Then Peter came to Jesus
and asked, "Lord, how many times should I forgive my brother when he sins
against met? Up to seven times? Jesus answered, "I tell you not seven
times, but seventy-seven times. (Matt. 18:21-22)
In Ernest
Hemingway’s short story, The Capital of
the World, he tells about a young man who had wronged his father and had then
run away to the city of Madrid to become a bullfighter. Out of great love and
compassion for his son, the father took out an ad in the Madrid newspaper which
read, “Paco, meet me at the Hotel
Montana, Tuesday at noon. All is forgiven. Papa.” At the time, “Paco” was a
pretty common name in Spain. So, when the father got to the hotel, he found 800
young men waiting for their fathers. We all long for forgiveness. We want to be
able to forgive, and to be forgiven. But why is it so hard? Well, if it’s any
consolation, it wasn't any easier for Jesus’ disciples, either.
In the text,
Peter – playing the role of spokesman for the disciples – steps forward and plops
the problem of forgiveness right there at Jesus’ feet. Maybe he thinks he’s pushing
the outer limits of forgiveness. Maybe he thinks he’s pushing the envelope. But
whatever he thinks, he comes to Jesus and says, “Lord, when somebody hoses me, how many times should I allow that to
happen before I stop forgiving them? Seven times?” The Rabbinic teaching of
the day said that when someone wronged you, you should forgive them up to three
times, and then you could stop forgiving. So, to be on the safe side, or maybe
on the pious side, Peter doubles the number and adds one for good measure. Jesus'
response is startling. “No,” he says.
“Not seven times. Seventy-seven times.” Now
the literal Greek in the text can be translated either seventy-seven or seventy
times seven, which would be 490. But we’re missing the point if we think that
Jesus was talking about a literal number. What Jesus was talking about is
grace.
It’s a mistake
if we try to understand forgiveness in a clinical way. Because if we try to
understand grace (which is at the heart of forgiveness) by dissecting the law, we’re
going to miss it altogether. Grace can best be understood by way of a story, or
an example. So, Jesus explains the grace of forgiveness to the disciples by
telling them a parable. It’s a simple, straight-forward story that doesn’t
require a rocket scientist, biblical scholar, or even a great theologian to understand.
And therein lies part of the difficulty. It’s a story about a king and his
servants. You see, this king had loaned his servants some money and it was time
to call in the loans. Now, servant A had run up an unbelievable tab, e.g., about $2.25 billion. And the point
of the parable was that this was such an enormous sum that it would have been impossible
for the servant to repay. So, the king chooses to cut his losses and orders Servant
A, including his wife and kids, into slavery and puts the servant’s house up
for sale.
The servant begs
for mercy. He’s trying to buy time, and he’s hoping that the king will cut him some
slack. So, he literally pleads for his life. And then the most unexpected,
unbelievable thing happens. The king doesn't just give him a little extra time,
or even cut him some slack. He totally forgives the debt. He cancels it in its
entirety. The servant and his family are off the auction block. They’re debt-free!
Now, put
yourself in that servant's shoes for a minute. How would you feel at that
moment? How’d you leave the palace? You’d be ecstatic, right? Like when somebody
lets you merge into traffic, aren't you more likely to return the favor to
another driver? Kind of pay it forward? But that’s the problem with this
servant. After all of that forgiveness, he leaves as if nothing’s happened when
servant B arrives. Servant B owes servant A the princely sum of about $6,800.00
by today’s standards. And like a scene right out of The Godfather, servant A puts down his violin case and starts
choking servant B saying, “I’m going to
break your kneecaps unless you pay up.” Servant B begs for mercy, using the
identical words that servant A used with the king. But this time there’s no
mercy. Servant A has servant B thrown into debtor's prison until he can work
off the debt. Nice guy. But the hills have eyes. Some of the other servants see
what servant A does to servant B, and they squeal to the king. And for the
second time, servant A is called on the king's carpet. But where, once before, the
king had gone from loan shark to Mr. Generosity, the king’s pity has changed to
anger as he lowers the boom and sends servant A to be tortured in prison.
Although the
story’s over for servants A and B, it’s not over for Peter and the disciples, and
it’s not over for us. Because Jesus says at the conclusion of the parable that “Unless you and I forgive our brothers and
sisters from the heart, we are going to wind up just like servant A.” You
see, this is a parable about us and our relationship with God, and our
relationships to each other in terms of forgiveness. Consider how God has
forgiven the debt that we’ve run up! It’s a LOT bigger than $2.25 billion. Our
sin has run up a tab totaling eternal death and infinite separation from God, i.e., hell. Those are the consequences of
the debt we owe. Yet God in his unfathomable love and grace has canceled our
sin debt through the life, death and bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ. He
has totally forgiven that debt in its entirety. “I – yes I alone – am the one
who blots out your sins for my own sake and will never think of them again.”
(Isaiah 43:25) And not only that, but you and I come out on the other side with
the gift of eternal life. Now that’s grace.
In 1935,
Fiorello LaGuardia, then Mayor of New York City, visited a night court in the
poorest ward of the city. He relieved the judge for the evening and took the
bench himself. A case came up where a grandmother had been arrested for
stealing bread to feed her grandchildren. LaGuardia said, “You’re guilty, and I’ve
got to punish you. Ten dollars or ten days in jail.” And then LaGuardia pulled out
a $10 bill from his pocket and threw it in his hat. He then fined everybody in
the courtroom for living in a city where grandmothers have to steal bread to
feed their grandchildren. They passed the hat and the woman left the courthouse
that evening not only having her fine paid, but with $47.50 in her pocket. Now,
don't you think it’s more likely than not that she left that courtroom in a
spirit of forgiveness; a greater probability that she would show mercy to those
whom she met?
