How Many Times?
Preaching
Preaching the Parables
Series IV, Cycle A
Object:
I received a piece of mail not too long ago that brought a rather disconcerting message. The sales piece said: "God May Forgive, But The IRS Won't." It went on to offer, for $3.50, a little booklet titled "17 Most Common Tax Mistakes Ministers Make, What They Are, And How To Avoid Them." I ordered a copy. I just wish there was a booklet to help all of us avoid the one most common mistake all of us make all of the time. That mistake is to rewrite the title of that little booklet with our lives to read: "God May Forgive, But I Won't."
Or maybe, "I Can't." God may forgive so-and-so for such-and-such, but me? Forget it. Do you know how he made me feel? Do you have any idea what she did to me? Do you know what that cost me? Do you know where that leaves me?
The only honest answer I've got is, "No, I don't." I don't know. Only you know that. But I do know what it will cost you and where it will leave you, if you will not or you cannot forgive -- you cannot quit counting the cost and leave the accounting to God. You must find freedom for yourself in forgiving others.
The lack of forgiveness by the IRS is a matter of legend. The lack of forgiveness between "me and thee" is a matter of life -- my life and yours. Whether we choose to live life letting go of those things that destroy life; or we hold them close and die every day.
Jesus' teaching on forgiveness is actually rather unforgiving, in the sense that it leaves us with little, with really no choice. Forgive and live, says Jesus. As Lew Smedes writes:
Forgiveness is God's invention for coming to terms with a world in which, despite their best intentions, people are unfair to each other and hurt each other deeply. He began by forgiving us. And he invites us all to forgive each other.1
Since you've just had someone or something you're not about to forgive come to mind -- and if you didn't, you're asleep -- we need to ask the obvious question. Matthew says Peter asked it for us:
Peter came up to the Lord and asked, "How many times should I forgive someone who does something wrong to me? Is seven times enough?"
-- Matthew 18:21 (CEV)
"There's a limit, Lord! So-and-so, or such-and-such, has gone too far. Forgive? Forget it! Enough is enough." I love Peter! God knows, he's just like you and me. He is good-hearted, trying hard, but within limits. I sense in the story we read that Peter had just reached his limit with someone or something. That his was not just a generic or a philosophical question about the abstract nature of forgiveness. Someone pushed his buttons and Peter was pushing back. Now Peter was feeling Jesus out about the need to forgive someone one ... more ... time. And it's someone they both knew.
The Contemporary English Version of Matthew 18:21 says, "How many times should I forgive someone...?" The New Revised Standard version says, "someone" is, "... another member of the church...." The Greek text says, it isn't just "anyone," it's "... my brother...." Peter had a brother. His name was Andrew. Personalize it. "Peter came up to the Lord and asked, 'How many times should I forgive Andrew, anyway? Seven times seems more than fair to me!' "
I suspect it seems more than fair to you and me, too. Enough is enough, we say. And seven times is more than enough. But it wasn't enough for Jesus. And his answer to Peter says it isn't enough for you and me, either. Jesus' answer to Peter's question was, "Not just seven times, but seventy-seven times" (Matthew 18:22 CEV).
And if that isn't bad enough, you can also translate Jesus' words, "not just seven times, but seven times seventy times," which, on my calculator comes up to 490 times! That's a lot. But as Wordsworth puts it in his Ecclesiastical Sonnets:
High heaven rejects the lore
of nicely calculated less or more.2
Wordsworth was talking about money and our need to give more. Jesus was talking about forgiveness and our need to forgive more. Incalculably more.
Any debate about "how much more," misses the meaning entirely, as the parable that follows makes clear. The parable is about a man who was a slave. He was owned by the king. And worse, he owed the king -- big time. How big? Ten thousand talents! Well, how big is that? I got out my calculator. One "talent" is the biblical equivalent of fifteen years of wages for a common laborer. Let's pay the laborer a "living wage." Mayor Anthony Williams and others say that in the District of Columbia that is $11.80 per hour. Let the workweek be forty hours. Ten thousand talents is $24,544 per year for 150,000 years! I had to multiply it out by hand. My calculator went into overload! You can check me. (And I'm sure someone will!) The slave owed his master $3,681,600,000! You've got to give him credit. He said, "Give me time, and I'll pay you 'every cent I owe' " (Matthew 18:26 CEV).
That's over 300 billion cents! I tried to imagine hauling that over to my bank and dumping it into one of those change-counting machines. The amount is absurd. And so is the king's response. He forgave the debt. Instead of selling the man, his wife, his children, and everything he had, just to make a down payment on a debt that could never be paid, the king forgave every penny. That's a lot of pennies. A lot of debt. A lot of forgiveness.
