How Many Times?

 Matthew 18 21-35

Forgive Thy Brother
Scott Erickson

September 13, 2026

 

So Peter asks, 

“How many times should we forgive someone?

seven times?"

He probably thought he was being 

generous with that.

But Jesus says No, a lot more than that.

Try seventy and seven times.

 

Jesus didn’t just pick these numbers out of the air.

Their linked to an important reference in Genesis.

After Cain kills his brother Abel,

Cain is banished from his home and

sent to wander around the earth.

Cain tells God that he won’t survive that punishment

someone will surely kill him. So God protects him

with a seven times vengeance against anyone who does.

 

Cain remains an outcast, not counted in

Adam’s official lineage, but he marries

and has a family of his own and Cain’s great, great grandson

Lamech, is born. He has two wives, and through the years he maintains

this protective status

but he takes advantage of the protected status God gave him.

He kills another man just for wounding him.

And his protection stands.

Then he brags about it. He says.

²⁴ If Cain is avenged seven times, then Lamech seventy-seven times.”

That’s where that number comes from.

 

Instead of being thankful for God’s protection,

Lamech was vengeful. He received protection,

but he used it and would seek vengeance.

He didn’t give others the grace

that he and his family were given.

  

It important to remember that in Jesus time

and before, revenge was a way of life.

If someone did something to you or your family,

you didn’t just brood over it, and internalize it

and stopped talking to the person or leave the neighborhood.

You didn’t let law enforcement do its work,

since there was no law enforcement as we understand it now.

You got back at the person who did it.

It was your right and obligation.

If you didn’t, you and your family’s honor was at stake.

 

It was supposed to work like a code of honor,

but you could see how it could easily out of hand – and it did.

Someone could kill you or punish you for something that

your grandfather did 50 years earlier. Or someone could

be mad at someone or want some of their property

and use the excuse that their ancestors

had hurt someone else a centuries earlier.

Leviticus 24, kind of tries to temper it:

“an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth”

In other words, just keep it to one eye for one eye.

And one tooth for one tooth. Don’t go crazy with this retribution thing.

 

And then in Matthew 5, Jesus says,

“You have heard that it was said,

‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’ 

But I say to you: Do not resist an evildoer.

But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also”

In other words, stop the cycle of violence and retribution.

 

And today, we hear Jesus call for forgiveness.

Jesus says that the call of his followers is not 

seventy-seven fold vengeance like Lamech, but seventy-seven fold forgiveness.

Jesus is calling for his disciples to undo the curse of Cain

and the vengeance of Lamech that has trapped humanity

in endless cycles of hate, vengeance, and violence over generations.

Jesus is calling his disciples to be different from our ancestors

and to take another path a path of life, not death.

Now a days, we’re more sophisticated than they were in Jesus time,

we like our retribution for sins taken care of by our institutions,

we like our justice departments, we like our revenge meted

out by prison sentences, solitary confinement and the death penalty.

We like our debts counted by credit agencies and payday loan companies.  

We let the courts handle our retribution.

We relish in the suffering of people we decide are at fault.

Some have taken this even as a Christian trait.

Forgetting Jesus words in Matthew 5 and this parable.

Like the slave, we’ve forgotten about our own forgiveness.

 

Truthfully, the cycle of sin and retribution and revenge,

is harmful to everyone.

Even though it’s lasted for thousands of years,

we can’t sustain ourselves like this.

As someone said, “If everyone took an eye for an eye,

the whole world will go blind.”

 

And that is why Jesus made forgiveness front and center of his

ministry. Forgiveness is our secret super-power 

that we have been given as Christians, even though so many Christians forget to use it.

And that’s why God’s forgiveness has come first.

It sets us free so we can pass it on and  create

a new reality in our community.

 

A society that is build around revenge and getting even

cannot move on. It cannot sustain itself, it will eventually blow itself up

or guns, or bombs. Or with a alienation depression, or addiction.

Jesus wants to overthrow this system with our forgiveness and love.

 

And the truth is, forgiveness makes a new reality in our own lives.

Hate and anger can derail us.

It can burn in our hearts and take our focus and our thoughts.

Anger and vengeance can make us do things we never would have thought of doing. 

Forgiveness releases us primarily.

Forgiveness does not necessarily release the offender from responsibility, it’s releases ourselves

from the burden of resentment, bitterness, and past pain.