People are going
to do us wrong. And some of them are going to come to us and ask us to forgive
them. Granted, some of those people are going to be pretty awful – having done
some pretty horrible things to us. And we think that most of them, if not all
of them, don't deserve to be forgiven. So, we’re confronted with a choice. Are
we going to seize on the pain? Are we going to seize on the pride and withhold
forgiveness? If so, Jesus says we’re just like servant A, and we’re going to
wind up in prison – a prison of anger, hatred, depression and guilt. And it’s a
prison that we build ourselves.
God really does
have this obsessive thing about forgiveness. So much so that he requires it. He
orders it. And just like any other mandate in Scripture, forgiveness is
primarily commanded for our own good. Because God knows. He knows that you and
I will never really be healed; we will never really move toward wholeness; we
will never really get on with our lives until we are able to let go of the
resentment; until we can give up gaining revenge and forgive. Forgiveness is
not a feeling; it’s a choice. Fortunately, what God orders, the Holy Spirit
empowers. The mistake we make a lot of times is that we look at who the person
is who’s wronged us and what they’ve done. But the parable reminds us that
that’s a mistake. When we’ve been wronged, we need to look at who God is and
what He’s done for us. “OK, so how far do I have to go with this forgiveness thing?”
I don’t know. How far has God gone with you? “But aren’t there limits?” I don’t
know. What are the limits to God's grace? You see, it’s all about mercy and grace,
and grace says, “I won't give him what he deserves; I will forgive him.”
In fact, this
forgiveness thing is so important that it could permanently ruin the “Lord's Prayer”
for you. Go to Matthew 6, and look at verse 12. Right in the middle of the
Lord's Prayer is a phrase that you and I, if we’re not careful, mindlessly pray
when we say it: "Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors." But
have you honestly thought about what you’re asking God to do there? In fact, by
the time we get to verse 12 we just want to go silent, or maybe mumble hoping that
God won’t hear. Right? Here’s what I mean.
Simon Wiesenthal
was a Nazi prisoner-of-war. One day, as Wiesenthal's prison detail was taking
out the trash from the hospital for German casualties, a nurse approached him. “Are
you a Jew?” she asked hesitantly, then signaled him to accompany her.
Apprehensive, Wiesenthal followed her up a stairway and down a hallway until
they reached a dark, musty room where a lone soldier lay, covered in bandages.
White gauze completely masked the man's face, with openings cut out for only his
mouth, nose and ears. The nurse disappeared, closing the door behind her, to leave
the young prisoner alone with the soldier. The wounded man was an SS officer,
and he summoned Wiesenthal so that he could make a deathbed confession. “My
name is Karl,” said a raspy voice that came from somewhere behind the bandages.
“I must tell you of this horrible deed; tell you because you are a Jew.”
Karl began his
story by reminiscing about his Catholic upbringing and his childhood faith,
which he lost while in the Hitler Youth Corp. Three times, as Karl tried to
tell his story, Wiesenthal pulled away as if to leave. But each time the
officer reached out to grab his arm with a white, nearly bloodless hand. He
begged him to listen. Karl explained that in a certain town abandoned by the
retreating Russians, Karl's unit stumbled upon a booby-trap that killed 30 of his
soldiers. As an act of revenge, the SS rounded up 300 Jews, herded them into a
three-story house, doused it with gasoline, and fired grenades at it. Karl and
his men encircled the house, their guns drawn to shoot anyone who tried to escape.
“I saw a man with a small child in his arms. His clothes were afire. By his
side stood a woman, doubtless the mother of the child. With his free hand, the
man covered the child's eyes, and then he jumped into the street. Seconds later
the woman followed. Then from the other windows fell burning bodies. We shot.
Oh God.” Karl went on to describe other atrocities, but he kept circling back
to the scene of that young boy with the black hair and dark eyes falling from a
building who was used as target practice for the SS rifles.
“I am left here
with my guilt,” he concluded at last. “In the last hours of my life, you are
with me. I do not know who you are. I know only that you are a Jew, and that is
enough. I know that what I have told you is terrible. In the long nights while
I have been waiting for death, time and time again, I have longed to talk about
it to a Jew and beg forgiveness from him. Only I didn't know whether there were
any Jews left. I know what I am asking is almost too much for you, but without
your answer I cannot die in peace.” Simon Wiesenthal, an architect in his early
20's, now a prisoner dressed in a shabby uniform marked with a yellow Star of
David, felt the crushing burden of his race bearing down upon him. He stared
out the window at the sunlit courtyard. He looked at the eyeless heap of
bandages lying in the bed. He watched a fly buzzing around the dying man's
body, attracted by the smell. “At last I made up my mind,” Wiesenthal writes. “And
without a word I left the room.”
How far are we willing
to go with this forgiveness business? We’ve been hurt. We’ve been wounded. In
little ways. Sometimes in catastrophic ways. And deep down inside, our gut
tells us that there’s got to be a limit. So, we play church because we say we
know Jesus, and that we’ve surrendered our lives to him. Well then, please
forgive me. Forgive me for asking, “What difference will playing church make
the next time you and I run into servant B?” There’s someone who needs to hear
us say, “I forgive you.” Will you?
Grace,
Randy
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