A sermon preached by Pastor Lewis Polzin on September 13, 2020 at St. Peter–Immanuel Lutheran Church in Milwaukee, WI, on Matthew 18:21-35. You may play the audio of the sermon here.
A mostly unedited transcript of the sermon follows the jump:
Grace to you and peace from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Amen.
The text this morning is from the Gospel according to St. Matthew, the 18th chapter:
Then Peter came up and said to him, “Lord, how often will my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? As many as seven times?” Jesus said to him, “I do not say to you seven times, but seventy-seven times. “Therefore the kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who wished to settle accounts with his servants. When he began to settle, one was brought to him who owed him ten thousand talents. And since he could not pay, his master ordered him to be sold, with his wife and children and all that he had, and payment to be made. So the servant fell on his knees, imploring him, ‘Have patience with me, and I will pay you everything.’ And out of pity for him, the master of that servant released him and forgave him the debt. But when that same servant went out, he found one of his fellow servants who owed him a hundred denarii, and seizing him, he began to choke him, saying, ‘Pay what you owe.’ So his fellow servant fell down and pleaded with him, ‘Have patience with me, and I will pay you.’ He refused and went and put him in prison until he should pay the debt. When his fellow servants saw what had taken place, they were greatly distressed, and they went and reported to their master all that had taken place. Then his master summoned him and said to him, ‘You wicked servant! I forgave you all that debt because you pleaded with me. And should not you have had mercy on your fellow servant, as I had mercy on you?’ And in anger his master delivered him to the jailers, until he should pay all his debt. So also my heavenly Father will do to every one of you, if you do not forgive your brother from your heart.”
Thus far the text.
My dear friends in Christ,
Forgiveness is the game. It is really, honestly, what the church is all about. This is why we're gathered together. I had a professor in seminary who liked to say that as we were becoming pastors, we were becoming superheroes. We are becoming Absolution Man, where we run around with a big AM on our chests, forgiving people their sins. That really is the main part of my job, to announce to you the forgiveness of sins and to forgive your sins under the command of Christ and in his stead.
Well, it turns out that Jesus is pretty focused on forgiveness, is he not? That was His entire purpose as He dwelled on earth with us. It wasn’t the healings, the miracles. Those were good and they pointed to Him being the Messiah, but He really came to forgive your sins, my sins, the sins of the entire world. We talked a little last week about how Matthew litters the his gospel with forgiveness because he was forgiven much; the man who had been seen as a traitor by his people, being a tax collector working for the Romans, had been forgiven by Jesus. It turns out Matthew hits hard on it a lot and so he recounts this conversation between Peter and Jesus. Peter here displays himself to be that wonderful guy that we all know and love, the one who sticks his foot in his mouth without ever realizing it. Peter thinks that he's being all good and gracious. He comes to Jesus and he says, So Jesus, you know, how many times am I supposed to forgive my brother? I got it. 7 times right? I mean once is just not enough for a good, pious guy like me, and twice, you know, it’s good but it’s not quite there. I get that. Let's do 7 times. That sounds great. Right, Jesus? Let's get ahead of the game.
Peter thinks he knows it all. And Jesus looks at Peter and he says, Truly if you knew if you knew who you were, you wouldn't even ask that question. I tell you it's not seven times, but seventy times seven. Now, some translations may say 77 times, but either way you look at it, the point is Jesus saying it is more than you ever could know or ever could even fathom. That's how many times you are to forgive your brother. 7 is that perfect number in the Bible; it stands for complete perfection, so anything involving that multiple times is like uber-perfection. You forgive your brother perfectly each and every time, that’s what Jesus is saying. That's a hard thing for us to think about, right? It’s hard to imagine first that someone should sin against us as much as 490 times, but I suppose it’s in the realm of possibility.
Imagine what that might look like. Teachers and staff of SPI, can you imagine a student sinning against you 490 times? I suppose that might be easy to imagine. Forgiveness doesn’t mean that we give up our vocation of discipling them, of teaching them right from wrong, but forgiveness looks like forgiving the debt, starting over, not holding it against them, saying that you will not recount this sin on the day of judgment that they might be saved from hell.
