Forgiveness

 Matthew 18 21-35

Forgive Thy Neighbor
Scott Erickson

September 17, 2023

 

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.

 

Now these numbers were not just picked 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. He tells God that

he can’t live with that punishment, and

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 he tells them:

“Adah and Zillah, listen to me;
    wives of Lamech, hear my words.
I have killed a man for wounding me,
    a young man for injuring me.
²⁴ If Cain is avenged seven times,
    then Lamech seventy-seven times.”

 

It was kind of a brag and kind of a threat.

He was taking advantage of his protected status,

and instead of being thankful for it,

he was vengeful he didn’t give others the grace

that he and his family were given.

Seventy seven fold.

 

 

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.

In Leviticus 24, it’s spelled out and kind of tried 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.

 

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 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.

So now knowing some of that, we can look at Jesus parable.

 

In the parable, A slave owes a king a ton of money.

Remember, exaggeration is one method of parables.

And 10,000 talents was a lot.

One talent was 15 years wages, this was 10,000 times that.

Basically It’s a lot of money. More money than can be repaid.

This means that king had a lot of power over his subjects.

He could do almost anything he wanted.

And if he held onto that debt, he could leverage it

over this man and his whole family not just now, but for years to come.

And what does he do?

He releases the slave of the obligation of the debt.

Not just some of it, all of it. That must have sounded ridiculous.

And scandalous and radical.

Holding onto debts and grudges maintained power,

the caste system, a pecking order.

If the king started just forgiving people it would be

mass hysteria, dogs and cats living together,

you wouldn’t know who was who, slave or free,

man or woman, Jew or Greek.
This would be a new world, new freedom, new life.

Jesus meant to overturn a basic system of society.

 

For this now former slave, it could have been

a new morning, a new day, a new life for everyone.

He could have passed the Kings forgiveness on

and created a new reality in his community.

But as soon as he left that meeting with the king,

the slave forgot the new world he was given.

He went out into the world and forgot the forgiveness he was given,

and resumed the old way. The counting every debt,

the demand, the violence and the torture.

 

Now Matthew’s Jesus is always taking it over the top

in God’s justice department, but this old way

of accounting sins is torture –

 for the counted and for the counter.

Have you ever been in a position of not being able to forgive someone

for something they’ve done, whether it’s a large or small offense?

Of grumbling every time their name comes up

and relishing every bad thing that happens to them?

Of course you have, just like I have. Everyone has.

It’s human nature. And I can tell you it’s not good for you.

You think about it, you relive it, you imagine you’re offense over and over again. 

The one who’s done it has probably moved on and doesn’t

think much about it. But we can be held by the offense for years.

 

A society that is build around revenge and getting even

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

with depression, or addiction, or guns, or nuclear bombs.

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

 

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 solitary confinement and the death penalty,

we like our debts counted by credit agencies and payday loan companies, 

we still like the church to divide us

into holy and not holy, sinful and righteous.

We’re comfortable with the caste system

created by sin and debt and we are reluctant to give it up

but still and all, it’s torture for everyone.

It cannot survive.

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.”

We will destroy ourselves.

 

And that is why Jesus made forgiveness

front and center of his ministry.

And that’s why God’s forgiveness comes first

and sets us free so we can pass it on and

create a new reality in our community.

 

In 2014 I went with a group of other clergy to a presentation

of a group called Sandy Hook Promise.

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 were there talking to us.

They have a foundation who’s purpose it is to curb school shootings

it’s called Sandy Hook Promise.

 

One arm of their foundation works on reasonable gun control

and all of those safety precautions.

 

But their main focus is on loving everyone’s children.

They called it “Parenting our whole community.”

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

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

No one knew him, or knew his name.

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

 

They have 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.

 

The man who lost his son said that his son, Ethan, was a person who

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

And this father, who’s son was killed said:

“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 shot his child.

 

The group said that many of them were people of faith.

And their faith brought them to a place of compassion .

And they felt that this was a better place to be, a more productive place

than if they chose vengeance and hate.

That is forgiveness.

It’s not being a “doormat”. Not “doing nothing”. 

That’s not “just letting it happen again”.

But it’s also not relishing in the pain of his offender.

It’s being truthful and honest about where we are.

But it’s not being hung up in cycles of offenses and vengeance,

It’s facing the past, and working towards new solutions and healing.

 

What if we could do this in our own lives?

What if we could do this in our own 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 was able to start 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,

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 too.

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.

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.

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