"Don't Forget You're Forgiven"
9-14-14 (Proper 19, Ordinary 24A Semi-Continuous)
Romans 14:1-12; Matthew 18:21-35
Don’t Forget You’re Forgiven
Every month, our mailbox at home fills up with a handful of envelopes that I wish would just stop coming to us. These envelopes are important - they’re not just junk mail that I can rip up and throw away, no matter how much I may want to. Instead, they’re all emblazoned with this terrible, horrible, four letter word that we all probably know and tremble when we hear: BILL. It’s that time again - there’s the phone bill, the car bill, the student loan bills, the insurance bills, the credit card whose balance never seems to go down, the credit card that only has those few more payments left before we can rack it up again... and so on.
So as I read this parable, I find it all to easy to step right into the servant’s shoes as he’s called before his king to account for his debts. I imagine him as the guards throw him down before the king, who pronounces his judgment that the servant and all he had should be sold to pay the debt. I see the servant’s eyes become nearly all whites, his face one of absolute horror as he sees his life being sold away. Shock turns to groveling as the servant throws himself at the king’s feet. He begs the king to be patient with him, choking back the lump in his throat and trying to hold in his tears. And seeing this poignant display, the king feels pity and relents, forgiving the man entirely of his debt.
And at that point in the story, I always sit and think to myself - wouldn’t it be amazing if we had such compassionate people at the credit companies that handle our accounts? We run around scared to death of missing a payment on our bills - it’ll ruin our credit, get our electricity or water or cable turned off, or we’ll wake up and find our car being towed away. But what if we missed a payment, and as we tried to apologize over the phone, the operator told us to forget about it, that we were forgiven and we didn’t need to worry about making payments anymore? What would your response be? What would you do in the wake of that phone call? What could you do?
That’s what makes the second part of Jesus’ parable so difficult - immediately after this servant comes away from the most amazing pardon of his life, he runs into another servant, who happens to owe him some money. And when this other man asks him the very same favor that he had asked the king mere minutes before, “Have patience with me, and I will pay you,” the servant insists that he be paid! He chokes the man and has him thrown into prison until the debt could be paid. How does something like that happen? What had to have been going through this servant’s mind? From the parable, it sounds something like, “Gee, I can’t believe the king just forgave me all of my debt - hey, I just remembered - that guy over there owes me money!”
It’s easy to jump down this guy’s throat - his actions are ludicrous, considering his circumstances, and at the end of the parable, we certainly get the sense that he deserves to have his fortunes reversed by the king in the way that he does. But I can’t help but wonder if we’re too quick to judge some of the people we encounter in parables like this. Jesus used terms that would have been familiar to people of his day, but I’ve never been asked to pay in Denarii for my coffee, or had my income taxes calculated in talents before. So I sat down and put my math skills into action to see just what kind of numbers we’re talking about here. Historians have determined that a talent was a measure of money that was roughly 20 years worth of wages for a regular laborer. That number alone tells us how big the debt of the original servant was -10,000 talents would have been that servant’s wages for 200,000 years. If we go with information from the 2011 census, which lists the average income of an American laborer as roughly $26,708 a year, that means that he owed the king a shade over $5.3 billion dollars. And based on the salary above, if we put a day’s wages somewhere around $70, this second servant owed the first about $7000 dollars. So the second man’s debt was certainly significant - with numbers like that in my head, I can better understand why the first servant was eager to collect his debt. But even still, put seven grand that you’re owed beside 5.3 billion that you suddenly don’t have to worry about anymore and things still don’t really add up. Was this servant so strapped for cash that he needed money that badly, or was he just that dense that he just completely took for granted the importance of what the king had just done for him?
Jesus’ parable wasn’t about crunching numbers and doing math - when Peter asked him how many times he should forgive his brother, Jesus didn’t mean that Peter should literally forgive his brother 490 times and then the buck stopped there. It’s about the fact that we’re forgiven in the first place. It’s no coincidence that in Matthew’s gospel, Jesus taught his disciples to pray, “Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors.” When we pray those words before God, we are meant to remember this parable of the forgiving king and his servant. We need to remember that we do have a savior who is compassionate, who we don’t need to run around in fear of, who has taken our debts upon himself and forgiven them entirely. And as we ask for God to forgive us our own debts, we should hear God reminding us of those whom we still need to forgive and let our prayer be that God gives us the grace to do the same for them. That’s not to say that it’s easy - I’ll be the first to admit that it’s easier said than done. There are people in this world who I know I’d have a real problem showing love to; people who are abusive, who lie at every turn, who only seem to speak a message of hate to anyone who will listen. There are people who only see you for what you can give them, who even expect the king to forget what they owe him, all the while demanding the sum their neighbor owes them. There are people who I disagree with on almost every level about many things, and nothing makes that more clear than the months before an election. These last few months, it seems too many of us have been walking around like the forgiven servant, forgetting to stay in awe of what our king has already done for us.
Whether we like it or not, rich or poor, we’re all that deep in debt with God. Give us 200,000 years to work on paying that debt off and we wouldn’t even be close to catching up to where we started. But through Christ, that debt is erased. It no longer exists. And if God has forgiven us of the worst of our debts and restored us to relationship with him, our Almighty King, is it so much for God to expect that we should take that grace and pay it forward to others? We are a people who live every day by the grace of God - and all that God expects of us is to live into that grace the best we can. In order to preach a gospel of forgiveness and love, we must act as a people who are forgiven. We must be willing to forgive one another and to demonstrate that love which God has shown to us in Jesus Christ. We have been forgiven much, so let us go and love all that much more. To God be the Glory. Amen.