According to Jesus, that's the way God forgives you and me. Jesus responded to Peter's counting the petty cash of life, with the amazing truth that we can count on God's forgiveness again and again and again and again and yet again. God's love is without limit. But we limit our experience of it when we limit our love of one another -- like the slave in Jesus' story.
Without so much as a thank you, he headed out the door and bumped into another slave who owed him 100 denarii. A denarii was one day's wage. In our example, $94.40. The debt was about $10,000. Not insignificant, but a drop in the piggy bank by comparison to the debt just forgiven. The second slave begged for time in almost the same words spoken by the first slave to the king: "Have patience with me, and I will pay you." But the forgiven slave was unforgiving. He sent the second slave to prison "until he could pay what he owed" (Matthew 18:30 CEV). The servant who had been forgiven the impossible, did not find it possible to forgive.
By now, Peter must have been squirming. The message was clear. "Peter, considering how much God has forgiven you, how is it that you can be so unforgiving of your brother?" Jesus was not saying that the debt Peter felt he was owed, or the slight he felt he had endured, or the pain he had suffered, was insignificant. It wasn't. And it wasn't just, "Oh, c'mon, Peter -- live and let live." It's "Come on, Peter. Forgive. One more time do what God does all the time." Jesus' answer to Peter's question is essentially, "Peter, you can stop forgiving when God does."
What that would look like, for God to quit forgiving, is well described by the end of the parable. When word got back to the king that the forgiven servant was so unforgiving he revoked his forgiveness. And the unforgiving servant found himself right back where he started. He was still hopelessly indebted to his master.
It's as though the prayer Jesus taught us to pray had been answered:
• "Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors."
• "Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us."
• "Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us."
• "Be just as forgiving of us as we are of others, O God!"
Someone has said you should be careful what you pray for because you may get it! Do you really want God to be just as forgiving of you as you are of others? God knows, I don't. Because I know myself too well. I think we all do.
So the apparent ending of Jesus' parable is hard to swallow. Because the slave was unforgiving, it says, the king took back his forgiveness. Would God do that? To you? To me? No!
That's what I believe about the love of God in Jesus Christ: that God would never not forgive.
Scholars and commentators handle the seeming suggestion that God would withdraw forgiveness from the unforgiving by saying that suggestion is really Matthew's suggestion, not that of Jesus. They say that Matthew elaborated on Jesus' story that really ended with the king's question, "Should you not have had mercy on your fellow slave, as I had mercy on you?" (Matthew 18:33). That's really Jesus' question to Peter. "Should you not forgive your brother, as God has forgiven you?"
"Has God forgiven you only seven, or even seven times seventy times, Peter? Or has God forgiven you more times than you can count? And certainly more times than you want to remember? Why should you do any less for your brother?"
I agree with Oswald Chambers, who once wrote:
God never threatens;
the devil never warns.3
It isn't "Forgive or else," but rather, "How else is there to live except to forgive each other?"
Bob Patterson writes about
... Jesus' insistence on forgiveness and reconciliation. Forgiveness is not a law, but a disposition of the heart which we learn from Christ Himself. In his novel, Love Is Eternal, Irving Stone has Mary Todd, the grieving widow of the just-slain Abraham Lincoln, say that she cannot forgive the assassin. Her son, Tad, responds, "If Pa had lived, he would have forgiven the man who shot him. Pa forgave everybody."4
Thank God he did. Thank God, God does, in Jesus Christ.
N. T. Wright, the Bishop of Durham in England, has written a book titled, Simply Christian. In the religious environment in which we live, where everyone is a liberal or a conservative, or a progressive, or orthodox, or a member of the covenant network, or the lay committee -- you name it -- it's refreshing, if nothing else, to hear someone call himself simply "Christian." And then go on to articulate in a personal, pastoral, sometimes pointed way what it means to be a Christian. Some are saying that the bishop's new book, Simply Christian, is simply the best of its kind since C. S. Lewis wrote Mere Christianity.
Early on in his book, Bishop Wright acknowledges that being Christian does not always translate easily into being Christlike. That's something Paul had trouble with, too. The bishop writes:
There have always been people who have done terrible things in the name of Jesus ... There's no point hiding from the truth, however uncomfortable it may be. It's no part of Christian belief to say that the followers of Jesus have always got everything right. Jesus himself taught his followers [like Peter] a prayer which includes a clause asking God for forgiveness. He must have thought we would go on needing it.5
How many times? As many times as you need!
____________
1. Lewis B. Smedes, Forgive and Forget, Healing the Hurts We Don't Deserve (San Francisco, California: Harper, 1996), p. xii.
2. William Wordsworth, "Sonnet XLII," The Ecclesiastical Sonnet of William Wordsworth (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1922).
