Then Peter came to Jesus and asked, “Lord, how many times shall I forgive my brother or sister who sins against me? Up to seven times?”
Jesus answered, “I tell you, not seven times, but seventy-seven times.
“Therefore, the kingdom of heaven is like a king who wanted to settle accounts with his servants. As he began the settlement, a man who owed him ten thousand bags of gold was brought to him. Since he was not able to pay, the master ordered that he and his wife and his children and all that he had be sold to repay the debt.
“At this the servant fell on his knees before him. ‘Be patient with me,’ he begged, ‘and I will pay back everything.’ The servant’s master took pity on him, canceled the debt and let him go.
“But when that servant went out, he found one of his fellow servants who owed him a hundred silver coins. He grabbed him and began to choke him. ‘Pay back what you owe me!’ he demanded.
“His fellow servant fell to his knees and begged him, ‘Be patient with me, and I will pay it back.’
“But he refused. Instead, he went off and had the man thrown into prison until he could pay the debt. When the other servants saw what had happened, they were outraged and went and told their master everything that had happened.
“Then the master called the servant in. ‘You wicked servant,’ he said, ‘I canceled all that debt of yours because you begged me to. Shouldn’t you have had mercy on your fellow servant just as I had on you?’ In anger his master handed him over to the jailers to be tortured, until he should pay back all he owed.
“This is how my heavenly Father will treat each of you unless you forgive your brother or sister from your heart.” Matthew 18:21–35
When you believe in Jesus, forgiveness is post-scarce. I. When forgiveness is scarce II. When forgiveness is post-scarce
Have you heard about the post-scarcity world? It’s a world where food, water, shelter, and clothing are so abundant that they cost no money. This is an idea that some people have about what our future is going to be like. They observe that for as long as humanity has been around, we’ve had to fight for the essentials of life. Food, water, shelter, clothing all were hard to come by for the vast majority of people. But due to all the technology we’ve got, now a great number of people, at least in our country, can go to a grocery store and buy pretty much whatever we feel like. And housing may be expensive, but we can afford it. It used to be only royalty and aristocrats could request whatever clothing items they wanted, and now most middle-class American can now tap on our phone a few times and someone will bring it to our doorstep. And the post-scarcity idea is that this trend is going to keep going until it’s universal. Until we create so much abundance of the essentials of life that food, water, clothing, and shelter won’t even cost any money anymore.
Why are we talking about economics when the theme of the day is forgiveness? I don’t think it’s by accident that Jesus, when he was asked about forgiveness, told a story about money. Because we often have a similar view of money as we do to forgiveness. In fact, in the Lord’s Prayer, we say “forgive us our sins,” but a more literal translation is “forgive us our debts.”
We’ve got all kinds of money: more people in the world live with more luxuries than in any time in history. Yet, we still have this tendency to hoard our wealth. We still worry about whether we will have enough. We try and pinch pennies to make sure we never run out.
In a similar way, we are stingy with our forgiveness. We have this tendency to think that when someone wrongs us, they owe us. When your co-worker does a sloppy job on a project and you have to work overtime to clean it up, they know and you know that they owe you one. When your spouse forgets to pick up the milk on their way home like you asked them to, you expect them to make it right, to pay you back somehow. We have this tendency to be debt collectors. We don’t want to forgive, because then people wouldn’t owe us anything anymore. And we’re always running this mental till, keeping track of what other people owe us—our spouse, our friends, our siblings, our parents, our co-workers, the person who cut me off in traffic. Why would we forgive others when everyone owes us so much! That’d be like throwing money away.
But the economics of forgiveness, or lack of it, cannot continue like this. This constant circle of owing others who owe others who owe others who owe me—holding onto and keeping track of all these debts turns a person vindictive and self-righteous and fearful of others. We have to stop. And we can. That’s what Jesus shows us today. He shows us that God has disrupted the forgiveness market so greatly that we already have the chance to break the cycle of holding others accountable. He shows us that when we believe in him, forgiveness is post-scarcity.
