Forgiveness Without Limits

Background Passage: Matthew 18:21-35

One can’t be sure what prompted the question. Perhaps it was born out of a natural argument among men who traveled together days on end. Men getting on each other’s nerves after too much time together, staring into the distance from opposite sides of the road.

Perhaps the question popped into his head after hearing another rabbi expound in heavy monotone in the local synagogue about the law’s limit on human forgiveness.

Perhaps the question rattled around his brain after hearing Jesus teach about harmony among believers and dealing with the unrepentant sinner among them.

Whatever the prompt, Peter sidled up to Jesus one day with an honest question about forgiveness. “How many times shall I forgive my brother or sister who sins against me?”

The scripture Peter knew laid specific guidelines for forgiveness, declaring that you should forgive anyone three times. One was not obligated to forgive a fourth offense. The question Peter posed reflected the thinking of the day. Surely, there is a point where forgiveness is no longer expected. In essence, “When can I stop forgiving someone who hurts me?”

His follow up question suggests that Peter had a gut feeling that Jesus always lived in a “walk the extra mile-turn the other cheek” kind of world when it came to the law. He certainly saw evidence of Jesus’ boundless forgiveness in his time with his Lord. So, Peter exerted his opinion in the form of another question. “How many times shall I forgive a brother or sister who sins against me? Seven times?”

In the debate bouncing around in his head, Peter must have thought he would catch an “atta boy” from his Master for his magnanimous spirit. “The law says ‘three’ times. Let’s double that and add one for good measure. Now that’s turning the other cheek.”

Maybe it played out like this:

Jesus stooped as he walked
down the dusty path.
Picking up a chunk of gray basalt
along the side of the road.
“That’s a great question, Peter.”
Jesus bounced the rock in his hand a time or two.
Thinking about his response.
Casually threw the rock side-armed.
Bouncing it off the trunk of a cypress tree
60 feet down the road.

“I tell you, Peter.
It’s more than that.
You’re still too literal. Not seven times.
Seventy-seven times.

“We won’t get through this life
without someone hurting us.
Taking advantage.
Offending.
Insulting.
Happens in the closest families.
Happens within the fellowship of believers.

“How much do we damage all those relationships
if we put a limit on our forgiveness?
Doesn’t our limited attitude
set a substantial barrier between us and
those we are supposed to love?

“The law says three.
You say seven.
Both are limits.”

Jesus sat under the same cypress tree
he plunked with the stone.
Glad to get out of the summer heat.
His disciples settled around him,
taking a quick drink from a shared
water bag Nathaniel carried.

No heavy sermon.
No deep theology.
Just a tongue-in cheek story to teach
a powerful lesson about the
size of their hearts.

“The kingdom we’re trying to build here is different.
“Let’s suppose…”

Jesus then launched into a parable about a king to whom a servant owed more money that the disciples could imagine. 10,000 talents. Historians tell us a talent represented the equivalent of 6,000 days’ wages. Staggering! The number Jesus imagined would support a man for 164,000 years. Hear the laughter roll through the disciples as they could scarcely comprehend the outrageous fortune the man owed. Hyperbole of the highest magnitude. Jesus laughs with them. Sees that he’s captured their attention.

Jesus continues. The time comes to collect the bill and the king says, “Pay up or you and your family will be sold into slavery and all you own will be confiscated to repay what is owed…knowing full well the servant’s assets would scarcely make a dent in the debt.

The man falls on the floor promising to repay what he has no hope of repaying. Grasping at straws. Begging for mercy. Yet, somehow, the man’s contrite spirit touches the king deeply.

Jesus mimics wiping a tear from his eyes, “Your debt is cancelled. Go home.”

The disciples react with a chuckle and few comments about the king’s enormous wealth and the servant’s good fortune. Jesus waited until they settled down. His playful demeanor turning more solemn.

“Now suppose this very relieved servant…”

Jesus’ brow furrows in thought, eyes searching deeply into the heart of each disciple as he speaks. He explains how the forgiven servant encountered a colleague who owed him six months’ wages, a pittance compared with his former debt. Yet, the man whose debt was wiped clean grabbed his friend by the scruff of the neck demanding his payment.

That servant was in no better place financially than the forgiven one. Using the exact same words the first servant spoke to the king, the man falls on the ground. Begs for mercy. Promises to pay back a difficult, but not impossible, sum of money. Rather than extend the same mercy as he received, the man had the other thrown in jail until his debt could be paid.

The injustice described hit home with the disciples. Caught up in the story, they grumbled a bit, angry at the first servant.

