Reverend Jonathan Waits
Sermon: How Many Times? (Matthew 18:21-35)
Date: February 11, 2024
Last week we talked about the fact that when someone hurts us we gain a kind of power over them. I want you to think for a second this morning about a time when you were hurt by someone else. I don’t just mean a little hurt either. I’m talking about a big, bad, ugly hurt; a hurt that was soul deep; a hurt that you carried with you for a long, long time…maybe you are still carrying it today. What did you do with all of that power? If you’re like most people, you probably didn’t do anything particularly productive with it. Maybe you made the other person pay relationally, especially when they reached the point of realizing their sin and seeking to repent of it. Maybe you’re still making them pay. How’s that working for you? Perhaps you used your power to build yourself some armor. This kind of armor can take a lot of different forms. Sometimes it is a prickly personality. Others, it is a refusal to let anyone get close. Armor like this makes us strong. It protects us from getting hurt again. But it also makes us lonely because it doesn’t let anyone really get close. It could be that you used your power to hurt someone else so you knew you weren’t the only one hurting. You wouldn’t have admitted that in the moment, and you may not have even realized it, but it was there all the same. There are all kinds of different things we can do with the relational and emotional power we gain over another person when they hurt us. What we should do with it is another matter.
This morning we are in the fourth and final part of our series, Leverage. For the last month we have been walking with Jesus through a conversation He had with His disciples when they came to Him with a question about who the greatest person in the kingdom of heaven was. Using a child standing nearby as His illustration, Jesus told them that greatness in God’s kingdom is just the reverse of greatness in this world. Greatness in this world is about gaining power for ourselves and then using that power to further the advancement of our own greatness. In God’s kingdom, on the other hand, the primary ethic is set by God’s own willingness to leverage all of His resources (and, being God, His resources are pretty considerable) for our benefit. This others-focused approach to life should inform everything about how we think and operate. Because of this, as we talked about, the greatest people are the ones most committed to making those around them great. And we do this, again, because it’s how our God operates. If we are going to do life in His kingdom, we’ve got to operate on the same basic terms He uses with us—otherwise we’re not really doing life in His kingdom, are we?
Well, after talking through a story Jesus told to help us better grasp this character on God’s part, which culminated in the powerful truth that God leverages all of His resources for us, last week we listened in as Jesus gave us an example of how this pattern on God’s part translates into our own lives. The bit of teaching we encountered is one of the most well-known and looked-to passages on church discipline and authority in the entire New Testament, but as we discovered, those things are really sidebars to what Jesus was most wanting us to understand. Digging in on this idea of a sheep that has wandered off, Jesus talked about how to deal with someone (and specifically a fellow church member) who has wandered off from a relationship with us because of sin. The short version was this: we approach them just like God approaches us. We do everything we can to bring them back, but if they absolutely refuse, we honor their decision and keep on loving them anyway. The goal of our efforts, though, is always redemption. When we leverage our resources for those who have hurt us, redemption is always the goal.
But what if redemption doesn’t happen? What if we do all of this stuff Jesus was talking about—we go to them individually, with a group, with the church, and nothing changes. We even honor their decision to live apart from the church and our efforts still don’t break through. We still have this relational and emotional power over them because they have hurt us. Maybe they’re not around your community any longer; maybe you have removed yourself from a family situation in order to avoid contact as much as you can; maybe you had to change jobs or even move out of a community just to create separation. But the power is still there because the offense hasn’t been resolved. What then?
Well, if you have a copy of the Scriptures with you this morning, find your way back to Matthew 18 one last time, and let’s take a look at what comes next. You see, the disciples were wondering this same thing. They were wondering and Peter spoke up to ask Jesus about it. Take a look with me at how this went starting in v. 21. “Then Peter approached him and asked, ‘Lord, how many times must I forgive my brother or sister who sins against me? As many as seven times?’”
In the Jewish culture of the day, the expectation was that you were going to forgive someone who sinned against you three times. After that, they were out. You had done your duty to the Law, and now you were free to handle the matter more…directly. Well, by this time in their journey with Jesus, the disciples all understood pretty well that He tended to go above and beyond what the Law stated. So, Peter didn’t come asking Jesus about forgiving his erring brother just three times. He doubled that and added one just for good measure. I’m not totally sure what He was looking for as far as a response from Jesus went, but I suspect it was probably more along the lines of, “Wow, Peter! You really went above and beyond. That’s exactly how God’s kingdom works. Nice job getting this right. Guys, pay attention here because Peter really understands this.”
