Sept. 13, 2020 Sermon

P15A 2020 Matthew 18:21-35
Matthew is not my favorite gospel writer; but it’s fortuitous that the pandemic hit while
we were in Matthew’s year in our lectionary cycle, because the events of the last several months
have, to me, unfolded in a similar pattern to the way Matthew tells this part of the story of
Jesus’ teaching and call to discipleship. Because we live in an age of advanced scientific and
medical technology, and because information is available to us almost instantaneously, we have
been able to watch the scientific method at work, practically in real time, as doctors
hypothesize, observe, learn, and correct their ongoing approach to the coronavirus. Of course,
that has made it feel like one precaution has been piled on another and another and another until
what we had hoped were simple safeguards became much more involved and our overall
response has changed, for a time, almost every aspect of our lives. This is just how Jesus’
portrait of life in Christian community plays out in Matthew’s gospel.
A few weeks ago, Jesus promised Peter that he would be the rock on which the church
was built. Then Jesus started explaining that the members of that church would have to deny
themselves and take up their cross to follow him. Last week we were warned that the
predictable conflict that would arise from members of the church sinning against each other
necessitated a whole process of reconciliation, and that even if the offender was completely
uninterested in reconciling, we had to treat them with love and grace anyway. In today’s
reading, I have to believe that Peter is looking for a loophole. “Lord, if another member of the
church sins against me, how often should I forgive? Seven times?” And you just know that
Peter is waiting for Jesus to praise his patience and long-suffering mercy. “Ah, seven times!
How gracious of you Peter!” But of course, that’s not what Jesus says: seventy-seven times. Or,
in some translations, seventy times seven. Not the answer Peter was looking for at all.
Whether Jesus meant 77 or 490—the Greek can mean either—the point is not to count
second and third and fourth chances up to one of those numbers and then quit. The point is
quite the opposite—that we are to forgo a mindset of keeping score in order to justify a broken
relationship and instead work toward a restored relationship. The numbers Jesus suggests,
seventy-seven or seven times seven, as well as the debts he describes in the parable are not
meant as literal benchmarks but as metaphors for something so big it can’t be measured. The
amount the first slave owes the king works out to something like 60 million days of wages. I
don’t know how much patience the slave was asking for when he promised to pay back 60
million days worth of wages; the point is that the debt the king forgives him is, for all intents
and purposes, immeasurable. And that is how God looks at forgiving us. For who could stand
if the Lord counted sin? the Psalmist asks. God takes away our sin as far as the east is from the
west—an immeasurable distance. So even when someone sins against us a lot—seven times,
seventy-seven times, 490 times, or in the parable, incurring a debt of 100 days wages, which is
a lot—the model of forgiveness that we are to follow is to just forgive without counting the cost
and without keeping score.
So we learn to forgive the friend who is late yet again; we forgive even if it’s not the first
forgotten birthday or anniversary; we forgive the loan that we guessed wouldn’t be paid back
when we gave it. But what about the real doozies—the “I can’t believe you let me down when I
needed you” sins, the “I don’t know if I can look at you the same way after this” sins? As nice
and neat and tidy as “forgive and forget” sounds, we know that there are some instances where
we can’t forget. And that may be where we are called to the hardest kind of forgiveness, where
every day we have to choose to continue in relationship with someone who has hurt us deeply—
not forgiving 77 sins but forgiving that one sin 77 times and more. That doesn’t mean our
forgiveness erases consequences; some of the abuses people level against us may demand that
we change the nature of our relationship with them, because as much as God calls us to
forgiveness, God also calls us all to right, responsible, respectful living in the first place. Our
call to forgiveness is not an invitation for anyone to act against us 76 more times. But we are
charged with finding a way forward into renewed relationship—whatever that may look like—
with the person who has sinned against us, so that at the very least we bring ourselves to a place
where do not judge them exclusively by the wrong they have done.
It’s not an easy thing. If forgiveness was easy, and we really could let everything go and
forget about it, Jesus wouldn’t have to tell us to keep forgiving every time that hurt surfaces in
our memory—seventy times seven or however many times it takes. But like all the hard things
we are called to do, we aren’t left to do it on our own. The Spirit of God, who is gracious and
merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, is living in us, working that which is
well-pleasing in God’s sight. And when our human nature overpowers the Divinity with in us,
as it often will do, we thank God for promising to remove our sins from us, as far as the east is
from the west, so that we can be in restored relationship with the One who loves us too much to
keep score. When we can bring ourselves to forgive, even a little, those wrongs that hurt a lot,
we experience just a glimmer of that unending love God has for us.