Pentecost 16
September 17, 2023
Text – St. Matthew 18:21-35
“The Master Forgives”
Thoughts of revenge and any grudge bearing have no place in the Christian heart and life. That’s not “what Jesus would do!” Adam and all his descendants have treated God and His commandments with contempt and that, after all, is the way of sinners. In return God has shown patience, love, and mercy (mercy also known in the Bible as pity and long-suffering) in the face of our lacking all of them in our dealings in both heaven and on earth.
It is made quite clear that the path of patience is God’s way, for when His justice demanded death a substitute was found, to be sacrificed, and the nakedness and shame of Adam and Eve was properly covered. Throughout the intervening years man still pursued the spoils of continued rebellion against the Lord but when He would smell the sweet pleasing aroma of the sacrifice offered by the humble and the penitent, He would forgive.
His patience was seen in the sending of prophets, priests, and kings to lead His chosen people through wilderness, conquest, and settled civil statehood. The people were preached to; but they would not listen, and the prophets were killed. Again, they were warned, but still both messenger and message were stifled or silenced by the very ones who would have benefited and end up blessed… (just for a time). Then the Lord would repeat the cycle once more. The Lord sent even more prophets who did not refrain from speaking the whole counsel of God even if it cost them their lives.
You see, the Master of all things – seen and unseen, living or not, animal, vegetable, and mineral, He could have been over and done with this world and its wayward inhabitants. He could have sent the universe into oblivion; He could have sent us all to hell, and He would have stood vindicated. He is righteous and just, and we are not! By His condemnation we would have gotten our just desserts. But in the rites and rituals of Israel was set forth a pathway back into the good graces of our Maker. And it cost nothing… nothing but blood, and lots of it.
The mercy of God flowed forth from His altar. The mercy of God originated in connection to a heavenly promise and some lambs, thousands upon thousands of lambs, who gave their lives over four thousand years that the people of God might be spared from the consequences of their sins. The mercy of God, moved by a love for His creation, cemented a precious bond between Lord and laity that nothing could break, neither in heaven, or on earth, for not angels, principalities or powers, not things present or things to come, and certainly not life or death could separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus.
Such is the patience, love, and mercy of the God who Himself redeemed us because none of us could recover, regenerate, rescue, revive, reinstate, repair, release, or redeem ourselves. All we could – and did – offer was our rebellion, recalcitrance, resignation, and resistance.
Our sins before the Lord, who judges the heart, soul, mind, and not just externals as we tend to do and are powerless to gain insight into man’s inmost parts, those sins rise as a stench that would pollute God’s own throne room. He, who shows no partiality, is equally incensed by every sin of thought, word, and deed. Each misstep, each crime, all our moral shortcomings, every omitted or committed infraction, every sin – whether mortal or venial – deserves the harshest sentence, and not only an actual and physical death penalty, but an ETERNAL death sentence. The sins perpetrated against us, and the sins, by which we prod, perturb, and persecute others, and all their just penalties in this life, are still nothing in comparison to how we’ve let God down… how we’ve disappointed Him who had such high hopes for us – the very crown of all His creative activity.
Until you understand sin and all its divine and earthly consequences rightly (that the whole world stands guilty before God) the Gospel and its worth will remain veiled to those who will perish. The forgiveness of sins means nothing to those who believe they are already righteous, or who believe in acceptable degrees of righteousness short of perfection. A Savior is a meaningless figure to those have no need for deliverance. The preaching of the cross is folly to those who seek signs and wonders, worldly wisdom or wealth, or those who belittle the compassion of our God.
So now, we have established the criteria upon which our little parable rests, as well as the command to do with the lesser sins of this life committed against us what God has done with the huge debt we eternally owed Him. Or will we not learn the lesson that it finally took poverty and prison to teach that miserable servant.
Are you coming to the Lord to negotiate how kind you should be to others? Peter, Peter, impetuous Peter, speak-before-you-think Peter… He asks, “How often should I forgive? How kind must I be?” According to rabbinic tradition three times is the limit! To a good Jew like Peter, then, seven times might appear quite generous.
But who am I fooling? Our present-day standards are about as low for those who should be shown our generosity and gentleness.
Who is your neighbor? Anyone in need of your help, whether friend or foe. Who should I forgive? Whoever, in repentance, asks for your forgiveness. How often should I forgive… even if they are sorry, of those who have committed the same sin against me multiple times? Jesus recommends 490 times. After all, He does it! I have yet to observe it among any of us. I certainly have not gone to such lengths myself!
For whom does Jesus lay down His life? …for His friends. And who are His friends? “God so loved the world.” For sinners Jesus died. How many are sinners? “There is none righteous, no not one.” On the cross He draws all men to Himself. On His shoulders are borne the sins of the whole world for whom He serves as priest and sacrifice. Yes, Jesus has forgiven us as often as we have contritely stepped forward and bared our hearts to Him… even beyond 490 times. Each of you knows that, and many of us have taken His overwhelming grace and love for granted to the point that we expect Him never to withhold His pardon. And to correct our erring thoughts, Jesus says, “Neither will your heavenly Father forgive you, if each of you does not forgive his brother.”