Romans 14:1-12; Matthew 18:21-35
Don’t Forget You’re Forgiven
Every month, our mailbox at home fills up with a handful of envelopes that I wish would just stop coming to us. These envelopes are important - they’re not just junk mail that I can rip up and throw away, no matter how much I may want to. Instead, they’re all emblazoned with this terrible, horrible, four letter word that we all probably know and tremble when we hear: BILL. It’s that time again - there’s the phone bill, the car bill, the student loan bills, the insurance bills, the credit card whose balance never seems to go down, the credit card that only has those few more payments left before we can rack it up again... and so on.
So as I read this parable, I find it all to easy to step right into the servant’s shoes as he’s called before his king to account for his debts. I imagine him as the guards throw him down before the king, who pronounces his judgment that the servant and all he had should be sold to pay the debt. I see the servant’s eyes become nearly all whites, his face one of absolute horror as he sees his life being sold away. Shock turns to groveling as the servant throws himself at the king’s feet. He begs the king to be patient with him, choking back the lump in his throat and trying to hold in his tears. And seeing this poignant display, the king feels pity and relents, forgiving the man entirely of his debt.
And at that point in the story, I always sit and think to myself - wouldn’t it be amazing if we had such compassionate people at the credit companies that handle our accounts? We run around scared to death of missing a payment on our bills - it’ll ruin our credit, get our electricity or water or cable turned off, or we’ll wake up and find our car being towed away. But what if we missed a payment, and as we tried to apologize over the phone, the operator told us to forget about it, that we were forgiven and we didn’t need to worry about making payments anymore? What would your response be? What would you do in the wake of that phone call? What could you do?
That’s what makes the second part of Jesus’ parable so difficult - immediately after this servant comes away from the most amazing pardon of his life, he runs into another servant, who happens to owe him some money. And when this other man asks him the very same favor that he had asked the king mere minutes before, “Have patience with me, and I will pay you,” the servant insists that he be paid! He chokes the man and has him thrown into prison until the debt could be paid. How does something like that happen? What had to have been going through this servant’s mind? From the parable, it sounds something like, “Gee, I can’t believe the king just forgave me all of my debt - hey, I just remembered - that guy over there owes me money!”
It’s easy to jump down this guy’s throat - his actions are ludicrous, considering his circumstances, and at the end of the parable, we certainly get the sense that he deserves to have his fortunes reversed by the king in the way that he does. But I can’t help but wonder if we’re too quick to judge some of the people we encounter in parables like this. Jesus used terms that would have been familiar to people of his day, but I’ve never been asked to pay in Denarii for my coffee, or had my income taxes calculated in talents before. So I sat down and put my math skills into action to see just what kind of numbers we’re talking about here. Historians have determined that a talent was a measure of money that was roughly 20 years worth of wages for a regular laborer. That number alone tells us how big the debt of the original servant was -10,000 talents would have been that servant’s wages for 200,000 years. If we go with information from the 2011 census, which lists the average income of an American laborer as roughly $26,708 a year, that means that he owed the king a shade over $5.3 billion dollars. And based on the salary above, if we put a day’s wages somewhere around $70, this second servant owed the first about $7000 dollars. So the second man’s debt was certainly significant - with numbers like that in my head, I can better understand why the first servant was eager to collect his debt. But even still, put seven grand that you’re owed beside 5.3 billion that you suddenly don’t have to worry about anymore and things still don’t really add up. Was this servant so strapped for cash that he needed money that badly, or was he just that dense that he just completely took for granted the importance of what the king had just done for him?
Jesus’ parable wasn’t about crunching numbers and doing math - when Peter asked him how many times he should forgive his brother, Jesus didn’t mean that Peter should literally forgive his brother 490 times and then the buck stopped there. It’s about the fact that we’re forgiven in the first place. It’s no coincidence that in Matthew’s gospel, Jesus taught his disciples to pray, “Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors.” When we pray those words before God, we are meant to remember this parable of the forgiving king and his servant. We need to remember that we do have a savior who is compassionate, who we don’t need to run around in fear of, who has taken our debts upon himself and forgiven them entirely. And as we ask for God to forgive us our own debts, we should hear God reminding us of those whom we still need to forgive and let our prayer be that God gives us the grace to do the same for them. That’s not to say that it’s easy - I’ll be the first to admit that it’s easier said than done. There are people in this world who I know I’d have a real problem showing love to; people who are abusive, who lie at every turn, who only seem to speak a message of hate to anyone who will listen. There are people who only see you for what you can give them, who even expect the king to forget what they owe him, all the while demanding the sum their neighbor owes them. There are people who I disagree with on almost every level about many things, and nothing makes that more clear than the months before an election. These last few months, it seems too many of us have been walking around like the forgiven servant, forgetting to stay in awe of what our king has already done for us.
Whether we like it or not, rich or poor, we’re all that deep in debt with God. Give us 200,000 years to work on paying that debt off and we wouldn’t even be close to catching up to where we started. But through Christ, that debt is erased. It no longer exists. And if God has forgiven us of the worst of our debts and restored us to relationship with him, our Almighty King, is it so much for God to expect that we should take that grace and pay it forward to others? We are a people who live every day by the grace of God - and all that God expects of us is to live into that grace the best we can. In order to preach a gospel of forgiveness and love, we must act as a people who are forgiven. We must be willing to forgive one another and to demonstrate that love which God has shown to us in Jesus Christ. We have been forgiven much, so let us go and love all that much more. To God be the Glory. Amen.
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