Some people say that those who forgive  

are “being doormats” and inviting in more abuse.

But forgiveness is not endorsement of bad behavior.

it doesn’t minimize the wrong.

It’s not necessarily releasing the offender of responsibility.

Forgiveness releases the burden of

emotional debt that the victim can be laden with.

 

In 2014 I was involved in a discussion with a bunch of clergy

and a group called Sandy Hook Promise. They were there to get us

involved with their programs. It was started by the parents of the victims 

of the Sandy Hook school shooting in 2012 where 26 people were killed,

20 of them first graders.  Two of the parents of the children were there 

talking to us, it was just two years after their children were killed.

They made a foundation who’s purpose was to curb school shootings.

 

One arm of their foundation works on reasonable gun control

and all of those safety precautions as you’d expect.

 

But their other primary focus is in making sure every child is loved.

They called it “Parenting our whole community.” They explained it this way. 

They know that the young man, who killed their children,

Adam Lanza, was, like a lot of other mass shooters, he was called a loner.

No one knew him, or knew his name even though he had attended Sandy Hook elementary. 

They wanted to work to correct that in schools so that other

young people would not take the path that he did.

In the presentation, they used Adam Lanza repeatedly. Not in anger.

They kind of saw him as another victim.

 

They had two programs:

“No Child Eats Alone”, which encourages children and staff to go and eat with other children who are eating alone.

And “Know Me Know My Name” an effort for every staff teacher and administrative person to know every child’s name and use it regularly.

One of the parents there said that his son Ethan, who was killed that day,  

was a person who would go and sit with a child who was alone or was crying.

 And he said to us,  “If more children like my son were there for Adam Lanza, maybe it wouldn’t have happened.”

Which I thought was an amazing statement.

This man who had every right to be bitter and angry and spiteful even,

but instead he had compassion for the person who murdered his child.

That is forgiveness. They were releasing themselves of the emotional debt owed by the offender.

 

Of course, since it was a bunch of pastors, we were interested in the program 

but we really wanted to know how they came to the place of forgiveness. 

Were they all people of deep faith?

He said some were, and some were not.

 

What he did say was that as they were starting to work together

they were meeting with other people who had gone through

similar shootings. They now belonged to a group no one wanted to

belong to, but they found wisdom and comfort there.

 

And he said there were so many people who talked with them 

who were five, ten and 20 years on, who had not released the emotional debt. 

They noticed that these people’s lives had been consumed

by this one awful moment. Many had lost their marriages, jobs.

Their surviving children suffered. They were focused with getting even, 

finding retribution, even revenge, and it had destroyed their remaining life. 

He said they all made a conscious decision to take another path.

 

He said that the forgiveness was a process for him,

it came and it went.  Some days he was angry.

But overall having compassion instead of hate

had done a lot of work to heal his pain.  

And even just two years after the shooting he felt that he was 

in a better place than some of the people who were decades past the trauma.

Instead of picking at the scab over and over, it allowed the wound to heal. 

The scar was still there. But the wound was healing.

  

Forgiveness is hard. We’re bound not to do it perfectly.

And sometimes we won’t do it at all.

And yet we are still we are forgiven by God.

And those times when we can do it, we are made better.

But what if forgiveness was the goal with every bad

or hurtful incident that we had? Intentional or accidental.

What if, as Christians, we led with that super-power

that we have been given by Jesus?

Seventy Times Seven.

 

What if we could do this in our own lives?

What if we could do this in our own churches and communities?

What if we could do this in our countries and our world?

It could change everything, everything we’ve ever known.

 

Forgiveness starts with remembering we are forgiven.

In Jesus parable, the first thing that happens is that the

king forgives the servant everything. He is released and freed.

He could have started a new day and a new life.

But the servant forgot that, and that’s where the trouble began.

 

We who have been given so much, and released of so much,

have been asked to give those debts that we hold

against other people, back to God.

And in the process, the debts we used to hold

will no longer have a hold over us anymore.

In forgiveness, we are freed.

And our forgiveness can also show God’s grace to the world.

 

Jesus, How many times should we forgive?

Seven times? Seven times might seem like a lot, but more than seven.

Seventy times seven. Keep doing it.

Keep practicing, keep trying and keep failing and keep trying again.

Do it with your family, your church, and community,

and then do it with others.

Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who have sinned against us.

Until God’s will is done on earth as in heaven.