Romans
14:1-12
Welcome
those who are weak in faith, but not for the purpose of quarreling over
opinions.
Some
believe in eating anything, while the weak eat only vegetables.
Those who
eat must not despise those who abstain, and those who abstain must not pass
judgment on those who eat; for God has welcomed them.
Who are you
to pass judgment on servants of another? It is before their own lord that they
stand or fall. And they will be upheld, for the Lord is able to make them
stand.
Some judge
one day to be better than another, while others judge all days to be alike. Let
all be fully convinced in their own minds.
Those who
observe the day, observe it in honor of the Lord. Also those who eat, eat in
honor of the Lord, since they give thanks to God; while those who abstain,
abstain in honor of the Lord and give thanks to God.
We do not
live to ourselves, and we do not die to ourselves.
If we
live, we live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord; so then, whether
we live or whether we die, we are the Lord's.
For to
this end Christ died and lived again, so that he might be Lord of both the dead
and the living.
Why do you
pass judgment on your brother or sister? Or you, why do you despise your
brother or sister? For we will all stand before the judgment seat of God.
For it is
written, "As I live, says the Lord, every knee shall bow to me, and every
tongue shall give praise to God."
So then,
each of us will be accountable to God.
Matthew
18:21-35
Then Peter
came and said to him, "Lord, if another member of the church sins against
me, how often should I forgive? As many as seven times?"
Jesus said
to him, "Not seven times, but, I tell you, seventy-seven times.
"For
this reason the kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who wished to
settle accounts with his slaves.
When he
began the reckoning, one who owed him ten thousand talents was brought to him;
and, as he could not pay, his lord ordered him to be sold, together with his
wife and children and all his possessions, and payment to be made.
So the
slave fell on his knees before him, saying, 'Have patience with me, and I will
pay you everything.'
And out of
pity for him, the lord of that slave released him and forgave him the debt.
But that
same slave, as he went out, came upon one of his fellow slaves who owed him a
hundred denarii; and seizing him by the throat, he said, 'Pay what you owe.'
Then his
fellow slave fell down and pleaded with him, 'Have patience with me, and I will
pay you.'
But he
refused; then he went and threw him into prison until he would pay the debt.
When his
fellow slaves saw what had happened, they were greatly distressed, and they
went and reported to their lord all that had taken place.
Then his
lord summoned him and said to him, 'You wicked slave! I forgave you all that
debt because you pleaded with me.
Should you
not have had mercy on your fellow slave, as I had mercy on you?'
And in
anger his lord handed him over to be tortured until he would pay his entire
debt.
So my
heavenly Father will also do to every one of you, if you do not forgive your
brother or sister from your heart."
================================
When
Jesus taught in parables, he was not telling stories of things that had
actually happened, that he had just happened to see taking place at some point
in the past. He was telling fictional stories that he used to make a point. And
so it was not unusual for these stories to include extremes, hyperbole that
would capture people’s attention, make them realize there was a lesson to be
learned, a reason for the extreme, the exaggeration. And the use of
exaggeration is definitely part of this parable, which is considered to be one
of the most challenging teachings of Jesus. When we read it, we don’t
immediately recognize the exaggeration, because the units of currency mentioned
here are not anything that we are familiar with. But the amount this slave owed
the king was equal to 150,000 years of annual earnings. If this was written
today, it might go something like this:
One
day a man opened up a letter from the IRS and read, to his utter shock and
horror, that he owed the government $15 billion dollars.
And
the king initially has no mercy for this slave, but intends to sell him and his
whole family as well as all his possessions. This is bankruptcy with no
opportunity to ever start over. This family’s life together is done. And of
course what the king will receive for selling all this is not even a drop in
the bucket compared to what is owed.
Naturally
the slave tries to keep this from happening, but the promise he makes to pay back
everything he owes is, frankly, ridiculous, because everyone listening to this
story knows that he could never make a dent in that sort of debt.
So
in this story we already have three aspects of it that are outrageous to the
listener – the amount the slave owes the king, the payback that the king has
demanded, and the promise of the slave to pay it all back. All ridiculous.
And
then….drum roll… comes the most ridiculous thing of all. The king says, never
mind, just forget it, forget the entire debt. You owe me – NOTHING.
Well,
if the slave was shocked before, when he heard what he owed, that was nothing
compared to the shock and disbelief he must have been feeling when this order
came down from on high. Forget about it. I forgive you this entire debt. The
whole thing.
Now,
you know those times when Jesus said to someone, your sins are forgiven; now go
and do likewise? Well, that seems to be
what the king had in mind, at least in the way Jesus is telling the story.
Because what happens next is just as important as what has already happened.
The
slave goes out, and runs into another slave who owed him money – much less than
what he owed the king, but a decent sum nevertheless – one hundred denarii, or
about three months labor. He asks for the money, just as the king did of him.
