Matthew 18:21-35
The Rev. Conor M Alexander
Christ and St. Luke’s Episcopal Church
Norfolk, VA 23507
9-14-2008
When I was a small boy I picked up the Lord of the Rings books for the first time. As I started reading them, I became engrossed in this world of orcs and wizards and magic rings … but at the same time I felt really out of place. I was reading the first book but I felt like I had missed something – as if there was a whole lot of back story that I had totally missed. I went back to my copy of the Hobbit and skimmed through the chapters – it was entertaining but nothing there about an ancient war that’s resurfacing. There was nothing there that gave me the background relationship between Gandolf, and Sauron and Sauromon. And yet for the characters in the book, they discussed these people as a matter of course. These relationships made perfect sense to them and they proceeded with their mission. For them it was completely natural, for me it was utterly alien.
I often feel the same way when Jesus talks about the Kingdom of Heaven. Things happen in his parables that are completely foreign to our way of thinking, and yet Jesus talks about them as if they were the most natural things in the world – for Him I suppose they were natural; he could see no other way of being. But it rubs against the grain of almost everything we do.
Take today’s parable, a man has a huge debt to his master – the text says 10,000 talents. This was probably more money than anybody would see in their lifetime. We don’t know why but he was unable to pay back this debt. The only thing he could do was fall on his knees and asks for more time. “Just extend the terms of my loan and I’ll pay you back – let me refinance!” The master then has pity on him, and rather than just extending the loan, he forgives it entirely. Can you imagine that happening in our world? Imagine if you went in to your banker, explained that you had fallen on hard times and couldn’t make your mortgage payments. Could you please have another loan application so you can refinance. This would probably work out well since your monthly payments would be lower. But then imagine if your banker looked at you and said, “I know times are tough, the economy is pretty bad right now. Tell you what I’m feeling generous so we’re just going to wipe the rest of your mortgage clean – consider it paid in full.”
To us that seems ridiculous. But Jesus talked about it as if it were the most natural thing in the world. He probably being provocative on purpose so that we could imagine the possibilities that God imagines for us. If we look at the context we’ll see that he wasn’t giving advice on banking and debts, he was talking about forgiving other people when they sin against us. But the Kingdom of Heaven is probably even more alien to us than Lord of the Rings that the only way Jesus could describe it is to compare it to something else, and often with ridiculous, shocking imagery. The Kingdom of Heaven is like a pearl of great value, or it’s like a farmer going out scattering seed. It’s like a banker who will forgive all of your debts. I’d sure love to find a lender who will forgive all of my debts, but I asked around and nobody wants to.
Jesus told this parable in response to Peter’s question about how many times he should forgive someone else. Last week you may remember that Jesus talked about how to confront someone who had sinned against you, and how to work for reconciliation. This week Peter responds with okay, but how many times should I let someone get away with this, seven? When you think about it he was probably being quite generous. We might forgive someone once or twice for the same offence – fool my once shame on you, fool me twice shame on me. If we’re feeling really charitable we might say three strikes and you’re out. That’s it, three times is the limit of our forgiveness. Here Peter is offering seven times. Jesus then counters with no not seven times, but seventy-seven times. I don’t know about you but I don’t think I could keep track of anything seventy-seven times.
Rather than keep track of all the ways in which someone has wronged me, and then pompously saying I forgive them, I find it easier to not take offense in the first place. Of course in our own world that’s not as easy as one may think. But it does become possible if we’re willing to suspend our judgments about matters. If we take a more humble approach to life, and realize we’re not at the center of the universe, then we open ourselves up to the possibility that our opinions, how we feel about things are not the absolute truth. They are things we’ve created in our mind. For example, if I dropped my sermon notes right now, I’m sure we could put our heads together and pass all kinds of judgments on the situation. “Conor is a stupid lazy klutz; he’s a lousy preacher. A good preacher wouldn’t lose his notes like that. Somebody should really give him some pointers. We really need a new assistant. I wish Berkley would fire him and be done with it.” The problem comes when we confuse all of these stories with the truth. We think they’re the truth with a capital T, when in reality they’re just things we made up. They’re neither true nor false, they just are. But so long as we hold on to them, we get to be right and we make the other party wrong. We get to be in a superior position, and thus look good – even at the expense of our relationships with each other and with God.
Unfortunately in our parable, the person who had his debt forgiven didn’t understand this – he didn’t get it. Even though his debt was forgiven, there still had to be a winner and a loser, perhaps he felt like the winner in that situation – hence the master, the one who forgave his debt, was the loser. But the reality was there was no winner or loser – those are just judgments. There was only a sum of money that wasn’t going to change hands. But then he found another fellow who owed him a smaller sum of money, and couldn’t pay. He might have been that good-for-nothing brother-in-law/cousin/black sheep of the family who’s always borrowing money and never paying it back – more judgments. Not wanting to be the loser, he demanded that he be paid and through the fellow in jail. When the master heard of this, he brought him in and through him into prison until he could pay off his debt.
Jesus follows up by saying that his Father will do the same to any of us if we don’t forgive our brother or sister from our heart. I believe he’s inviting us into a world where there aren’t winners and losers – a world where we can accept responsibility that our judgments are uniquely ours, and not the absolute truth. Inside this world there’s plenty of forgiveness to go around – outside of it somebody wins and somebody looses – somebody is right and somebody is wrong. When Jesus invites us to forgive each others sins, and have our sins forgiven, he’s inviting us inside this world he calls the Kingdom of Heaven.
Amen.
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