Grace Beyond Measure
Rev. Mark A. Schaefer
Oxnam Chapel, Wesley Theological Seminary
September 15, 2002
Exodus 15:1b-11, 20-21 and Matthew 18:21-35
I am a Boston Red Sox fan. In addition to this, as if that weren’t enough, I am also a Buffalo Bills fan. Basically at the beginning of every season–whether baseball or football–I set myself up, and hope for the best and at the end of every season I am disappointed. And yet, every year I come back, as though seeking more abuse.
If this were any other area of our lives–if this were a relationship–my friends would have counseled me to get out long ago. ‘Leave, it’s no good, you’re just setting yourself up for more heartbreak.’ If this were a business relationship, my financial advisors would tell me ‘This one’s a loser–you’re investing money like you’re throwing it out the window. There’s no point in this.’ If this were any other kind of transaction or relationship, continuing to come back to something that doesn’t bear any fruit, a source of disappointment, would be utterly futile and everyone would advise against it.
But that’s kind of what is going on in the New Testament text today in the story from the Gospel of Matthew. Peter poses a question, “If one of our brothers or sisters should sin against me, how many times should I forgive them? Seven, right?” And Jesus says, “Not seven. Seventy-seven times.” Now the interesting thing is that Peter doesn’t say, “How many times should I forgive someone after they ask for forgiveness?” he just says “How many times should I forgive someone.” So right away we’re tempted to think that Peter is being fairly generous: he’ll forgive someone seven times who hasn’t even asked for it.
Now, seven is of course, one of those Biblical numbers that comes up a lot: seven, twelve, forty. Seven means ‘perfection’. Basically, Peter is offering a perfect number of times and Jesus says no. Actually, in the translation we read earlier it says 77 times, but you can read the Greek as also saying ‘seventy times seven’ or 490 times.
I don’t know about you, but I’m kind of uncomfortable with Jesus saying ‘Be a doormat for me.’ Give forgiveness to people who haven’t even asked for it. If we were to do this, people would walk all over us–not just the Bills and the Sox. Everyone. Jesus can’t possibly be saying to us ‘Just forgive people’–many times or an innumerable number of times. In fact, we find ourselves saying, ‘Wait, isn’t this the same God who drowned Pharaoh’s army in the Old Testament lesson we read earlier?’
First there’s something about the numbers–seven, seventy. Seven is a number of completeness, perfection. Seventy is ten times that–a large, round number. What these numbers really mean is almost innumerable numbers of times, an innumerable amount of forgiveness. Forgiveness without measure, without counting. And we sit and ask ‘Are we supposed to do that? Can we do that? Are we even able to do that?’
Because the forgiveness that’s being asked for is beyond all calculation. Jesus doesn’t really say ‘Forgive someone 490 times but on the 491st time that’s when you can withhold forgiveness.’ He means an innumerable, an uncountable number of times. I don’t know about you but this doesn’t make me happy. I don’t want to be a doormat for God.
But there’s something else going on here. Matthew is using this story in his gospel, this parable of Jesus’ to instruct people how the church ought to behave. And so the way the story is edited and presented to us, and where it is put in the gospel story, is a way of instructing the church about that kind of behavior. But when we read it we come up against the impossibility and we don’t know what to do with this commandment. It seems so impractical, so harmful even.
And then, it is followed by a story that seems even more incomprehensible to us. The story of the king and his servants we heard a few minutes ago. The king has a servant who owes him 10,000 talents. Right away we are up against that gulf that separates us in culture, history, and time from the people of the New Testament. Ten thousand is the translation for the Greek word ‘myriad’–a word we usually use more poetically these days: “a myriad difficulties” “a myriad wonders”. It’s kind of like saying “a kajillion” in ancient Greek. It means a lot, the highest number you could think of. A talent is 15 years worth of wages. Ten thousand talents is 150,000 years worth of wages that this servant owes his king. Now, we’re probably talking about taxes or something. The servant had probably promised to raise a certain amount of revenue if he were given responsibility for a certain territory. And he probably screwed up or mismanaged, or gave jobs to all his friends in government, or in some other way squandered the revenues, and didn’t have enough money left over. But the king is saying, “Where is my ten thousand talents?” There is no satisfaction–the man could never pay this money back–the only punishment is prison.
It is a staggering amount of money. King Herod’s territory only generated 900 talents a year. Ten thousand talents. And the slave drops to his knees, begs for forgiveness, and the king, remarkably, forgives the debt. And then of course, we have the next part of the story. The way that we always read this knowing about the king’s forgiveness as we watch as this petty bureaucrat finds one of his fellow servants who owes him 100 denarii (one 600,000th of the amount he owed the king). And he throttles the servant, threatens him and has him thrown into debtor’s prison. Now, the amount that the one servant owes to the other is about 100 days worth of wages. It is not an unreasonable sum to expect to be repaid. The way we’re used to thinking about this is that that king forgave the servant, and the servant ought to forgive his fellow servant. He does not exercise the same forgiveness as the king.
The way this story has been presented to us is that if we do not forgive as God forgives, there will be consequences. For, in the end, the unforgiving servant is thrown into debtor’s prison to be tortured. This brings us to this terrible tension that we feel. For we’ve been told to forgive 70 x 7 times. We’ve been told that our lack of forgiveness brings punishment upon us. But let me suggest that something else is going on.
The way we always read this story is that the king is God and the debt is sin. What I think is really going on here is that the king himself is part of the parable. The king himself is an example of what God’s forgiveness is not like. The king recants his forgiveness. The king says, “I forgave you but you did not forgive, so I am taking back my forgiveness.” The king in effect has an expiration period on his grace.
The story is really about God’s grace as a grace without measure. God’s grace is a grace that forgives–seven times, seventy times, seventy-seven times, seventy times seven. God’s grace is a grace that is so powerful that our failure to forgive each other is not what makes God’s grace operate. In fact, God enters into this whole arrangement knowing that we’re going to fail to forgive each other. Yet God extends his grace to us through Jesus Christ. Grace without measure.
Again, we think, ‘Is that right?’ We want to know that we’ve earned our way through. We want to know that we’ve at least got a corner on God’s grace or at least know who doesn’t. But God’s grace is not like that. It cannot be limited by our limitations.
Tonight, the very reason we are in this chapel , is the night of Yom Kippur–the holiest day in the Jewish year. Yom Kippur is usually translated as “Day of Atonement”. The word kippur means ‘blotting’ actually, like taking the pitch from a tree and blotting out something. It is the day on which God blots out the sins of the people of Israel. They gather together, they confess their sins, and God blots out that sins. They don’t claim that the sin never happened, but God strikes it off the record books as a collectible debt. I asked the rabbi this earlier, and the answer I suspected was right–God’s forgiveness is presumed. It is not contingent. There is nowhere in the liturgy where the congregation hopes for God’s forgiveness. As we say in our prayers when we confess our sins publicly–in our communion liturgies and our public prayers “In the name of Christ you are forgiven”–God’s forgiveness is assured.
That’s what these stories are about. These stories are about a tremendous gift of grace without measure. God stops counting our transgressions. That doesn’t let us off the hook. We still have to act with acts of mercy, charity, justice, and compassion. But we know that we are doing this in response to a God who stopped keeping count a long time ago. And for that we are grateful without measure.