3. Source Unknown.
4. Floyd W. Thatcher, Bob E. Patterson, and Elizabeth Rockwood (The Guideposts' Home Bible Study Program) Discovering Matthew (Carmel New York; Guideposts Associates, Inc., 1985), p. 111.
5. N. T. Wright, Simply Christian (San Francisco, California: HarperSanFrancisco, 2006), p. 12.
Or maybe, "I Can't." God may forgive so-and-so for such-and-such, but me? Forget it. Do you know how he made me feel? Do you have any idea what she did to me? Do you know what that cost me? Do you know where that leaves me?
The only honest answer I've got is, "No, I don't." I don't know. Only you know that. But I do know what it will cost you and where it will leave you, if you will not or you cannot forgive -- you cannot quit counting the cost and leave the accounting to God. You must find freedom for yourself in forgiving others.
The lack of forgiveness by the IRS is a matter of legend. The lack of forgiveness between "me and thee" is a matter of life -- my life and yours. Whether we choose to live life letting go of those things that destroy life; or we hold them close and die every day.
Jesus' teaching on forgiveness is actually rather unforgiving, in the sense that it leaves us with little, with really no choice. Forgive and live, says Jesus. As Lew Smedes writes:
Forgiveness is God's invention for coming to terms with a world in which, despite their best intentions, people are unfair to each other and hurt each other deeply. He began by forgiving us. And he invites us all to forgive each other.1
Since you've just had someone or something you're not about to forgive come to mind -- and if you didn't, you're asleep -- we need to ask the obvious question. Matthew says Peter asked it for us:
Peter came up to the Lord and asked, "How many times should I forgive someone who does something wrong to me? Is seven times enough?"
-- Matthew 18:21 (CEV)
"There's a limit, Lord! So-and-so, or such-and-such, has gone too far. Forgive? Forget it! Enough is enough." I love Peter! God knows, he's just like you and me. He is good-hearted, trying hard, but within limits. I sense in the story we read that Peter had just reached his limit with someone or something. That his was not just a generic or a philosophical question about the abstract nature of forgiveness. Someone pushed his buttons and Peter was pushing back. Now Peter was feeling Jesus out about the need to forgive someone one ... more ... time. And it's someone they both knew.
The Contemporary English Version of Matthew 18:21 says, "How many times should I forgive someone...?" The New Revised Standard version says, "someone" is, "... another member of the church...." The Greek text says, it isn't just "anyone," it's "... my brother...." Peter had a brother. His name was Andrew. Personalize it. "Peter came up to the Lord and asked, 'How many times should I forgive Andrew, anyway? Seven times seems more than fair to me!' "
I suspect it seems more than fair to you and me, too. Enough is enough, we say. And seven times is more than enough. But it wasn't enough for Jesus. And his answer to Peter says it isn't enough for you and me, either. Jesus' answer to Peter's question was, "Not just seven times, but seventy-seven times" (Matthew 18:22 CEV).
And if that isn't bad enough, you can also translate Jesus' words, "not just seven times, but seven times seventy times," which, on my calculator comes up to 490 times! That's a lot. But as Wordsworth puts it in his Ecclesiastical Sonnets:
High heaven rejects the lore
of nicely calculated less or more.2
Wordsworth was talking about money and our need to give more. Jesus was talking about forgiveness and our need to forgive more. Incalculably more.
Any debate about "how much more," misses the meaning entirely, as the parable that follows makes clear. The parable is about a man who was a slave. He was owned by the king. And worse, he owed the king -- big time. How big? Ten thousand talents! Well, how big is that? I got out my calculator. One "talent" is the biblical equivalent of fifteen years of wages for a common laborer. Let's pay the laborer a "living wage." Mayor Anthony Williams and others say that in the District of Columbia that is $11.80 per hour. Let the workweek be forty hours. Ten thousand talents is $24,544 per year for 150,000 years! I had to multiply it out by hand. My calculator went into overload! You can check me. (And I'm sure someone will!) The slave owed his master $3,681,600,000! You've got to give him credit. He said, "Give me time, and I'll pay you 'every cent I owe' " (Matthew 18:26 CEV).
That's over 300 billion cents! I tried to imagine hauling that over to my bank and dumping it into one of those change-counting machines. The amount is absurd. And so is the king's response. He forgave the debt. Instead of selling the man, his wife, his children, and everything he had, just to make a down payment on a debt that could never be paid, the king forgave every penny. That's a lot of pennies. A lot of debt. A lot of forgiveness.
According to Jesus, that's the way God forgives you and me. Jesus responded to Peter's counting the petty cash of life, with the amazing truth that we can count on God's forgiveness again and again and again and again and yet again. God's love is without limit. But we limit our experience of it when we limit our love of one another -- like the slave in Jesus' story.
