A sermon on Matthew 18:21-35 prepared by Heather Sceats
You can listen to an audio recording of this sermon by clicking here.
The gospel reading last week from this same chapter in Matthew focussed our attention on the question of conflict, and how differences between fellow believers are to be resolved. But as Margaret pointed out, it did not provide us with a tick list of things to be done, which would then let us wash our hands of the person we have fallen out with. Jesus’s example of how to treat a pagan or a tax-collector brings compassion to the fore, not rejection.
Today’s gospel reading continues the theme of how believers are to behave towards one another but it focusses on the question of forgiveness. Peter is asking Jesus for a ruling. When is it alright to stop forgiving someone who upsets you again and again?
I’m sure Peter is aware of the three strike rule that the Jewish rabbis advocated: ‘Forgive three times and then you’re done!’ But Peter also knows that Jesus has a habit of reinterpreting these things and is likely to be more generous. What number should he go for? How about 7? That’s a big enough number, and it‘s also a number that Jews often used to symbolise completeness or fullness – surely 7 times would be enough even for Jesus?
Jesus’s answer of 77 times or 70 times 7 (because you can translate it either way) must seem absurd to Peter. It’s as if Jesus is saying there are no limits to the obligation to forgive; there is no line that once crossed takes away the possibility of forgiveness. In fact there is to be no numbering, no listing, no keeping score of wrongs done to you. The answer to Peter’s question is not a number at all. It is a story.
When Peter asks his question, he presents himself as someone who has been wronged again and again, and he wants an answer that will limit his responsibility to keep on forgiving. I think we can empathise with that feeling. How many times do I have to put up with this or that behaviour? I’m drawing the line we say. No more chances. But Jesus’s story casts Peter in a very different role. He’s not on the outside now, asking an ethical question from the safety of the moral high ground. In the story he’s very much on the inside; he’s one of a number of servants of a King, who is in the process of settling accounts with those who work for him.
The idea of being in debt as a way of talking about sin is a familiar one in Matthew’s Gospel. And the identity of the king (or kyrios) is pretty clear, even before we get to verse 35 when Jesus compares him to my heavenly Father. I wonder how long it takes Peter to recognise himself as one of the King’s servants.
In Jesus’s story the King deals first with a servant who owes him 10,000 talents. It’s an unimaginably large amount. Josephus reckons that all the taxes collected from Judea, Idumea and Samaria at this time only came to 600 talents. A working man would take 150,000 years to earn that much. Needless to say, the servant is completely desperate and pleads with the king not to sell him and his family into slavery, which would be the normal practice in such a case. He is so desperate that he makes the absurd claim that if he is given a bit more time he will repay it all.
The king doesn’t offer him any more time, he doesn’t lay down any conditions. He simply takes pity on him and forgives him this huge debt. But then, the next minute this servant has forgotten his own circumstances, he’s forgotten the way the king has treated him, he’s even forgotten his own desperation and pleas for more time. He turns on a fellow servant who owes him a trifle, a tiny fraction of what he owed, ignores his pleas for more time to pay, and throws him in jail. And when the king is told he is furious and says ‘Shouldn’t you have had mercy on your fellow servant just as I had on you?’
Has Peter got it yet? Does he recognise himself in the story? Do we? Do we recognise ourselves as the servants of a king? A king who has forgiven each one of us, even though we were up to our necks in a mountain of debt. A king who keeps on forgiving us when we fail again and again. ‘Kyrie eleison’ we pray every Sunday: ‘Lord have pity’. And most importantly of all this is a king who demands that we treat others in the same way as we have been treated, with forgiveness from the heart.
Forgiveness from the heart is not easy to come by on the moral high ground. If we are preoccupied with how others have offended us, we can easily forget how much God has forgiven us, and how He continues to forgive us for the much greater wrongdoing that we are guilty of.
The answer to Peter’s question is not a number. It is a state of heart. Remember who you are, and how much God has forgiven you, and then treat others with the same generosity.
‘Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.’
Amen.