After Forgiveness, Forgiveness

Trinity 22

November 4, 2012

After Forgiveness, Forgiveness

Matthew 18:35

In the name of Jesus. Amen.

When are you most likely to be generous towards other people?

After you hear that your first grandchild is born. After a good first date, that ends with plans for a second one. After you've opened all your birthday presents. After a delicious meal.

It's always after something, isn't it? After something good.

So it is with forgiveness, which is why the man in the middle of our story this morning catches us by surprise.

This miserable old man—by the way, he's us—has a huge debt owed to his king. He owed 10,000 talents. He'd have to work for 150,000 years to pay it off. But the king had compassion on this miserable man and canceled the debt.

Then this man is free. He no longer lives under a crushing debt. So he enjoys his new freedom by taking a walk. And he runs into a man who owes him about $5,000.

What do you expect him to do after something good has happened to him?

    Say nothing and wish him a nice day?

    Gently remind him that his debt is overdue?

    Tell him what the king just did for him?

He chose option number four: shake him down and throw him in prison.

Now here's the thing. That miserable man had every legal right to have his debtor thrown into prison. We might even expect this on the day before the king canceled his debt. Indeed this sort of thing happens every day. We might not like it, but it's predictable.

But his decision to throw someone into debtor's prison after the king's generosity toward him is unexpected. And it was noticed and reported to the king. His reaction is predictable.

Matthew 18:32-34

“You wicked servant,” he said, “I canceled all that debt of yours because you begged me to. Shouldn’t you have had mercy on your fellow servant just as I had on you?” In anger his master turned him over to the jailers to be tortured, until he should pay back all he owed.

And then Jesus makes His point.

Matthew 18:35

This is how my heavenly Father will treat each of you unless you forgive your brother from your heart.

Jesus' point is that He is serious and that you should take it to heart. He's serious about sin and He's serious about forgiving sin. He tells you to cling to what He has done for you, pictured by the king canceling the man's debt. And He warns us that being stingy with His forgiveness can lead to grave consequences. Believers who are stingy with forgiveness will finally begin to wonder if God will be stingy with them.

There have been groups of Lutherans who have been stingy with forgiveness. They tried to measure how heartily sorry—that is, from the heart—other Lutherans were before they would declare them truly forgiven. They insisted that certain inner feelings of sorrow should be shared and expressed to small groups of “real” believers. Soon the certainty of forgiveness based on Christ's generosity was replaced by the predictable human view of forgiveness: before you can have it, you have to earn it.

Christ destroys our before attitude toward forgiveness that insists on doing something before forgiveness is received. He replaces our stingy forgiveness toward each other with His blood dripping from the cross. His forgiveness comes from the heart, His heart that generously pumped blood out of His back that had been flogged to pieces and out of His hands and feet where the nails had been driven and out of His side where the spear pierced Him. His forgiveness is the true body and blood that He gives to His Church Sunday after Sunday in the Holy Sacrament. His forgiveness is the word of forgiveness that I speak, in my office as your called pastor, sent by Christ to you.

After all that goodness, how strange it is when we are so stingy with forgiveness. We love throwing others into jail. We love sulking and punishing parents for their inconsistent parenting. It can be so satisfying, yet so far away from Jesus.

Matthew 6:9,12

Our Father, who art in heaven… forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.

Christ has forgiven our debts, our trespasses of hate, lust, greed, and stingy forgiveness. Instead of being tied down by our debts, He has sent them far away.

Let us forgive from the heart. How? Look at your heart? Try to summon superhuman feelings of pity and kindness and warmth toward your debtors? No! Never that.

Run away from your heart and run to your generous Master and His cross. See how seriously He takes your debts and how He takes them away from you and upon Himself. This is how we forgive from the heart again and again and again because we forgive after He has forgiven us again and again and again.

In the name of the Father and of the + Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.