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+ + + In Nomine Jesu + + +
Please join me in prayer: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be pleasing in your sight, O Lord, our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.
Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ,
Grace to you and peace from God our Father and from the Lord Jesus Christ. (Amen.)
The topic of our forgiving our fellow human beings regularly comes up in works of fiction and nonfiction in all sorts of media that we consume. For example, some 27 years later, I still vividly remember such forgiveness being a part of the plot in the 1996 movie Courage Under Fire, starring Denzel Washington and Meg Ryan. Yet, we hardly need Hollywood subplots in order to consider such forgiveness, since we regularly are faced with situations dealing with our forgiving our fellow human beings in our real lives. Parents and children, husbands and wives, teachers and students, and employers and employees—we all find ourselves in real situations where the same person sins against us, often committing the same sin, over and over and over again. Having heard today’s Gospel Reading, this morning we consider the matter of “Forgiving our brothers and sisters in Christ”.
Today’s Gospel Reading picks up right where last Sunday’s Gospel Reading left off (Matthew 18:1-20). Last Sunday, near the end of what I then characterized as a discussion of “Childcare in the Kingdom of Heaven”, our Lord Jesus Christ said to seek out those who have gone astray and, ultimately, either to bind their sin if they refuse to repent or to loose their sin if they do repent. Jesus’s disciple Peter’s question that begins today’s Gospel Reading is often our question: how often will my brother or sister in Christ sin against me and I forgive them? Peter’s and our question “how often” presumes that there is a limit, and, more than the limit of three times reportedly proposed by some rabbis, Peter suggests seven times. And, in other contexts, the number “seven” and its multiples are numbers of completeness and perfection. However, the number that Jesus gives—whether 77 times (KJV, NIV) or 70 times 7, that is, 490 times (ASV, NASB, AAT, NEB, NKJV)—is clearly not meant to be a literal limit, for, as the parable that Jesus goes on to tell makes clear, we should have mercy on our brothers and sisters in Christ as God has had mercy on us. And, in case you are wondering how the quantities of the different currencies convert, the parable can be taken to suggest that God forgives us a debt of sins some 600thousand times greater than the debt of sins that we forgive our brothers and sisters in Christ—600-thousand times greater!
The question for us really is whether we are willing to forgive our brothers and sisters in Christ. When we consider a bad childhood, marriage, schooldays, or workhistory, do we want to hold a grudge and to carry out some form of vengeance on the person or the people who have sinned against us? Or, are we willing to have mercy and forgive them? In the parable of the Gospel Reading, the fellowservant fell down and pleaded with the first servant for patience to repay what arguably was a repayable debt, but the first servant was not willing to have patience. The first servant was not willing to have patience despite the fact that, when the first servant fell down and pleaded with the master for patience to repay what arguably was not a repayable debt, the master, having been moved with compassion, exceeded that request for patience to repay by instead releasing the first servant and forgiving the debt. Yet, his master’s release and forgiveness did not transform the first servant as it should have. Does our Lord’s release and forgiveness transform us and make us at least willing to forgive others? The time when our King will “settle accounts” with us is coming, either on the day of our deaths or the day when He comes with glory to judge both the living and the dead. Because of our unwillingness to have mercy and forgive, because of all of our other sin and our sinful nature, we deserve not only death now but also to be delivered over to the torturers in hell for eternity. And we should be clear that unrepentant unbelievers are tormented in hell for eternity. The parable in today’s Gospel Reading is misunderstood and misused to support the false teaching of limited torment, whether in purgatory or in hell, which limited torment in hell is then wrongly said to result in everyone’s eventually being saved. So, while there is still time, we repent and believe, as God calls and so enables us to do (confer Matthew 5:25-26).
Although President Biden might like for people to think that he can forgive billions of dollars in student loan debt with just the stroke of his pen, at least some people know that, instead of the borrowers, someone else will have to pay that debt, and that someone else is the taxpayers of the United States. Although the parable in today’s Gospel Reading does not say so, the same is true when it comes to the debt of our sins to God: someone else had to pay, and that someone else is our Lord Jesus Christ. God could be patient with us all the time in the world, and we still could not repay our debts ourselves; there is nothing that we can give in return for our souls (Matthew 16:23; confer Psalm 49:7-8). God in human flesh, Jesus came to serve by giving His one life as ransom for many, that is, for all (Matthew 20:28). On the cross, Jesus died for the sins of the world, including your sins and my sins, dying in our place, the death that we deserved; Jesus ransomed us not with gold or silver but with His holy, precious blood and with His innocent suffering and death (1 Peter 1:18-19; Small Catechism II:4; confer Scaer, CLD VI:7172; Franzmann, Follow Me, 192-193). On the cross, when Jesus said, “It is finished” (John 19:30), He used an expression that was written on outstanding debts and meant “paid in full”. When we repent and believe, then God forgives us by grace on account of what Christ has done for us. God forgives us our sinful nature and our actual sin, including our failing to forgive others. God forgives us all our sin, whatever our sin might be. God forgives us through His Means of Grace, His Word and His Sacraments.
In the parable of the Gospel Reading, as we heard it, the first servant fell on his knees and implored his master, and, seemingly similarly, the fellow servant fell on his knees and pleaded with the first servant, but there is a distinction in the original Greek that is lost in the English Standard Version’s translation. The first servant “worshipped” his master (KJV, ASV), as we appropriately worship our Lord, by confessing both who we are, as debtors before Him, and Who He is, as our merciful Lord and Master, and by seeking and receiving His forgiveness in the ways that He has chosen to give us that forgiveness: especially through His Word with water in Holy Baptism, with the pastor’s touch in Holy Absolution, and with bread and wine that are His Body and Blood in the Holy Supper. Jesus won our forgiveness on the cross, and in His Word and Sacraments He gives us that forgiveness. The parable of the Gospel Reading makes clear that the Kingdom of Heaven is about the forgiveness of sins, especially that the mercy that God has had on us should lead to our having mercy on our brothers and sisters in Christ.
“Forgive and forget”, or so people say. The expression apparently goes back to the seventeenth century, either to Miguel de Cervantes’ novel Don Quixote or to William Shakespeare’s roughly contemporaneous play King Lear (christelowoo.com). Through the prophet Jeremiah, God promises that He will forgive our iniquity and remember our sin no more (Jeremiah 31:34), but He says that not about us but about Himself. And, even an allknowing God’s “forgetting” something seems problematic, though perhaps His statement has more to do with the meaning of His not “remembering” being that His knowing will not cause Him to punish us, since He has instead punished His Son. As we are forgiven, we are transformed. But, as we remain both saints and sinners in this lifetime, our forgiving others their sins, and much more our forgetting their sins, remains imperfect. Ideally, our being forgiven leads to our forgiving our brothers and sisters in Christ, and our forgiving our brothers and sisters in Christ leads to our forgetting their sins, but we cannot necessarily stop bad memories from popping up, even when we wish that they would not pop up, even to the point of those bad memories blocking our memories of anything good.
Not as a Hollywood subplot but as situations in real life, we have been considering “Forgiving our brothers and sisters in Christ”. “God has forgiven us far more than we will ever be called on to forgive” (TLSB, ad loc Mt 18:21-35, 1622), and His forgiving us makes possible our at least being willing to forgive others. We thank God the Father that, even for our imperfect forgiveness of our brothers and sisters in Christ, there is forgiveness from Him, by the power of the Holy Spirit, for the sake of Jesus Christ our Lord.
Amen.
The peace of God, which passes all understanding, keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.
+ + + Soli Deo Gloria + + +