Messiah
Lutheran Church, Fargo, ND
Pentecost
15/September 17, 2017
Matthew
18:21-35
In the name of Jesus.
Amen.
So, what’s so special about the number 77 in this
morning’s gospel lesson?
Here, Peter asks Jesus a very good question: “If
another member of church sins against me, how often should I forgive?”
Then, like an eager-beaver, impress-the-teacher student, sitting in the front row of a
classroom, straining to be noticed….Peter suggests an answer to his own
question. “Should I forgive someone ‘as many as seven times?’”
It may not be readily apparent to us in the 21st
century, but Peter was being pretty generous here….
..because the great rabbis of Peter’s day taught that
Jews owed one another three gestures of forgiveness.
But Peter had been hanging around Jesus long enough to
suspect that Jesus would want to raise that number--so Peter doubles the rabbis’
“three” and adds one more for good measure.
Seven! Is
seven the number of times I should forgive someone who does me wrong?
Though Peter comes off like a neophyte seeking to impress
his teacher…the teacher quickly deflates Peter’s ego, by upping the ante elevenfold!
“Not
seven times, I tell you, but seventy-seven times”
(Some ancient manuscripts of Matthew’s gospel substitute: seventy times seven).
Wow! Peter
sure missed that one by a country mile.
Forgiving someone seven times—really quite a feat, when you think about
it—but it doesn’t even come close to what Jesus was angling for here. Jesus multiplies Peter’s seven by eleven—amazing!
So I ask you, what’s so special about the number
77?
We could, I suppose, come up with all sorts of
answers, most of them having to do with seven being the perfect number in
Jewish thinking…
…but I really doubt that this particular number—77--matters
all that much. It’s not a password or a PIN
number or an access code to deep mysteries.
I think Jesus hit upon 77 as the number of times we
need to forgive someone, because if you actually try to do that—to forgive
someone exactly 77 times--sooner or later you will lose track…you’ll forget
“the count.”
And when that happens, you’re probably going to chuck
it all and stop bothering to keep score at all.
Then
you’ll understand that the number “77” is a placeholder for “countless.”
“If
another member of church sins against me, how often should I forgive?”
Peter asks.
And Jesus, in effect, replies: “forgive count-lessly….forgive so
many times you lose track of the score….forgive as God forgives….anything less
than that will never do!”
In this manner Jesus shifts the conversation away from
math and toward the very essence of forgiveness. And as that happens we hit pay-dirt, because
at its core, the biblical notion of forgiveness has to do with freedom. Forgiveness is about setting someone free,
and, in the process, being set free yourself!
In the Bible, you see, the root-word for “forgiveness”
is closely related to the word for untying
a knot.
When was the last time you were mired in frustration,
stuck dead in your tracks, trying to untangle a pesky knot in a shoelace, a power-cord,
or a rope?
Whenever that happens, time stands still. Everything grinds to a halt until that pesky
knot is undone.
Only then are you free--free to move on with whatever
you were doing--free simply to “be,” once more.
THAT’s
the picture God wants to imbed in our brains, imprint on our hearts, and burn
into our souls this morning.
Forgiveness is about getting unstuck, it’s about breaking
out, moving into a free and open place, into a wide zone of freedom.
No wonder weekly worship often begins with confession
and forgiveness. We come here to church
all tangled up in waywardness and worry…we arrive all tied up in knots….and
before our worship even gets going, God sets us free!
We start our weekly worship the same way Martin Luther
urged us to begin each day: by making the sign of the cross…invoking the name
of the Father, Son and Spirit…returning to our baptism…reclaiming our freedom
in Jesus Christ.
Then, we can embrace the day, because we are free!
More than anything else, God wants us to be free from
everything that might hold us back, keep us stuck, leave us all tied up in
knots.
And
this freedom that comes from forgiveness—this freedom is meant to be shared.
That’s the point of the parable Jesus tells next in
our gospel text—the parable of the two debtors.
To understand this parable, we need some background.
It’s most likely that both the first and the second
servants in the parable worked for the king.
Their job was to produce and convey wealth to the king’s coffers, so
that the king’s balance sheet will always show a profit.
Think
of it as a first-century Middle Eastern multi-level marketing arrangement—also known
as a “pyramid scheme!”[1]
The king was at the apex of the pyramid, and he had hundreds
of “worker bees” laboring beneath him.
The first servant was a middle-manager, perhaps even
the CFO (chief financial officer) of the whole operation, given the astronomical size of the man’s debt
to the king.
The first servant moved around scads of the king’s wealth,
sometimes mixing in some of his own resources, sometimes winning big for the
king, sometimes taking foolish risks on the king’s portfolio.
In Jesus’ parable, it’s definitely a “down” day for
the first servant. His personal balance
sheet is dripping with red ink. He’s so
far in the hole he can’t even see a glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel.
So, knowing that his own avalanche of debt is
insurmountable, the first servant threw himself at the mercy of the king—begging
that his humongous debt be written off…
….which is exactly what the king does!
Whew! What a
relief…the first servant’s thorny knot is untied.
He can breathe once again.
But the unimaginable mercy he receives from the king
doesn’t last long.
No sooner does the first servant leave the chamber of
the merciful king, but that he encounters one of his own underlings in the
pyramid scheme, the second servant, who has his own debt crisis—though it’s of
a magnitude far smaller than the first servant’s debt.
When the first servant gets a chance to emulate his
master, the merciful king who had graciously forgiven him…when his chance comes
to do the same thing for someone who was in his debt--the first servant comes
down with a bad case of amnesia.
He refuses to write off his own underling’s debt. In fact he removes the second servant from
his position in the king’s pyramid scheme, tossing him into debtor’s prison.
When word of this reaches the king, he calls in the
first servant and reads him the riot act: "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?” (Matthew 18:32-33)
So the king imprisons the first servant where he will
be tortured until he repays everything he owed the king….which means he would
be tortured forever.
What’s going on here?
What made the king turn on a dime, from lavish mercy to bitter retribution?
This isn’t about an emotional outburst by the king.
No—something far bigger was at stake. When the king forgave the first servant’s
astronomical debt, the king turned his entire business plan upside down.
Where formerly the king’s pyramid scheme was designed
to send money upstream, toward the top of the pyramid…..the king—by forgiving the
first servant--reversed that “flow,” bathing the first servant with more mercy
than he could possibly “absorb,” so that he would have to pass it on all those
who were beneath him in the pyramid.
In like manner…because of the life, death and
resurrection of Jesus Christ…you and I have received more forgiveness, more
mercy, more second chances than we’ll ever manage to “absorb” or just keep for
ourselves.
God’s gift of freedom, that comes from God’s forgiveness,
is something for us to receive—but
never to keep for ourselves.
You and I were created to be conduits, not holding
tanks, for God’s merciful forgiveness.
Try to hang on to it selfishly, and it will melt in
your hand.
But share it, as freely as God forgives you, and all
that mercy keeps coming back to you, eleven-fold, a full measure heaped up,
pressed down, and overflowing, right in your lap.
Freedom. It’s
what you and I were created for.
And today and every day, Jesus Christ is recreating us, to bask in but also to pass
on this freedom….the freedom that perpetually springs forth from God’s overflowing
fountain of forgiveness.
In the name of Jesus.
Amen.
[1] For
this understanding of economic arrangements in kingdoms around Mediterranean
Sea in the 1st century, I’m indebted to Stanley Saunders, http://www.workingpreacher.org/preaching.aspx?commentary_id=3393
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