus said that we are to forgive not seven times - but how much? Seventy-seven times! For the ancient mind, that was an incredibly large number! The number seven is a number that symbolizes completion and perfection - the world was created, for example, in how many days? Seven! So seventy-seven times, or seventy times seven, as it is translated in some manuscripts, is an especially perfect number to the Jewish people. And to Peter and the other disciples, it would have sounded totally unrealistic - let’s face it, folks, we can barely forgive a person once, never mind seven times - and seventy-seven times? Impossible! Why would we ever want to do such a thing?
Jesus, of course, knows exactly what the disciples are thinking. So he tells a parable to illustrate his point. (READ 18:23-35).
Now what would have immediately leapt out for the disciples was the contrast between the debts of these two men in the story. Because we don’t understand the money of the time, let me try to translate for you. The first man was like, say, Bill Gates - and he owed a bunch of money to the government. In fact, the amount mentioned here, 10,000 talents, would be equivalent to around $10 billion today. We’re talking some big bucks - pretty much unimaginable to you and me! And in all realistic terms, this was a debt so big that it was truly impossible to pay - even for someone like Bill Gates!
The second man, who owed the money to our fictional Bill Gates, was like a person who works for minimum wage. He owed a hundred denarii - well, one denarii was the wage for an average day’s work - so let’s say $50 in today’s money. So the poor man owed $500. Hmmm, let’s see - one owes $10 billion and is forgiven his debt, the other owes $500 and is put in prison. Do you see how this story caught the disciples’ attention?
The rich man is forgiven his enormous, unpayable debt - and then turns around and refuses to forgive a comparatively miniscule debt that is owed to him. This parable captures so clearly one of the more unattractive aspects of human nature - namely, that we tend to expect certain actions and standards of others that we are not always prepared to fulfill ourselves! As William Barclay says, “We are... often very critical of others and very easy with ourselves. We are often open-eyed to the faults of others, and unwilling to see our own. What is candid frankness in us is discourteous brutality of speech in others. What is selfishness in others is standing on our indisputable rights in our own case. ... Should we fail in anything we produce half a dozen valid reasons, which in others would be feeble excuses. We should think more of Jesus’ commandment to do to others as we would have them do to us. If we treated others with the same understanding charity with which we usually treat ourselves, it would be a happier world and there would be fewer breaches between us.”
(2, pg 88)
Indeed, this is a clear underlying teaching in this parable. But the main lesson of the parable is about forgiveness. Notice that at the end of the parable, Jesus brings the story from merely a fable about human beings into the spiritual realm - listen again to verse 35 (READ). Who is Jesus telling us the king in the story represents? God! So then, the main lesson of the parable is this - in the light of the enormous forgiveness that God gives us, how can we do anything but be just as forgiving to others? This is not a new teaching from Jesus. Earlier in the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus says “Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy” (5:7), and in the Lord’s prayer, Jesus teaches us to pray, “Forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors” (6:12). And let me remind you that the word here in the Lord’s prayer is clearly debts - not sins, not trespasses, but debts - what we owe to another person (in Greek, the word is “opheilema”). In the case of this prayer, we ask that our debts to God be forgiven - as much as we are willing to forgive the debts others owe to us.
And that is the exact point of this parable, isn’t it? Any wrong which has been done to us simply cannot compare to the wrong we have done in God’s eyes. And He has forgiven us. Not only that, He has sent His own Son, part of His very being, to die on our behalf, so that the debt we owe - the righteous debt owed for our sins - would be paid. And yet we have the nerve to get all huffy and self-righteous and refuse to forgive someone else for something they have done? This is the point we must see in this parable. When we refuse to forgive others, we are not just breaking God’s law, we are breaking God’s heart! (2, pg 90) Any true Christian must understand that because we have been forgiven so much, we must then forgive others.
Now before I address some practical applications of this forgiveness principle, let me clear up one confusion that this parable sometimes causes. Some people read this parable and believe that it says that if we don’t forgive others, then God won’t forgive us - in other words, we will not be saved. That can’t be true - because if it was, then none of us would be saved! This misunderstanding then becomes a kind of works righteousness, an idea that we can earn our salvation through our actions. Scripture clearly teaches over and over again that salvation is a free gift from God, not something we can earn.