Jesus becomes more animated as he continues the parable. His words coming more rapidly. “Now, when the king found out, he was livid and called the first servant before him. You wicked servant. I canceled all your debt because you begged me. Where is your mercy toward the one who owed you?”

The disciples pondered the words during the pregnant silence that hung in the air like a morning mist. Jesus added, “This is how my Father will treat you unless you forgive your brother and sister from your heart.”

*

I think Jesus liked Peter’s question. It gave him a chance to help the disciples sink the plow of personal belief a little more deeply in the fertile soil of applicable faith. It never crossed Jesus’ mind to make forgiveness a quantifiable event. Yet, the religious law of the day did exactly that, dragging the plow along the surface, setting the standard in shallow attitudes seemed to look forward to a day of retaliation rather than a time of reconciliation.

Peter stretched the legal limit as far as he felt comfortable. “I know you expect more from us, Jesus, than the law requires.” And, in that moment of inspiration, he doubled the law’s demand and added one to grow on. “Seven seems like a fair number,” proud of the forbearance it showed.

Jesus understood forgiveness as a way of being…a lifestyle choice. To Jesus, forgiveness was a way of relating to others. Thinking about others. Loving others. Forgiveness is nothing less than the way of Christ. If we are to live in his image, forgiveness must be our way as well. Not three times. Not seven times, but as an open expression of whose we are.

Picture Jesus. Visiting with the woman at the well, turning her from her troubled lifestyle.

Watch him. Writing in the dirt next to the woman caught in the act of adultery as the Pharisees who wished to stone her walked away with guilt laden feet. “Neither do I condemn you. Go and sin no more.”

See him. Wrapping his arm around Peter who lived for weeks with the sound of that rooster crowing in his head, “Feed my sheep.”

Forgiveness.

The way of Christ.

An infinite, life-altering act of grace.

In his book, Mere Christianity, C. S. Lewis wrote, “Forgiveness is a lovely idea, until there is something to forgive.” A promising premise, in principle, until we face the dreadful reality of pardoning the grievous and unforgivable.

Our lives are filled with broken promises, bitter betrayals and hurt feelings. We cry over unkind words, licking our physical and emotional wounds, telling our stories of loss and pain at the hands of another. Underneath all of it lies the question of forgiveness. How can we move past the hurt and into the healing?

Jesus told his disciples that forgiveness flows from the heart. He meant that they must dig deeply into their innermost being and find a way to set aside the anger, frustration and bitterness. To offer sincere words of forgiveness wrapped in the warmth of God’s love, extended with a handshake or embrace.

If the greatest attribute of God in Christ is love, one could make an argument that forgiveness is the greatest expression of love. This much seems to be true…living in the image of God requires us to demonstrate boundless forgiveness. It’s not that easy.

I have listened in amazement to a friend whose son was the innocent victim of a drive-by shooting talk sincerely about forgiving the one who senselessly took his son’s life. I heard honest words of forgiveness from a woman whose beloved grandmother was killed because the drunk driver shared one too many glasses of wine.

How can we hear testimonies like those and still harbor resentment toward the person who sat in our pew last Sunday? How can we let a few ill-chosen words of a neighbor cut us off from the fellowship we once enjoyed?

When we start counting the offenses we suffer at the hands of another…adding up the chalk marks until that day when we can say, “Enough is enough…” then we’re living exactly like the first servant in Jesus’ story. While we ignore the 10,000 talents of sin our Father forgave us, we hold our offender by the scruff of the neck, demanding payment… unwilling to forgive even the slightest of sins against us.

I share breakfast and Bible reading once a week with a group of men in the community where I work. Every breakfast ends with the Lord’s Prayer. The model prayer offered a petition and an expectation, “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.”

Jesus said as much to the disciples as he wrapped up this impromptu lesson. I see him rising from the tree under which he sat, bending down to pick up another rock, bouncing in lightly in his hand. He reared back and threw it, striking another bullseye on the trunk of another cypress tree 60 feet farther down the road.

Setting off down the road again, he ended the lesson with a casual but cautionary moral to the story, “If you don’t forgive others, how can God possible forgive you.”

His disciples get up and follow with their plow set a little deeper in the fertile soil of faith.

The lesson Jesus teaches his disciples, he also teaches us. Peter shared our human tendency to limit forgiveness. But to forgive beyond counting is inhuman. It doesn’t originate from us. It is born of a heart changed by God through Christ and his indwelling spirit of grace living within us. Christ living in us. Us living in the image of Christ.