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"Forgive--and Forget?"
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Text: Matthew 18:21-35
Date: The Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost 
9/15/02
When Christians gather on the Lord's Day as
Holy Church, they do not come to be entertained-though we do experience
emotions-or to get advice on how to succeed in life-though we do
hear about living the Christian life. When Christians gather on
the Lord's Day as Holy Church, they do not even come primarily to
DO anything, but rather, primarily to receive God's gifts and then
respond in repentance and faith, prayer and praise. And what are
those gifts? According to Luther's Small Catechism under The Sacrament
of the Altar those gifts are forgiveness of sins, life, and salvation.
Those gifts speak of our greatest, constant and ultimate need from
which then flows every other blessing.
So central to the Christian faith is the forgiveness
of sins that it is the one petition in the Lord's Prayer that Jesus
expands on in the Sermon on the Mount, saying, "For if you forgive
others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive
you, but if you do not forgive others their trespasses, neither
will your Father forgive your trespasses" [Matthew 6:14-15 (ESV)].
The point? Christians are to be experts at forgiveness. And there's
the rub.
It's not a big reach, after all, for us to
identify with St. Peter in today's Gospel when he asks Jesus, "Lord,
how often will my brother sin against me, and I forgive him?" For,
it's not a problem unique to first century Palestinian believers
requiring some special knowledge or revelation discovered in an
archeological dig somewhere. We have asked the same question every
day. "How often shall my brother sin and I forgive?" "How long do
I have to put up with you-know-who?" And it's not necessarily a
question that denies forgiveness, you see. We know we "should" forgive
others who trespass against us. It's, rather, a question of limits.
There has to be a limit, doesn't there? Especially if we sense our
patience and loving attitude has set us up to be used or abused
by others. In a less refined way we ask Peter's question in words
like, "How long do I contain myself? How long before the pressure
cooker blows its lid? What's the limit of endurance? There has to
be a day of reckoning when the accounts are settled up with those
who have abused us and misused us, doesn't there?"
And you'd be right in saying that. There has
to be a day of reckoning, a day to settle the accounts. If we didn't
hear Jesus say that in the parable he told in answer to Peter today,
we didn't listen carefully enough. For, to speak about Divine forgiveness
is not to speak of a soft and easygoing God who winks at sin. Forgiveness
is not just a sympathetic pat on the head supposing that God, for
all his tough talk, doesn't really take sin that seriously. For
the parable says that the kingdom may be compared to a king who
wished to settle accounts with this servants. The day of reckoning
had come, and one of his servants who had piled up quite a debt
was summoned to appear before the throne. The amount of the debt
was so huge the servant couldn't pay it. So the king gave orders
to foreclose on him, to sell him with his wife and children and
with everything he had and the payment to be made.
We all agree, that's the way things work in
real life. Regardless of the credit plan chosen, the bills come
due and we are called to account. Pay up, or else! And who will
dare to say that our account with God is clear or that our debt
is, after all, such a trifle that we'll have enough resources in
the end to take care of it ourselves? Like the man in the parable
we must come to the realization that the price of sin is beyond
our paying. As the psalmist says, "If you, Lord, should mark iniquities,
O Lord, who can stand?"
Things were bad. There seemed no way out. The
only option was to literally throw himself on his knees and on whatever
mercy there might be. And to his surprise-and remember this is a
story about the Kingdom of God, not Wall Street or the county courthouse-"out
of pity for him, the master of that servant released him and forgave
him the debt." Amazing! Amazing mercy. Amazing grace! You see, the
psalmist who wrote, "If you, Lord, should mark iniquities, O Lord,
who could stand?" continued, saying, "but with you there is forgiveness,
that you may be feared" [Psalm 130:3-4 (ESV)]. In the Canticle of
Zechariah which we sing at Morning Prayer, already there it is as
that saint said of the infant John the Baptist, "You, my child,
shall be called the prophet of the Most High, for you will go before
the Lord to prepare his way, to give his people knowledge of salvation
by the forgiveness of their sins" [Luke 1:76-77]. And that's the
Christian Gospel-the Gospel of the Cross. It fits our logic that
in his holiness God demands payment for sin, but suddenly we hear
this totally illogical, almost unbelievable answer to our predicament-that
God himself in Jesus Christ has paid our debt for us. But it is
believable! And you better believe it! Your sin and mine is not
a trifle that can be atoned for simply by spreading a little good
will around. It has no price to match it save the agony of God's
own Son, the death that he went into and the hell he conquered.
By his sacrifice, the burden has been lifted and the debt on our
accounts is cancelled.
But while faith breathes a sigh of relief at
that Good News, then there's this: "if you do not forgive others
their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses."
As soon as you believe God's forgiveness of your sins you discover
it's our turn now. As we go through our mental filling cabinet we
discover two drawers, one marked "mine" and the other marked "theirs."
There are people I have offended and sinned against. And there are
people that have offended and sinned against me. And Christ has
a word for both of those categories. Here, in Matthew 18, it's about
people who have sinned against you. Back in Matthew 5, it's about
those against whom you have sinned. In both cases, whether you're
the guilty party or the other guy, the Christian is to go and work
reconciliation, forgiveness and peace-because the Christian is "out
of his mind" and has been given the mind of Christ.
The time has come to settle accounts with one
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