But Jesus is Jesus. He never plays ball when we want Him to operate on our terms. Instead of commending Peter’s desire to go above and beyond the Law, He raised the standard even further. “‘I tell you, not as many as seven,’ Jesus replied, ‘but seventy times seven.’” Now, we’re not totally sure whether Jesus said “seventy-seven” or “seventy times seven” here, but either way, the point is clear. Jesus was taking Peter’s grand elevation of the standard of the Law and launching it into space. He wasn’t trying to give Peter some finite standard at which point we don’t have to forgive the other person any longer. He was making it clear that the kingdom demand for forgiveness never actually ends.
In order to back this up, Jesus told a story. “For this reason, the kingdom of heaven can be compared to a king who wanted to settle accounts with his servants.” These were people who had borrowed from him, but hadn’t yet paid him back. They had injured him financially, if you will, and he was looking for that injury to be rectified. Continuing: “When he began to settle accounts, one who owed ten thousand talents was brought before him.” Now, when Jesus got to this part of the story, the crowd gathered around Him would have started laughing. A talent was the amount of weight in gold that the average Roman soldier could carry on his back for a day. It ranged between 75-100 lbs. If you do some quick calculations using the current trading price of gold, you come up with roughly 32 billion dollars. No one had that kind of money then. Not to loan and certainly not to borrow. And if you borrowed that amount of money, you would never be able to pay it back. Ever. They could hardly even imagine that amount of money. Today, we’re used to hearing about really big sums of money, especially when we are thinking about government spending and debt. Elon Musk is personally worth six times that amount of money. The point, though, is that this was an unimaginably large sum of money this guy had borrowed, and now the lender wanted it back. All of it.
“Since he did not have the money to pay it back [the audience chuckled again because of course he didn’t], his master commanded that he, his wife, his children, and everything he had be sold to pay the debt.” This wouldn’t have even scratched the surface of what he owed, but it was all the master could do. “At this, the servant fell facedown before him and said, ‘Be patient with me, and I will pay you everything.’” To which the audience chuckled again. No, he wouldn’t. This guy was never going to be able to pay this money back. Everyone knew it too. Jesus knew it. The audience knew it. The servant in the story knew it. The master in the story knew it. Everyone. A lifetime as an indentured servant was the only outcome here. And not just for him. His sin didn’t just affect him. It affected his entire family. Everyone he loved was going to pay for his foolishness.
But then something happened that nobody expected. “Then the master of that servant had compassion, released him, and forgave him the loan.” We’re in the midst of a national debate over whether or not people who have borrowed money for student loans should have that money forgiven. Whatever your personal opinion on the matter happens to be, it is absolutely undeniable that if you were someone who had your loan forgiven, you’d be pretty happy with the outcome. If the amount of money this man had stupidly managed to borrow left the audience chuckling, this part probably resulted in some audible gasps. Nobody has that kind of money to loan out anyway, but if you do, the thought of your saying, “Never mind. We’ll just call it a wash,” to the person who borrowed it from you was simply beyond comprehension. Who does something like this?
Well, the servant was obviously thrilled. Only moments before he had been looking at a lifetime of indentured servitude for him and for his whole family, and now he was a free man. His gratitude had to be simply stratospheric. He quickly made his way out of the room in case the master changed his mind, and headed straight home to tell his wife the incredible news. But on his way out, something happened.
“That servant went out and found one of his fellow servants who owed him a hundred denarii.” Now, a hundred denarii would have been the equivalent of about five months’ worth of work. A denarius was a day’s wage. That’s not nothing, of course, but in comparison with the ten thousand talents he had just been forgiven, it’s not even a blip on the radar. So, naturally, this newly free man showed the same graciousness to his fellow servant that he had just received, right? Not so much. “He grabbed him, started choking him, and said, ‘Pay what you owe!’ At this, his fellow servant fell down and began begging him, ‘Be patient with me, and I will pay you back.’” Sound familiar at all? “But he wasn’t willing. Instead, he went and threw him into prison until he could pay what was owed.”