Or for others, maybe we should imagine this: one of our gathering came up to you everyday and stole something out of your wallet and then they come back to you and and they say, Oh, please forgive me. I took this out of your wallet. And they hand you the money back because that's what repentance looks like, right? It looks like restitution, the desire not to do it again and trying to show that it’s a serious thing by making up for it. But, imagine they’re doing this every day. Now, I guess that could happen every day for a year and that would be a year and a third of a year. Or, let’s put in context of when most of us are here, Sundays. That would be a little over nine years. Imagine that going on. Wouldn't you get tired of it?
It would be hard to look them in the eye, maybe not the first time, maybe not the second time, but you started to push it three, four, five, six, seven. This has been going on for months now, right and they're coming to you in the repenting of stealing out of your wallet. And Jesus says you forgive them. He can't be serious, right? But he is.
We forgive in abundance because of what has been forgiven for us. To that end, Jesus tells this parable that there was a servant who owed his master 10,000 talents. Now back then, that was kind of like saying he owed him a zillion dollars. It's a number that's unfathomable. It’s made up because the debt is so huge. We cannot comprehend somebody having a debt that big. It’s bigger than the US debt. I've heard it said is roughly like a year's wage. So you're talking 10,000 times a years wage, 10,000 years. It would take him at least that long to pay it back if he gave the master everything and kept nothing for himself. It's just a stupid number, it’s so big. The master knows it. The servant knows it. His debt it weighs on him.
I don't know if you've ever been in debt before, whether it's credit card debt or student loan debt, like I have, or even home debt. Sometimes you're looking at your bills as they come in every month and you're thinking, I just do not know how I'm going to pay this off. It seems to never ever end and it hangs over your head. It pushes down deep into your soul, it keeps you up at night and drops your appetite. It's hard.
So this man who owes his master 10,000 talents, we cannot imagine the stress this man was under. But he was and he was called before his master to pay it back. And he knew what he should do, what should happen. He should be going into a debtors prison. A debtors prison is a place where you would go and and all of your wages are garnished while you are there and are used to then pay back the debts that you’ve accrued. Sometimes it wouldn't just be you who owes the debt, but it may be even your entire family who goes into this debtors prison and they work and they work and they work and they work until that debt is finally repaid. This man knows that if the master sends him to prison it will be a hard sentence, because to get any kind of reward back, a man is going to have to work twice, three times as hard as anybody else just to try to make it. Still he wouldn't be able to do it. His debt is too great. He owes too much. There's no way he will ever be able to do this.
And so he knows that's what he deserves, but he doesn't want to go. Motivated by that fear and the fear of the master’s power over him, he falls down before his master and he cries out, Have patience with me and I will pay you everything! You can imagine the master looking down at the servant and saying, No, you can’t, you know you won’t. Don't be silly. There is no way that you are going to be able to repay me anything.
Instead, the master looks at him and has compassion. He looks at him and sees this pitiable man. He looks at him and says, I forgive your debt. All of the money that you owe, your entire debt is wiped out. You are free. You are free of the prison, you are free of me. I will never come and chase after you to get this money. Go in peace.
What joy that servant must have felt in that moment, but certainly a confusing joy. Who forgives such dent? What crazy man forgives such debt? The servant has got to be sitting there wondering if this is for real. Is it something that that the servant can actually trust? Is he going to leave this castle and is the master’s army going to chase after him? Are they going to kill him? And still, as he's walking out, all the sudden, he realizes he's alone. He's free. He's ready to go back to his life.
But, then he finds another servant of this same master. In contrast, this servant owes the newly freed just a hundred denarii. A denarii is about a day's wage. It can be repaid within about a year, maybe. The forgiven servant comes up to him, this servant who has had 10,000 years of debt forgiven, and he looks at the servant who owes him just a single year of debt and he begins to choke him. He's yelling at him and screaming at him, Pay what you owe me! Make restitution to me! There are other servants, probably having just heard what happened to this guy, heard this poor man cry out the same words, Have patience with me and I will pay you!
