9-17-2023 “The Height, Breadth, and Depth of God’s Mercy” Matthew 18:21-35 Pentecost XVI

Dr. John Tamilio III, Pastor

Let’s just jump right into it. At the heart of today’s Gospel lesson is a concern about forgiveness. It really begins with Jesus being asked by Peter, “How many times do I have to forgive someone who wrongs me?” Peter throws out a number he thinks is ridiculous. “Seven?” Jesus retorts, “Not seven times, but seventy-seven times.” In other words, it is as if he is saying, “Seven? Think again. Try eleven times that. In some versions of this story, Jesus is recorded as having said seventy times seven. Four hundred and ninety times! What’s going on here?

We need to turn to the parable that follows. A king wants to settle accounts with someone who owes him 10,000 bags of gold. You can only imagine the cash value today. The man cannot pay the debt and so he faces imprisonment, or maybe even something worse. The man begs and pleads with the king, who shows mercy and forgives the entire amount. Not long afterward, the same man runs into a fellow servant who owes him 100 silver coins. The fellow servant (the second one) begs the first one to show mercy. He doesn’t. When the first servant is called to the carpet by the king (his master) he is in trouble. ’ You wicked servant,” he said, ‘I canceled all the debt of yours because you begged me to. Shouldn’t you have had mercy on your fellow servant just as I had on you?’”

Here we have the meat of the story. To give it more perspective — or better yet, to relate it to today — Eugene Peterson (the pastor who is responsible for the modern translation of Scripture known as The Message) Peterson translates the 10,000 bags of gold as $100,000. So imagine that for a moment. You owe someone who has authority over you (a king, a master) you owe this person $100,000. In the context of the parable, the king has the power to sell you and his family to pay the debt. But then, because you plead with him, he pardons you. Pardons you! He forgives the entire debt. But then you go out and come across someone else (say, a neighbor) who owes you ten dollars. When that person pleads with you for mercy, you refuse to show it. What do you think the king/master is going to do when he gets wind of it?

The king in this story is God. He has forgiven you, and you, and you, and me of our sins. Those sins are expensive. They are grave sins. They are the transgressions we have foisted against an all-powerful, all-loving, all-knowing, all-grace-giving God. That should be the model we follow, shouldn’t it? Shouldn’t we forgive others for their sins against us — especially the small ones? After all, each of us owed so much more, and that debt was pardoned.

There are two ways to think of forgiveness. We say it in the Lord’s Prayer each week: “…and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.” It almost sounds as if we are saying the opposite. It is almost as if we are saying, “Forgive us, God, because we have forgiven others.” Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. We are more in line with the original Greek if we say, “Forgive us our debts, O God, and we should forgive others the same way.” We should forgive others (whether it is a small amount or a tremendous sum) because God has forgiven us. Furthermore, the transgressions we have committed against God are far worse than any wrongs we have suffered at the hands of anybody.

We’ve talked about Christian ethics recently and how it is different from the moral paradigms that have been taught to us throughout history by people like Aristotle, Immanuel Kant, and Utilitarians like Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill. What makes Christian ethics so different is that the God made known to us in Jesus Christ is the model we are to emulate.

Jesus forgave others. Even when he was on the cross, he forgave those who put him there and mocked him while he was dying. Would you be able to forgive your persecutors the same way? I couldn’t. And yet this is what we are called to do. Being a Christian is countercultural in every possible way. We are to forgive others for sins that seem unforgivable. We are to forgive others for the sins they commit that break us down and make us feel that we have been the victims of the greatest injustice imaginable. How often have we done the same: not just to others, but to God as well? How many times have we broken God’s heart? How many times have we not fulfilled a promise made? How many times have we broken a commandment? How many times have we loved God with all of our heart, soul, mind, or strength? How many times have we not loved others the way we love ourselves? All of these are sacred commandments that we agree to follow as disciples of Jesus Christ, as those who seek to do what he did.

Think of it this way. The ethic of confession and forgiveness we are to follow has two dimensions to it. It is vertical, meaning that we are to seek God’s pardon for the many, many ways that we have sinned against him. It is also a horizontal ethics: we are to forgive others for the wrongs they have done to us and we are to seek their forgiveness when we wrong them. It is vertical to God. It is horizontal to all people. Vertical. Horizontal. When you put those two together, you get the cross, do you not?

Yes. Indeed. The cross — that which lies at the center of our faith and theology — the cross itself is the symbol of forgiveness beyond any other possible human model. It goes up to God, and it reaches across to all of our sisters and brothers.

We cannot possibly understand the height, width, and depth of God’s forgiveness. Nothing compares to it. It stretches to the heavens. It never runs out. It is lavish and extravagant. When Jesus tells Peter to forgive seven-seventy times, he does not mean that he (and we) do not have to forgive someone the seventy-eighth time. He means that he (and we) have to forgive, and forgive, and forgive, and forgive, and forgive. Why? Because that is how many times you have been forgiven.

John Bunyan once wrote, “No child of God sins to that degree as to make himself incapable of forgiveness.” That echoes what Paul says at the end of Romans 8. Nothing can separate us from the love of God. Nothing. Nothing you can do will make God stop loving you. As Paul states, “Neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth…” Nothing can separate us from the love of God made known in Christ Jesus our Lord. As hard as it is, we should not let others (and the sins they commit against us) move us to not forgive.

It’s a tough calling. It’s a high calling. It is Jesus’ calling. Amen.