Without so much as a thank you, he headed out the door and bumped into another slave who owed him 100 denarii. A denarii was one day's wage. In our example, $94.40. The debt was about $10,000. Not insignificant, but a drop in the piggy bank by comparison to the debt just forgiven. The second slave begged for time in almost the same words spoken by the first slave to the king: "Have patience with me, and I will pay you." But the forgiven slave was unforgiving. He sent the second slave to prison "until he could pay what he owed" (Matthew 18:30 CEV). The servant who had been forgiven the impossible, did not find it possible to forgive.
By now, Peter must have been squirming. The message was clear. "Peter, considering how much God has forgiven you, how is it that you can be so unforgiving of your brother?" Jesus was not saying that the debt Peter felt he was owed, or the slight he felt he had endured, or the pain he had suffered, was insignificant. It wasn't. And it wasn't just, "Oh, c'mon, Peter -- live and let live." It's "Come on, Peter. Forgive. One more time do what God does all the time." Jesus' answer to Peter's question is essentially, "Peter, you can stop forgiving when God does."
What that would look like, for God to quit forgiving, is well described by the end of the parable. When word got back to the king that the forgiven servant was so unforgiving he revoked his forgiveness. And the unforgiving servant found himself right back where he started. He was still hopelessly indebted to his master.
It's as though the prayer Jesus taught us to pray had been answered:
• "Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors."
• "Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us."
• "Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us."
• "Be just as forgiving of us as we are of others, O God!"
Someone has said you should be careful what you pray for because you may get it! Do you really want God to be just as forgiving of you as you are of others? God knows, I don't. Because I know myself too well. I think we all do.
So the apparent ending of Jesus' parable is hard to swallow. Because the slave was unforgiving, it says, the king took back his forgiveness. Would God do that? To you? To me? No!
That's what I believe about the love of God in Jesus Christ: that God would never not forgive.
Scholars and commentators handle the seeming suggestion that God would withdraw forgiveness from the unforgiving by saying that suggestion is really Matthew's suggestion, not that of Jesus. They say that Matthew elaborated on Jesus' story that really ended with the king's question, "Should you not have had mercy on your fellow slave, as I had mercy on you?" (Matthew 18:33). That's really Jesus' question to Peter. "Should you not forgive your brother, as God has forgiven you?"
"Has God forgiven you only seven, or even seven times seventy times, Peter? Or has God forgiven you more times than you can count? And certainly more times than you want to remember? Why should you do any less for your brother?"
I agree with Oswald Chambers, who once wrote:
God never threatens;
the devil never warns.3
It isn't "Forgive or else," but rather, "How else is there to live except to forgive each other?"
Bob Patterson writes about
... Jesus' insistence on forgiveness and reconciliation. Forgiveness is not a law, but a disposition of the heart which we learn from Christ Himself. In his novel, Love Is Eternal, Irving Stone has Mary Todd, the grieving widow of the just-slain Abraham Lincoln, say that she cannot forgive the assassin. Her son, Tad, responds, "If Pa had lived, he would have forgiven the man who shot him. Pa forgave everybody."4
Thank God he did. Thank God, God does, in Jesus Christ.
N. T. Wright, the Bishop of Durham in England, has written a book titled, Simply Christian. In the religious environment in which we live, where everyone is a liberal or a conservative, or a progressive, or orthodox, or a member of the covenant network, or the lay committee -- you name it -- it's refreshing, if nothing else, to hear someone call himself simply "Christian." And then go on to articulate in a personal, pastoral, sometimes pointed way what it means to be a Christian. Some are saying that the bishop's new book, Simply Christian, is simply the best of its kind since C. S. Lewis wrote Mere Christianity.
Early on in his book, Bishop Wright acknowledges that being Christian does not always translate easily into being Christlike. That's something Paul had trouble with, too. The bishop writes:
There have always been people who have done terrible things in the name of Jesus ... There's no point hiding from the truth, however uncomfortable it may be. It's no part of Christian belief to say that the followers of Jesus have always got everything right. Jesus himself taught his followers [like Peter] a prayer which includes a clause asking God for forgiveness. He must have thought we would go on needing it.5
How many times? As many times as you need!
____________
1. Lewis B. Smedes, Forgive and Forget, Healing the Hurts We Don't Deserve (San Francisco, California: Harper, 1996), p. xii.
2. William Wordsworth, "Sonnet XLII," The Ecclesiastical Sonnet of William Wordsworth (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1922).
3. Source Unknown.
4. Floyd W. Thatcher, Bob E. Patterson, and Elizabeth Rockwood (The Guideposts' Home Bible Study Program) Discovering Matthew (Carmel New York; Guideposts Associates, Inc., 1985), p. 111.
5. N. T. Wright, Simply Christian (San Francisco, California: HarperSanFrancisco, 2006), p. 12.