The man was asking for the same thing that the other man had asked for: patience and time. The hope, I guess, was to spark this man's memory. Instead, this servant, this wicked and evil servant, threw this man into a debtors prison, maybe his entire family. What a silly thing to have done. This man should have gone from the master’s place saying, I've had 10,000 years struck off my debt. What's one year in light of that? Why shouldn’t I forgive that debt as well? But, he couldn't do it. Out of his greed and out of his anger, he threw the man into prison and he ruined everything.
Those other servants saw this and they went back to the master and reported what had been done. And so, the master called this wicked servant before him and, indeed, calling him wicked, calling him evil, calling him, in essence, not a servant any longer. Now, he was not free in the master’s house, but he would be made a slave forever, never to be free of the debt that was owed. The debt could never be repaid.
The wicked servant should have had mercy on the other servant. That wicked servant should have spoken words of comfort and peace, like Joseph, and he did not. And so, he is punished. Jesus then says, So also my heavenly father will do to every single one of you if you do not forgive your brother their debt.
These are harsh words with which to leave the passage, especially because, right after that, we say, This is the gospel of the Lord. Thanks be to God. In fear and trembling, we sit there and we go, This is great. God is going to throw us into prison if we don't forgive people. But it's true. It really is great. Because in these words, Jesus is pointing out to us that, in our sin, not only do we owe a great debt to God, but we owe a debt to every person against whom we sin. And yet Jesus shows us that debt is going to be forgiven by God, it has been forgiven by God in Christ. That debt is promised to be taken away from you because you are his child. Thus, you will forgive people their sins, especially when it's against you. That’s what Christians do. We forgive those who sin against us, because that’s what we’re to be about. We forgive the thief, the liar, the braggart, the student who annoys us with bad behavior.
And there is a great joy in that, a great freedom in that forgiveness, because what it means is we're not God. Joseph says to his brothers, Am I in the place of God? In essence, he says, I am not God and I cannot hold your sins forever. Instead, in your repentance, I forgive you. We’re not God, and we don’t make the rules. God says that, if you’re a Christian, if your debt of sin has been forgiven, go and forgive others. If you choose not to forgive others, then you are forsaking the faith given to you in love from the cross of Christ.
We don’t want to do that, we don’t want to be counted among the faithless. Instead, our job is to be about the forgiveness of sins because that's what God has said to do, and, in doing that, we are free just to forgive. We don’t need conditions. We don’t need servitude. We are free to live under the rule and reign of God, not making up rules for others to follow, or even for ourselves to follow, to win forgiveness. But it's all there, freely from God's hand. And we then are free to do the same. You don’t win forgiveness from God; why should we have others try to win forgiveness from us?
It's a strange thing, that if someone comes and steals from your wallet 490 times we should forgive them each and every time it happens, but it's true. It’s not because they deserve it. It’s not because we think they're going to do better. In our hearts, we may even know that time 491 is coming. But, we offer the same forgiveness to them that we have been offered. Our debt, which has been so great in sin, our debt which we owe to God, which can never be repaid by us, has been wiped clean. Who are we then to not forgive one who owes so little to us?
We can live free knowing that God will sort it out in the end. And God will repay any debt that is owed to us in spades when he raises us from the dead, when we live forever with Jesus Christ. We know that we will have an eternity of joy and blessing coming to us in that day. There is no need for us to hold any debts over anyone else's head, not just in sin, but any debt. Forgive. Forgive as much as you can. Forgive and go forth. Enjoy knowing life is short, but eternity is forever. Forgive forgive forgive forgive. If that's not what we as the church are doing, then what's the point of us being here? What is the point of us learning to gather in joy and in peace and in comfort and receiving the mercy of God? What's the point if we're going to go live like pagans who lord it over others? What's the point?
The point is Jesus Christ, He who came for you, who died for you, who rose for you, who ascended for you, and now gives you the authority to forgive the sins of those who owe you debts. That's the point. We can live today with those who sin against us in peace and joy, looking forward to the day of the resurrection, which is coming for you. That's the point.
There should be no end to the forgiveness that we offer to those around us, because, for us, there is no end to the forgiveness that God offers to us in his mercy. His mercy, His grace is inescapable and it is boundless and in that we have great joy. In Jesus’ name, amen.
Now may the peace of God which passes all human understanding guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus, our Lord! Amen.
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