Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost
“Seventy Times Seven” — Reflection by Rev. Brent Gundlah
First Reading (Exodus 15:19-31/NRSVUE)
Gospel Reading (Matthew 18:21-35/NRSVUE)
I know that it’s tempting to gloss right over those words in the Bible you might not understand the meaning of. Before I went to school and needed to know what they meant in order to pass my exams, I did the same thing. In fairness, if you’re not a seminary student or haven’t been asked to build an ark, you probably don’t need to know how long a cubit is. But let me share with you some information about one such word that might help make today’s passage from Matthew’s Gospel make a bit more sense: A talent was a whole lotta money.
In Jesus’s time, it was the largest unit of monetary value in the Roman world. One talent equalled six thousand denarii. A single denarius was the daily wage for a laborer back then, so a talent represented about twenty years’ earnings for the average person. And the borrower whom Jesus mentions at the beginning our tale, which known as the parable of the unforgiving servant, unfortunately owes his master ten thousand of them.
This would be a monumental sum for anyone, but even more so for a servant (really, a slave) because they didn’t actually get paid. Owners provided them with basic (and I mean basic) food and clothing and shelter, but that was it. So why would anyone lend this particular person a single denarius, let alone sixty million of them, you might ask? The short answer is, “They wouldn’t.” The longer answer can be found in an incident that takes place two chapters earlier.
You might remember when Peter correctly announced that Jesus was the Messiah and got the keys to the kingdom of heaven, but then argued with Jesus about the whole death and resurrection thing that came along with being the Messiah, and then got yelled at by Jesus and was told to pick up his cross and follow him. Well, at the very end of that passage, Jesus tells Peter that he is “setting [his] mind not on divine things but on human things.” Divine things, one the one hand, and human things, on the other: that’s the longer answer.
You see, no person in their right mind would lend anyone an amount so large, an amount that no one — let alone a slave with absolutely no income — could ever possibly repay. And no person in their right mind would ever forgive a debt that large. But the lender-king in this story, who obviously represents God, does both. The point here seems fairly obvious: God shares with us ridiculously abundant blessings and God extends us ridiculously abundant grace, because God can, because God is not a person in their right mind, because God is God. Divine things — which Jesus then contrasts with some human things.
In the second half of the parable, the slave who’s just had his enormous debt forgiven, ends up on the other side of the financing equation. Apparently, he’s loaned one of his fellow slaves a hundred denarii — a decent amount of money, but nowhere near what he himself had borrowed and been unable to repay — and that fellow slave can’t repay him (though, how could he because he also had no income). The borrower in this case makes the very same plea to his lender that his lender had previously made to his own lender, “Have patience with me, and I will pay you.” But this time, the plea doesn’t result in forgiveness, it results in punishment as the borrower is thrown in prison.
It happened all the time back then and, the sad truth is, it still happens all the time now. An economy set up so that people have to borrow money they can’t possibly repay and then, when they can’t repay it, they end up in jail where they can’t earn any money to repay it, which seems incredibly irrational in it’s own way.
Greatly distressed by what the second lender has done to the second borrower, his fellow slaves turn him into the king, and the angry king comes down on him like a ton of bricks — rescinding the forbearance to which he’d previously agreed and ordering his slave to be tortured until his debt is repaid — which isn’t very nice.
Essentially, the king is saying to him, “I extend you forgiveness for an incomprehensibly large debt and when someone comes to you seeking forgiveness for a much smaller debt the thought of forgiveness doesn’t even enter your mind? Now you will reap what you’ve sown.”
At some level, the moral of this story appears to be rather straightforward — mostly because Jesus seems to tell us what it is at the end: “So my heavenly Father will also do to every one of you, if you do not forgive your brother or sister from your heart.” In other words, practice forgiveness like God does, not like humans tend to, or bear the consequences for failing to do so. Divine things over human things. But we’re human, not divine, so how exactly that supposed to work for us?
I know that this might sound a bit sacrilegious, but is it really that hard for God to practice forgiveness? Just consider this question within the four walls of today’s gospel story: You’re a king, who seems to have unlimited access to anything and everything, so what’s sixty million denarii to you in the grand scheme of things? So when the first borrower says to the king — who clearly represents God here — “Have patience with me, and I will pay you everything,” how big of a stretch is it for God honor a plea for patience when God needs nothing and has an infinite amount of time?