I. When forgiveness is scarce
He does this by telling us a story about what living in God’s kingdom is like, a story about a servant who has been forgiven a huge debt. He’s got a new lease on life. Instead of going around with this sense of impending repayment weighing him down, he feels free, his burden is gone. But we’re astonished when he goes out and immediately tracks down someone who owes him money and has them thrown into a debtor’s prison. Now, before we judge, this man was well within his rights to do this. The other servant owed him a large amount of money, somewhere around four months’ worth of salary. So, by getting him imprisoned, the servant ensured he would work until he paid it off and then he would be set free and they would be even.
And another reason not to judge the servant: think about what would happen if the first servant would’ve just let the second servant off the hook. Sure, that would’ve been kind, but what if every person who owed a debt was all of a sudden forgiven. What if everyone in society who wronged others got off with no punishment? What if every time someone got taken to court, whether it was for an unpaid debt or for a speeding ticket or for murder, the judge said, “You’re forgiven”? It would be anarchy! No rules, no punishments to hold people in check. So this servant was trying to hold the other accountable.
Let’s bring this closer to home. Think about someone who has wronged you in life. Not someone who just did a sloppy job at work, not someone who forgot to pick up the milk from the store, but someone who has really negatively affected your life. Wouldn’t it be bad for both them and you if you just let them off the hook? That’s what the unforgiving servant doesn’t do here. He makes the second servant repay what he owes. So why does Jesus paint this unforgiving servant in such a bad light?
Because he was acting as if forgiveness was scarce. Remember why Jesus told this parable in the first place. He was responding to Peter, who asked how many times he should be expected to forgive someone. And Peter, I think, was trying to be generous. Seven times is a pretty high number. When you think about someone who has wronged you, you might be able to rationalize forgiving them once or twice, but seven? That’s enabler territory.
So Peter asks this question about forgiveness, and Jesus responds with this parable about how a servant doesn’t forgive. But hearing this story, you can’t help but despise this man, right? Let’s look closer at the parable once more. Jesus is a master storyteller, and he includes little details in this story that make you really loathe the servant. First of all, the servant owes ten thousand bags of gold. Which is an intentionally ridiculous amount. Historians estimate that maybe even the Roman emperor couldn’t have afforded that debt. The servant couldn’t even start to repay it. But his master forgives the debt! And it’s not because he could never hope to recoup a zillion dollars anyways, it’s not because it wasn’t worth his time to keep hounding this servant, Jesus specifically says it’s because he has pity on the servant. The master’s heart goes out to him. It’s an emotional decision. But then, did you notice what the first words out of the servant’s mouth are after this unbelievably loving act? Jesus doesn’t say he says thank you, instead he says immediately the man went out and his first thought was to find this other servant and choke him out and say, “Pay back what you owe me!” Jesus even says that the other servants were horrified and outraged, he wants you to share their feelings and be horrified and outraged yourself.
Why does Jesus go to such lengths to get you to despise this man? Why did Jesus respond to Peter’s question about forgiving with a story about someone who doesn’t forgive?
Because he wants you to realize that you are the servant. He wants you to realize that when you and I give into our tendency to be stingy with our forgiveness, this is what we look like.
God has forgiven the insurmountable, comically large amount that you owe him. Every sin you’ve ever committed, every offense you’ve created before your perfect holy God, he’s forgiven it! He’s canceled your debt! You come here every Sunday, and we may not physically get down on our knees, but you and I confess our sins to our Lord and master, our perfect and holy God, and every Sunday he says your sins are forgiven in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.
And yet how often do you and I leave these doors and then go back to our mindset of tallying up all the debts others owe us. How quickly we come up with excuses for why we do not have to forgive someone. How quickly do we forget how much we have been forgiven and instead mull over how our boss has given us the short shrift yet again, or how our significant other is totally clueless as to what we’ve done for them, or whatever it may be. God has brought us into his world, where forgiveness is abundant, overflowing, not scarce at all. Yet we live like we need to hoard forgiveness, like we need to go around to the people in our lives an extract every last cent of what they owe us.