Ouch, right? If you’re at all like me, you have this natural recoil from this whole scene. How could this guy do something like this? How could anybody do something like this? And if you react at all along those lines, you’re in good company. “When the other servants saw what had taken place, they were deeply distressed and went and reported to their master everything that had happened.”
If this were a movie, the soundtrack would have just taken an ominous turn. When the master heard about what had happened, he called this terrible servant back in. You can imagine perhaps some of the trepidation he felt as he walked back in that room. The last time he was in there everything was good. Had the master changed his mind? Why did he want to see him again? Verse 32 now: “Then, after he had summoned him, his master said to him, ‘You wicked servant! I forgave you all that debt because you begged me. Shouldn’t you also have had mercy on your fellow servant, as I had mercy on you?’ And because he was angry, his master handed him over to the jailers to be tortured until he could pay everything that was owed.” And just in case you’ve forgotten, he was never going to be able to pay everything that was owed.
Well, serves him right! What kind of a jerk would do something like this? I mean, he was just forgiven that enormous debt. The relief from interest payments alone probably left him set for life. How on earth did he justify refusing to give his buddy similar relief? It’s not like he needed the money anymore. This was nothing but spite. It was pure, unfiltered ugliness. This guy has all the bad stuff in the world coming to him! Why would Jesus tell a story like this? Was He just trying to get a rise out of us? No, He was just trying to make a point. He was just trying to help us understand one more little thing about how life in God’s kingdom works. He was giving us one more intensely practical example of what it looks like to leverage our resources for the people around us. And, like Jesus so often does, He saved this one for the end. Don’t miss this. “So also my heavenly Father will do to you unless everyone of you forgives his brother or sister from your heart.”
You see, it turns out that Jesus wasn’t just telling Peter a story in response to his question about the limits of forgiveness. He was actually offering him—and us—an allegory. Do you remember what an allegory is from your middle school English classes? An allegory is a story in which all the major parts of the story represent something else and the whole narrative is just a vehicle for making a point about this other thing. In the case of Jesus’ story here, there are three important parts: the master, the first servant, and the second servant. The master is obviously God. The first servant is us. The second servant who owed the first servant some money is anybody else who has offended us in some way no matter what the extent or nature of the offense happens to be. Are you with me? What this means is that the first servant’s debt to the master is like our debt of sin to God. The second servant’s debt to the first servant is anybody else’s debt of sin to us. Still with me? Given that, Jesus is trying to help us understand that whatever else somebody has done to us—and I mean very seriously that it literally doesn’t matter what it is—the size of that debt doesn’t even begin to compare to what our sin debt to God is. It just doesn’t compute. And, because God has forgiven us our debt to Him in Christ, then our unwillingness to forgive anybody else their debt to us looks just like it did here.
What Jesus says here may be one of the most uncomfortable things He says anywhere in the Gospels (and between you and me, that’s saying something). He’s basically saying here that our not forgiving someone else when they have hurt us is disqualifying in terms of our ability to live in His kingdom. Unforgiveness is that big of a deal. But, just to make sure I don’t communicate something Jesus doesn’t mean, let’s talk about why this is. We’ll start here: What is forgiveness? You can write this down if you want to; you’re going to want to remember this. Forgiveness is releasing someone else from a debt they owe you because of an offense they’ve dealt you. That’s what forgiveness is definitionally. When God forgives us in Christ, He is releasing us from the debt we owe Him because of the offense of sin we have dealt Him.
Here’s the thing about the forgiveness available in Christ: When Jesus died on that Roman cross, giving His body up to be broken to pay the price for our sins, and His blood to be spilled to sign and seal a new covenant with God, God in His infinite mercy and grace declared His sacrifice sufficient to pay the debt for all the sins of the whole world. If there was a sin, that sin was covered by Christ’s sacrifice on the cross. To put that another way, all sins are forgivable in Christ. Now, God’s not going to force anybody to receive this forgiveness, but all are free to do so by placing their faith in Jesus. Well, if God has pronounced all sins as forgivable in Christ, and if we come along and refuse to forgive someone for something they’ve done to us, what is it we are communicating? We’re communicating that God is wrong. We’re saying that we know better than God. I mean, sure, He was falsely accused of crimes, savagely beaten, and unjustly nailed to a cross where He hung until He died, but He just doesn’t understand how bad this thing was. If His ordeal was anything like ours, He would feel the same. Then again…maybe not.
