Peter came and said to Jesus, “Lord, if my brother sins against me, how often should I forgive? As many as seven times?” Jesus said to him, “Not seven times, but, I tell you, seventy times seven times.
The number of times here is not important. The we talked once before about how the Jewish people would create laws around laws to keep from breaking the first law. Some of these rules were very specific. Exactly how many steps you could walk on a Sabbath (3,049.5 feet, which is just a little over a half mile) The Jewish rabbis at the time taught that forgiving someone more than three times was unnecessary, citing Amos 1:3-13 where God forgave Israel’s enemies three times, then punished them.
Jesus isn’t giving us an exact number of times we should forgive someone before we don’t have to anymore. He’s basically saying that it’s a lot more than you think.
A guy named Peter Rollins wrote a little book of modern day parables and stories and one of them fits here very well. I don't want to reprint it, but here's a video of the author reading it:
https://youtu.be/flaT8wKkDlo
So Jesus tells this parable about the servant who owes 10,000 talents to a king. 10,000 talents is the modern day equivalent of several million dollars. I’ve heard people say that 10,000 was the biggest number the Greeks had at this time. I can’t verify that, but it’d be like us saying a billion dollars – the point is, its so much money he’d never ever be able to pay it back.
The King is ready to sell this servant and his family into slavery, even though there’s no way he’d get that much money for them. The servant begs the King for patience and the king is not only patient with him, he forgives him of his entire debt.
Right after this, the servant goes out and he finds a fellow servant who owes him 100 denarii. This would be thought of today as a few dollars.
Servant 2 begs Servant 1 the same as Servant 1 had begged the king. But Servant 1 had no pity on Servant 2 and had him thrown in jail.
When the King finds out about this he is furious. He calls in Servant 1 and yells at him - ‘You wicked slave! I forgave you all that debt because you pleaded with me. Should you not have had mercy on your fellow slave, as I had mercy on you?’ And in anger his lord handed him over to be tortured until he would pay his entire debt.
Then Jesus drops this bomb on us: "So my heavenly Father will also do to every one of you, if you do not forgive your brother or sister from your heart.”
That’s a heavy verse. A difficult one. Some say that if we don’t forgive other, God won’t forgive us and we will be condemned for eternity for it. I don’t read that here. The king sends the servant off until his debt is paid. To me, this implies an amount of time, not forever. Again, it sounds more like temporary or Purgatorial than eternalpunishment, which is what many imply.
While it is a tough passage and one that seems less than full of grace at the end, we have to remember the great grace at the beginning. The King did forgive the servant completely, yet in the end he forgave the servant his trespasses as he had forgiven those who had trespassed against him.
Sounds familiar, right? It’s a prayer most of us have said countless times. Its something that Jesus taught us to pray FOR, not against. Why would he teach us to pray for something like this?
I know I would hope that God would look more favorably on me than I do on the people who hurt me. And I think that is the point. We have been forgiven a debt that we cannot repay. Its what we say every week… God has forgiven you, God is not angry with you and will never leave you or forsake you. He wants us to treat other people the same way.
Now there are a few very important things to recognize here too.
Forgiving is not forgetting. The King remembered what was owed to him when he found out what servant 1 did. If someone has hurt us, forgiving them does not require us to forget what they did to us.
The line that we say “God will never leave you” does not apply here when we are talking about someone hurting us. We do need to get away from that. Forgive from a distance.
Forgiveness does not necessarily require reconciliation. Meaning, we do not have to face the person who wronged us and let them know we’ve forgiven them. Again, we can forgive from a distance and the person who wronged us doesn’t even need to know about it. The reality is, they may not even care.
Maybe the most important thing. Unforgiveness doesn’t hurt the person who hurt you. It only hurts you. On most computers, if you let them sit long enough, if the screen doesn’t just go blank, sometimes they have a little graphic or animation that will go up on the screen called a screen saver. Its to keep the images on your screen from being burned into your monitor. When our brains aren’t engaged, like if we’re driving alone for a long time, or we’re just sitting outside or in the shower scrubbing away, our brains will often go into “screen saver” mode. If what you find yourself thinking about in those times is how someone did you wrong and how you’d like to get them back or next time you see them you’re totally going to give them a piece of your mind or whatever… and the next thing you know, you’re arm is red like C3PO because you’ve been soaping up the same spot for 5 minutes plotting your revenge – you might have a forgiveness issue. Let it go.
Maybe we should turn that line in the prayer around and think of it this way. Forgive those who have trespassed against me as much as God has forgiven me.
I know my sins. So does God. And he’s still ready to forgive. That person that wronged you? God loves that person just as much as he loves you. Its crazy, but its true. And He’s ready to forgive that person, just as much as he is for you.
And I don’t know about you, but I need it.
In the name of the Father, and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.
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