And yet, in the story, even God’s initial reaction is to punish the defaulting borrower. Why is that? It’s tough to say with any kind of certainty. At some level, it’s worth remembering that this is a story, a parable, and so maybe Jesus simply constructs it this way in order to emphasize the difference between our tendency to want to punish and God’s disposition towards forgiveness.
And then, when this graceful reversal on the king’s part is then juxtaposed with the actions of the unforgiving lender slave (representing us), who immediately jumps to punishment and shows no trace of grace or mercy, the contrast between God’s behavior and ours becomes even greater. Divine things versus human things. Okay, I get it.
But why does the lender slave act choose to this way? It’s so easy for us to stand in judgement of this character and shake our heads disapprovingly at him, but be honest: would we necessarily do any better than he did? If we loaned someone a good slug of money and they came to us with a sob story about how they couldn’t repay it, how inclined would we be just to let them off the hook Unlike God, we have limited resources and time — right?
But wait — doesn’t God remind us again and again that God will provide, that God has already given us all that we need, that we will be granted eternal life?
And so maybe, just maybe, the reason why forgiveness seems to be so hard to come by in this world — is that we doubt this is true.
When you get right down to it, perhaps the disparity between God’s capacity to forgive and ours is attributable to this: in a world where fear of scarcity, rather than faith in God’s promises, becomes the guiding principle by which we live, then forgiveness ends up being rather scarce too. And so this parable seems to be a call for us to repent, to change our way of looking at things, to be and do better, to be slightly more divine than we are human.
But this is not to say that this is easy. Remember the context in which Jesus tells this parable. He’s just explained to his disciples the need to live into forgiveness within the faith community, to always leave open the door to reconciliation with someone who’s done wrong by the community. And the resulting exchange between Peter and Jesus on this topic (which begins today’s passage) speaks volumes: “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.’” Some manuscripts actually “seventy times seven” times, but any way you look at it, it’s a whole lotta times.
Jesus understands forgiveness is not necessarily a simple, straightforward, one-and-done kind of thing for us; it’s a process that often takes a great deal of effort over a long period of time — in other words, it requires patience. It’s no accident that this very word appears twice in today’s parable, in the plea that both borrowers make for forgiveness of their respective debts:
“Have patience with me, and I will pay you everything.”
“Have patience with me, and I will pay you.”
One lender does this, the other lender doesn’t, and neither lender gets their money back. But which lender do you think ended up being at peace?
It’s worth noting that the first borrower didn’t actually ask to have his debt forgiven — the lender did that on his own; the first borrower simply asked for patience and a chance to repay what he owed at some point in the future. The lender certainly could have chosen to go that route instead, because forgiveness doesn’t necessarily mean forgetting. It is also essential for us to understand that forgiveness doesn’t mean tolerating wrongdoing and abuse, and it certainly doesn’t mean that people who do these things shouldn’t be held accountable for their actions.
While there are many wrongs that can’t and won’t ever be forgotten, forgiving them is still possible. Because maybe forgiveness is simply about getting to a place where neither the one who is wronged nor the one who wronged them continue to be defined by the wrongdoing.
Sometimes forgiveness takes time; sometimes it happens gradually, in fits and starts — perhaps that’s at least part of what Jesus means when he says it’s something to be practiced seventy-seven (or seventy times seven) times, in other words, it’s something to be practiced with patience. His overarching point here is that it’s essential for us make the effort, and the consequences of us not making the effort are great. But what are they, exactly?
Near the end of today’s passage, Jesus says some pretty harsh things about what God will do to us should we choose not to “forgive… from our heart.” It’s really hard to reconcile the idea of a God who seems to be all about forgiveness, on the one hand, with the idea of God who will punish us for not forgiving, on the other. And to say this implies that even God’s capacity to forgive has it’s limits, which is a tough one for me to wrap my mind around.
At the end of the day, I doubt that God really wants to punish us — because why would God, having created us, want anything for us other than what’s best for us. But maybe God doesn’t actually need to punish us in the next life because we do such an effective job of punishing ourselves by choosing to live in anger and resentment and bitterness in this one;
and maybe the greatest blessing of forgiveness is that it ultimately liberates the forgiver as well as the forgiven. As the poet Maya Angelou wisely said, “To forgive is to set a prisoner free and discover that the prisoner was you.”
Don’t you see? When it comes to forgiveness, everybody wins – and that’s really what God wants.