To be honest with you, this is a really hard message for me to deliver, and not just because of all of the stinginess towards forgiveness that I have. It’s hard for me to preach because I know well that many of you have had some downright terrible things done to you over the course of your lives. All of us have been sinned against, but some of us have had harm done to us that caused us much more grief than a third of a year. And when you’ve told me about what you’ve endured, there’s a part of me, as I’m sure there’s a part of you, that wants to go straight to those who brought such evil into your life and demand they pay you back.
That’s what Corrie Ten Boom wanted to do. Her family lived in the Netherlands in 1940, when the Nazis rolled through and began occupying their country and rounding up Jewish people. Her family was able to house Jews and use a fake wall in their home to hide them whenever the Nazis searched. But eventually, they were found out. And the whole family was split up and sent to concentration camps. Corrie endured immense suffering there, watching her sister and father die. But she survived. And many years later, this happened. This is a quote from her book, The Hiding Place:
“It was at a church service in Munich that I saw him, the former S.S. man who had stood guard at the shower door in the processing center at Ravensbruck. He was the first of our actual jailers that I had seen since that time. And suddenly it was all there – the roomful of mocking men, the heaps of clothing, Betsie’s pain-blanched face. He came up to me as the church was emptying, beaming and bowing. ‘How grateful I am for your message, Fraulein.’ He said. ‘To think that, as you say, He has washed my sins away!’ His hand was thrust out to shake mine. And I, who preached so often to the people in Bloemendaal the need to forgive, kept my hand at my side. Even as the angry, vengeful thoughts boiled through me…”
Here is a man who directly caused Corrie an immense amount of unjust suffering. And now he’s asking for forgiveness? By every earthly right she should’ve had him arrested right there!
By every earthly right you should pay people back who have wronged you. But Jesus warns you and me against this. He tells this parable to show us that we can forgive—which doesn’t mean that we pretend we weren’t wronged. It means we give up our right to extract repayment.
II. When forgiveness is post-scarce
God has disrupted the economics of forgiveness and created a new world for us to live in. We no longer live in a world where forgiveness is scarce. We no longer live in a world where we have to try and repay our debt to God, and so we go around trying to get others to repay us. God again today has called you before him, he has listed out all of the evils you have done in your life, but instead of demanding repayment, his heart has gone out to you. And he has sent his Son Jesus to remove from your ledger every single wrong you have done. He has canceled your debt. You owe God nothing.
You no longer have to behave like the tortured servant, the one who is obsessed with making sure others get what’s coming to them for how they’ve wronged him. Instead, you change Jesus’ parable. You leave the master’s room, your head held high and joy and gratitude in your heart, and you forgive.
But what about accountability? God does desire justice. In fact, he is perfectly just. He provides the government primarily for that purpose, to carry out justice. And actually, even for those that escape the government’s justice, we can trust him to provide perfect justice eternally. But in this parable, God tells us that it is not our job to carry out justice. It is his. It is our job to forgive. When we forgive, we’re trusting him to hold someone accountable.
Maybe you’ve heard Corrie Ten Boom’s story before. If you have, you may have guessed I stopped my quoting of her halfway through. Here’s how that quote ends:
“Even as the angry, vengeful thoughts boiled through me, I saw the sin of them. Jesus Christ had died for this man; was I going to ask for more? Lord Jesus, I prayed, forgive me and help me to forgive him. I tried to smile, I struggled to raise my hand. I could not. I felt nothing, not the slightest spark of warmth or charity. And so again I breathed a silent prayer. Jesus, I cannot forgive him. Give me your forgiveness. As I took his hand the most incredible thing happened. From my shoulder along my arm and through my hand a current seemed to pass from me to him, while into my heart sprang a love for this stranger that almost overwhelmed me. And so I discovered that it is not on our forgiveness any more than on our goodness that the world’s healing hinges, but on his.”