Don’t sit idly by and expect that we can commit the unloving acts of grudge bearing, vengeance, or the failure to forgive, and somehow a scatter-brained heavenly Father will overlook such a perversion of His Gospel or maybe rebrand your behavior as pure spirituality and true Christianity. This little story makes it quite clear that He doesn’t take lightly those forgiven from heaven not extending His forgiveness on earth. And what you have freely received, you ought to freely dish out with relish and abundance.
Couldn’t the Lord easily forget about the forgiveness you need? Couldn’t He have decided He had better things to do than deal consistently and generously with those who seem to treasure the forgiveness of sins so little that they still sin even more, justify their sin as further opportunity to receive even more “cheap grace,” or then to withhold from those who beg our pardon the same benefits of the pardon we lavish on ourselves? Christians are not just a forgiven people… but for the sake of Jesus and to the glory of His and our heavenly Father, we are to be a forgiving people.
Once again, I would remind you that you only had your sin to offer God. You owed Him a debt that was beyond your ability to pay. You begged, you pleaded, you implored Him to relieve you of that awful debt, and He took pity on you. He released you, and your family, both from slavery and destined doom just because you were afraid, your heart was broken, and… just because you asked.
Furthermore, it wasn’t just by a simple decree that you gained release. In matters of far greater import to all of us, He absorbed the debt into Himself. He would be willing to impoverish Himself so that you might go free. He would pay every last bit of what you owed, and to that end God would become man, He would humble Himself, no longer playing the part of the king but even becoming a servant like the servant who owed Him, and He would pay the highest and most personally demanding price. Once and for all time He would shed His own blood as sacrificial Lamb. He would give His life in payment for ours. He would drink every last drop, to the bitter dregs lying at the bottom of the barrel of God’s rightful anger against sin and us. He would absorb the horrors of hell and the ending of all divine compassion (God’s back turned on Him… not us) so that we would never get what we deserved.
Instead, He would give us His undeserved attention, His undeserved merit and righteousness, His undeserved love, and an undeserved payment to meet all past, present, and future debts owed at His throne. All because you asked Him to, and He was already predisposed, from before the foundations of the world were laid, to do just that for the objects of His mercy, which you are!
God’s judgment comes upon all who treat His many benefits lightly and who forsake the path He has placed before us. God’s judgment is reserved for those who reject that Son of God who has already made good on our debt. God’s judgment is reserved for the unbeliever!
Now putting the parable in proper perspective: the first servant owed the king ten thousand talents, and based on my research this past Thursday while I was writing this sermon… the price of silver at 3:30 p.m. on September 14th was $22.70 a troy ounce. A talent is about 2080 ounces or a little over 129 pounds of silver or $47,216 per talent. He owed the king 1,290,000 pounds of silver or $468,528,000. I don’t think he nickeled and dimed the king. I believe we have here a swindling steward with his fingers caught in the royal till.
Now a day’s wage back then, a denarius, would have come in at about $1.15 in today’s value, and the selling of family and possessions might have generously garnered $200… maybe. To work off this debt with total income going toward payment of the debt – and none left to live on – it would have only taken 407,415,652 days to work it off. That is only 18,338 lifetimes. Now double that time frame if he used half his wage to live on.
Maybe this could work out better if we figured by Social Security standards for a day’s wage which according to the latest figures was $233. Then it would only take 2,010,850 days which is only 79 lifetimes… yet just 78 more lifetimes than any of us have available. That’s an awfully long time to make things right in a purgatory, if there ever was such a place – which there isn’t! What we know is that the Bible says that it is appointed unto man once to die, and after that comes judgment!
By no natural means was this man ever going to get out from under this burden of his own making.
On the other hand, servant number two owed servant number one a debt that could have been paid off in just one third of a year, or in a year if he just paid a third of his wage and lived on the other 2/3s. And because he presently didn’t have the means, the first servant, fully forgiven by the king, sees to it that it’s debtors’ prison for number two. Even all the other servants raise their eyebrows at the inequity and injustice of number one’s behavior. He hadn’t learned a thing! The Master’s benevolence didn’t raise in the forgiven servant a generous heart for a lesser debt and his fellow debtor. Oh, how strong is a self-centered ego! How hard is this flesh which still clings to us. How untrainable are these simple minds of ours as to walking in the right ways and the paths of the Lord. And yet… oh, how good God is in comparison.
God’s love has come in answer to that judgment we merited on our own. On the one hand, God’s justice can wipe out the greatest debtor, together with his debt, but on the other, God’s LOVE can wipe out the greatest debt while sparing the most miserable debtor. But then again, through our preaching and even by experience, you already know that! And so may the love of God in Christ Jesus that wells up in abundance – to more than adequately cover your sin – now overflow into the lives of those around you. How great is our Father’s love made palpable in the flesh of our Savior, Jesus! His mercy has forgiven our sin, paying in full our eternal debt! And to us all, so undeserving, He has opened paradise in His presence that we, who trust in Him, might dwell with Him in the House of the Lord eternally… in His mercy fully, perfectly, and forever debt free! All our guilt drowned in the depths of the sea, and we shall not die, but in Christ Jesus we shall live!
Amen.