So what then is Jesus saying here? He is teaching that our willingness to forgive is evidence of our salvation - if we have given our life to the Lord, if we have accepted God’s free gift of salvation, then we will be willing to forgive. We may not always succeed at it, but we are willing to try. Because of the forgiveness that has been given to us, we will be willing to forgive others. If we are not willing to forgive, then we must wonder if our hearts have truly been transformed by the power of the Holy Spirit! As Jesus says earlier in the Gospel of Matthew, “Not everyone who says to me, Lord, Lord, will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father in heaven.” (7:21). And what is the will of God the Father? - love, mercy, and forgiveness. If we are God’s children, we will become more and more like Him - which means that love, mercy and forgiveness will become more and more evident in our lives. This parable tells us that “God will hold us to account when we do not forgive. He doesn’t cancel our salvation, but He does, nevertheless, deal with us.” (3, pg 160)
So we are to forgive as we have been forgiven. We must make a choice to forgive. Did you hear that, folks? We must choose to forgive! Forgiveness is not an action of the emotions or the mind - forgiveness is an action of the will. You see, we could choose to hold a grudge, or we could choose to keep a record of all the wrongs done to us, or we could choose to punish, or we could choose to lay down a guilt trip. And we do all of those things at one time or another, don’t we? But as we seek to become more and more like Christ, we will choose to forgive.
But wait a minute, Pastor Lin - what if someone did something really, really bad to me! What if they abused me, what if they cheated me, what if they hurt me? How do you expect me to forgive that!!! Well, I don’t expect you to forgive stuff like that! God does! It is God that asks you to make that all important choice to forgive.
Choosing to forgive, over and over again if necessary, doesn’t mean that you let a person keep hurting you. If you are being abused or mistreated, God does not require you to stay in that situation. But you must forgive the person who is acting that way. Forgiving means not holding a grudge. Forgiving means letting the person who upsets you off the hook. Forgiving means that you do not bad mouth them, you do not seek revenge, you do not keep bringing up their mistakes. Now I realize that sometimes this just doesn’t seem fair. We want justice, we want fairness. How can we forgive someone who doesn’t ask for it or deserve it in our estimation.
Ah, but you see, that’s the whole point. In God’s eyes, we don’t deserve to be forgiven either! And yet, in God’s great love, we have been forgiven for every stupid, rotten, lowdown, sinful thing that we have done. Because God loves us, He forgives us. And because of that great expression of love, we then must forgive others. We must forgive them!
So how do we forgive? Again, by an sheer act of will. Forgiveness begins in the heart, so a good place to start is to decide to lift up to God the person who has hurt us by praying for them. Perhaps we can respond to them with kind actions. If appropriate, tell them that we would like to heal our relationship, and take the steps necessary to do so. Give them a helping hand, send a gift, give them a hug or a smile. If we find it difficult to feel forgiving toward the one who has hurt us, then we can try taking some positive action, and often we will find that right actions are followed by right feelings. But do not depend on feelings - whether it feels good and warm and fuzzy or not, we must do the right thing and forgive! (8, pg 233)
Forgiveness is hard work, folks - I’m not claiming otherwise. For some of us, it is a daily exercise - maybe an hourly exercise - to forgive. But that is exactly why Jesus included forgiveness in the prayer that he taught us. Jesus knew the power and the importance of forgiveness. Forgiveness is life-changing, and if we can truly learn to forgive with the kind of generous love with which God has forgiven us, then our lives, our church, and our world will never be the same!
Let us pray:
Oh Lord, sometimes it feels like You ask the impossible of us! How can we forgive people who have hurt us? How can we just let them off the hook and let that hurt go? How can we turn around and love people who have been rotten to us? And yet, Lord, we recognize this morning that this is exactly what You have done for us! You love us and forgive us of the incredible debt of sin, that debt that we could never repay. You, Lord Jesus, paid that debt for us. In the face of such amazing love, how can we hold on to our hurts and grievances. They seem so petty in comparison. Give us this day, Lord God, the strength, the will, and the determination to forgive - over and over again, if need be. Help us to love as You love, no matter how difficult it may be. We can’t do this easily on our own, Lord, but by the power of Your Holy Spirit, and in Your love, we purpose this day to forgive. In Jesus’ Name we pray. Amen.
RESOURCES:
1) Dr. R. T. Kendall, The Complete Guide to the Parables © 2004, published by Chosen Books, pp 157-166.
2) William Barclay, The Parables of Jesus © 1970, published 1999 by Westminster John Knox Press, pp 86-91.
3) Craig L. Blomberg, Preaching the Parables © 2004, published by Baker Academic, pp 70-81.
4) William Keeney, Preaching the Parables, Series II, Cycle A © 1995 by CSS Publishing Company, pp 93-106.
5) The Preacher’s Outline and Sermon Bible Volume 1 © 2000 by Alpha-Omega Ministries, Inc., pp 390-393.
6) Warren W. Wiersbe, The Bible Exposition Commentary Volume 1 © 1989 by S.P. Publications Inc., pp 66-68.
7) Verlyn D. Verbrugge, editor, The NIV Theological Dictionary of New Testament Words © 2000 by Zondervan, pp 943-944
8) Neil S. Wilson, editor, The Handbook of Bible Application © 1992 Tyndale House Publishers, pp 231-234.