The second slave uses the same words that the first slave had spoken to the
king – be patient with me, please, and I will pay you back. And in this case it
is actually possible that he could do just that. But the first slave shows no
mercy, and orders the second slave to be thrown into prison. And when the king
learns about this, it is this failing of the first slave that becomes the
tipping point for the king. And he orders this one whom he has just forgiven,
to whom he has just shown mercy, to be tortured until he can pay the entire
debt. Which, of course, is many, many lifetimes from now. An eternity,
essentially.
It
seems that the matter of paybacks makes more sense to us than radical mercy or
forgiveness. We can calculate “an eye for an eye” or “a tooth for a tooth”. When
someone hurts us, we tend to come back, over and over, to how they really ought
to pay for what they’ve done. A spouse cheats on us, or someone damages our
property or steals from us or injures us, and we want them to pay, not just to
make us whole, but to be sure they suffer the way they made us suffer. This
makes sense to us. When we think about forgiveness, or mercy, in our minds it
translates to “them getting away with it, when they don’t deserve it”.
Artist,
author and Methodist minister Jan Richardson wrote this week in a post called “The
Hardest Blessing” about the myths of forgiveness that many of us have absorbed:
·
“That
forgiveness means excusing or overlooking the harm that has been done to us and
saying that everything is OK.
·
– Forgiveness
means allowing those who have hurt us to persist in their behavior.
·
– Forgiving
requires forgetting what has happened.
·
– Forgiveness
is something we can do at will, and always all at once.
She goes on to say,
“If we have absorbed
any of these distorted beliefs about forgiveness, it can come as both a shock
and a relief to learn that such ideas would be foreign to Jesus. Clearly he
expects us—requires us—to forgive. Yet in his teaching about forgiveness,
nowhere does Jesus lay upon us the kinds of burdens we have often placed upon
ourselves—burdens that can make one of the most difficult spiritual practices
nearly impossible.
The heart of
forgiveness is not to be found in excusing harm or allowing it to go unchecked.
It is to be found, rather, in choosing to say that although our wounds will
change us, we will not allow them to forever define us. Forgiveness does not
ask us to forget the wrong done to us but instead to resist the ways it seeks
to get its poisonous hooks in us. Forgiveness asks us to acknowledge and reckon
with the damage so that we will not live forever in its grip.”
Living forever in
the grip of the damage that has been done to us is the real and unending
torture that comes from insisting on payback rather than forgiving, as Jesus
describes the punishment of the first slave when he is not able to forgive the
second slave, to show mercy.
Jesus uses this
parable to help Peter understand why forgiving does not end after seven times,
but seven times seventy. He uses it to remind us that we are called to forgive
our brother or sister from our heart, sincerely and completely.
Jesus gave us words
in the Lord’s Prayer to explain this – forgive us our debts, trespasses, sins,
as we forgive our debtors, those who trespass or sin against us. We ask God to
forgive us just the same as we forgive others. It is incumbent on us to forgive
others because God has forgiven us.
Jesus spoke words
from the cross that also reflect this – “Father, forgive them, for they do not
know what they are doing.” With an offense as horrendous as the crucifixion of
God Incarnate, Jesus still says, Father, forgive them. No paybacks. Just mercy.
We love, because God
first loved us. We forgive others because we have been forgiven. And the debt
or sin we have been forgiven is as extreme, as outrageous, so big as the
description of the slaves incredibly large debt. We have been forgiven the sins
that would have led to death. We have been saved from death by forgiveness, by
mercy. And all we are asked to do is to love and forgive others, all others, as
we have been loved and forgiven. Paul’s words from our passage last week were
“Owe no one anything, except to love one another.” He uses words of debt and
payback. This week he says “Why do you pass judgment on your brother or sister?
Or why do you despise your brother or sister? For we will all stand before the
judgment seat of God.”
It is up to God to
judge. It is up to us to seek to forgive and to love, even our enemies. In a
season where we remember the terrorist acts of 9/11, where we grieve the brutal
deaths of so many innocent people at the hands of ISIS, this is indeed a hard
lesson, a hard teaching indeed from Jesus. But as C.S. Lewis wrote, “to be a
Christian means to forgive the inexcusable because God has forgiven the
inexcusable in you.”
So this is the
payback to which we are called, individually and as a community – to forgive as
you are forgiven, as we are forgiven.
I will close using
the words of David Lose, professor at Lutheran Seminary,
"This Sunday we
remember the events of September 11 … when four hijacked airplanes wreaked such
destruction and woe. But we will also remember the events of 2000 years ago,
when God's own Son, surveying a field of broken lives and desolate hearts,
chose to call down from heaven forgiveness, not vengeance, and in this way
opened a future marked not by judgment but by mercy, not by calculations but
trust, not by despair but hope, not by fear but courage, not by violence but
healing, not by scarcity but abundance, not by hate but love, and not by death
but by new life. That's what forgiveness can do. May God give to all of us a
palpable sense of the forgiveness in which -- and by which --
we live and grant us the faith and courage to walk into the future such
forgiveness creates.”
Sources:
No comments:
Post a Comment