The thing is, there’s really only one person who can tell God He’s wrong and be right about it. That would be someone who outranks Him. This person would need to have more wisdom than God and be more just than He is. When we refuse to forgive, either we’re in the wrong—again, no matter what it is they’ve done since God Himself has pronounced their sin forgivable in Christ—or we outrank God. Those are the only two options. Well, if we’re not willing to admit we’re wrong and extend forgiveness, we’re claiming the latter. Stay with me here. If we outrank God, then we don’t need His forgiveness. What kind of forgiveness does a god need to be offered anyway? So, when Jesus says that we won’t be forgiven by God if we don’t extend forgiveness to those who have hurt us, this is not some kind of a punitive move on God’s part. Remember the context of this whole series? As my preaching professor once put it: God doesn’t want to pay you back, He wants to bring you back. No, the reason there’s no forgiveness available when we are sitting stubbornly in a position of unforgiveness is that we can’t accept it. God wants to give it. He let His Son be put to death on a cross in order to make it available to us. But as long as we are convinced we outrank God, we can’t receive it.
Yeah, but what about?… There are lots of those, aren’t there? And they’re hard too. Most of us will accept that Jesus is totally right here with just one little exception: our situation. But the fact here remains stubbornly unchanged. Our offense against God by our sin is bigger than their offense against us no matter what it happens to be. Jesus understands our whatabouts. But remember: He forgave the people who were putting Him to death while He was still being put to death. There’s our standard. If we are going to live in God’s kingdom—the only place eternal life can be found—then we have to be willing to let Him be God. We have to be willing to let Him be God even when we’re hurt; even when it’s a big hurt. Otherwise we can’t live in the kingdom of God. As it turns out, you see, leveraging our resources after the pattern of God’s kingdom not only benefits those around us, it benefits us as well. Leveraging our resources after the pattern God set for us in Christ—or, to put that another way, loving one another like Jesus loved us—is how we know we’re doing life in God’s kingdom and not out in the world. It’s how we tell who’s in God’s kingdom and who isn’t. Remember: Jesus said that “by this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.” Leveraging our resources like God does blesses everybody.
But just so I don’t leave you wondering or resisting because of lingering questions…forgiving the people who have hurt you doesn’t mean that it was okay they hurt you. All forgiveness is, is releasing another person from the debt they owe you because of an offense they’ve dealt you. That’s it. You’re not going to forget about whatever it was, so don’t even bother with that. If you forgive fully and completely—something that takes re-forgiving as often as you need to until it really takes—the hurt will eventually cease to become the lens through which you see the world at which point it will be like you’ve forgotten it, but that’s not your immediate goal. Neither does forgiveness necessarily imply reconciliation or a restoration of the relationship. That is only possible when the other person genuinely repents of whatever the sin was. If they won’t, you still need to release them from their debt to you because that’s what God did for you in Christ. But that’s it. You don’t have to pursue a relationship with them again. You don’t have to immediately trust them again. You don’t have to put yourself or the people you love in harm’s way again. None of that. All those things are, of course, the ultimate goal, but getting there takes more power than we have by ourselves and that’s okay. We just need to forgive them. We do that with the relational and emotional power we have because that’s what God does for us in Christ. We do it because of the blessing we receive for doing so. Leveraging our resources like God does blesses everybody.
If we are going to be a people defined by Jesus’ love and God’s kingdom, we have to leverage our resources after the pattern He has set for us. To do anything else is to claim to be following Him without actually following Him. In that case, He may be going somewhere good, but we aren’t going to get there with Him. We’ll be wandering off somewhere else. He’ll come and find us if we do. We can be assured of that. But how much better to not wander off in the first place. We stay on track when we leverage our resources like He does—when we love one another like He does. Leveraging our resources like God does blesses everybody. Let us be a people of blessing. The whole world will be glad that we did.