Amanda McMillen, “The Most Forgiven”
There is a special kind of subtle passive-aggressive marital dance that happens after having a baby. It’s called the “who’s more tired” dance and the beauty is found in its subtlety. You don’t go right out and say - “Oh you’re tired? Obviously I’m more tired than you because I got up three times with the baby” That’s way too obvious. Instead, you feign interest in their sleep: “hey honey, how’d you sleep?” (You want to do it nicely so there’s no way they can be mad at you for it) “oh you woke up once and had trouble falling back asleep, I’m sooo sorry”. And then - you wait. Your partner eventually asks it back, even though they KNOW they’re walking into your trap. They know it, but they have to do it. It’s the law. “And how did you sleep?” “Oh, you know.” You give a little laugh like it’s no big deal. “The usual.” You give a weak smile. But inside, you know, you win. And he knows it too. Everyone in the world knows it. You’re exhausted, but you’re a winner. You’re officially The Most Tired.
This parable we just heard from Matthew is for all those people out there, like yours truly, who care deeply about the scorecard. About being the MOST tired, or the MOST righteous. And about everyone else knowing it too.
Peter asks Jesus about forgiveness, after the previous passage in which Jesus outlines how to handle conflict amongst a group - you use direct communication, you bring one or two other people in if necessary, and if that doesn’t work, you just kinda drop it. And the disciples are thinking - ok, but how do we really drop it, when there’s conflict? Like, how often are we really supposed to forgive someone who offends us? In other words - forgiveness is wonderful, but at some point it has to run out, and so tell us, when exactly does that happen?
And Jesus replies, not only are you supposed to forgive someone 7 times over, but rather 77 times. Then he tells this parable.
There’s a servant who owes ten thousand talents, which is something like millions and millions of dollars, like it’s an absolutely astronomical amount of debt - it would have taken ten lifetimes of constant work to pay back. He couldn’t pay it. But the servant falls to his knees in humility and begs for forgiveness of his debt. The master, having compassion, releases him and forgives the debt, just like that. No payment plan was made. No lecture was given. The debt was forgiven, simply because the master was filled with pity.
The same servant who was just forgiven this unpayable debt, finds himself now in a similar position as the master was - he had a fellow servant who owed him a hundred denarii - maybe a couple months worth of wages, nothing compared to the debt that he himself had owed - but when that second servant falls to his knees and begs for forgiveness of the debt, the first servant throws him in prison until he pays. He is unmerciful. He feels, even if subconsciously, that he is inherently somehow better than this fellow servant, that his debt ought to have been forgiven, but his fellow servants - that’s a different story. He must pay. Like the anonymous random mother in my opening story, don’t know who she is exactly, like that mother who wants credit for being the MOST tired and hardworking, the servant in this story wants his fellow servants to know that he’s been wronged by an unpaid debt. Whereas the master in the first half of the parable, who forgives the ten thousand talents, the unfathomable debt, seems to not care one bit if anyone is aware of how much he has been wronged - he simply has compassion and forgives the debt.
I find, and I wonder if you’re the same, that one of the reasons forgiveness is so difficult to come to, is because I want it to be known when I’ve been wronged. By the person who hurt me, and by everyone else, too. I want validation of my hurt, of the injustice.
But the law in this passage says, forgive not 7 times but 77 times. Jesus takes the law and turns it up to 11, in this case multiplies it by 11. In other words, more times than you can imagine. You’ll lose count before you get to 77. Just keep forgiving, over and over and over again.
I’m someone who is horrible at math, at numbers in general. We have to, as a church, keep track of the number of people at every service for the Diocese of Virginia’s records, and so sometimes I’m asked to guesstimate - how many people do you think were there at that service? And I literally couldn’t do it if my life depended on it. Like right now, looking at you all, I would have to count every one of you individually to even get close to the right number and even then I’d somehow be off.
Here’s the miracle that is forgiveness, here’s what our parable of the foolish unforgiving servant tells us - we, like the forgiven but unforgiving servant, have no idea what we owe, we have no idea what someone else owes, we have no idea how the scales measure. We simply don’t get to know the math behind forgiveness.
The one thing we know about the person in this story who’s forgiven, that first servant, the forgiven servant - the one thing we know about him is that he’s the fool, right? He’s the person in the story who has absolutely no idea what’s going on - he turns around and refuses to forgive another who owes him so much less than what he himself owed. He’s the fool of the story. He is completely unaware of the math here. And he’s the one who the master has forgiven. God forgives the debt of fools - people who are completely clueless as to what they owe.
The person we want to be in this story is the forgiven person, right? So if there’s any emulation that should be happening for our lives from this story, it’s that you and I want to emulate a fool. The first servant, the one who has no clue what is going on, what he owes, what anyone owes him in comparison. That’s what it takes to be forgiven. To not really know what you owe, and to receive forgiveness anyways.
The crowds at Jesus’ death shouted “crucify him” - they wanted to be on the right side of righteousness. They wanted to protect themselves from the vindictive Roman empire. And in so doing, they crucified the only righteous one, who paid the unimaginable debt of sin on our behalf. That crowd is all of us - we are so often blind to the math of forgiveness, in which we are forgiven 77x over.
All we have to do here is suspend disbelief and imagine we’re the fool - think about a person or situation in your life in which you believe you deserve an apology, and imagine that you don’t actually know all the math involved in that situation, of who owes who what.
All of our own math, our calculations of who owes us what and why, and what we owe someone else and why, our scorecards of the righteous and the unrighteous, doing everything we can to be on one side of the equation and not the other. All the math be damned - your righteousness is given to you by Christ crucified and it can’t be taken away.
You didn’t earn it and you can’t lose it. It’s yours. God’s forgiveness never runs out - it’s literally endless. So, as Jesus says in parable form over and over again, you don’t have to be careful to keep it, by keeping score of who is right and who is wrong in your life, in the world. You don’t have to hold onto your righteousness like it’s a precious pearl that you could lose forever if you aren’t careful. It’s yours. You don’t have to prove it by being more right than someone else. Give it all away!
Freedom, then, on this side of the cross in which we find ourselves, looks like being a doormat. We usually think freedom looks like more power. This whole thing involves being an absolute doormat, because forgiveness is really about death - death of self. Death of ego. I have absolutely nothing to lose, not with Jesus’ cloak of righteousness on my shoulders. It’s saying - You can win the argument. You can win the dance of who’s the most righteous. I’ve already died in Christ’s death, forgiven and free, and that’s the only win I need, the only one I can’t lose.
Now to be clear, I’m not saying in a situation of abuse, to be a literal doormat. God is not saying - if you’re being abused you just have to deal with it, 77x over. Because remember, the person in this story who is being asked to forgive is actually a person who’s in a position of a great deal of power. It’s someone who has the power to forgive a debt and refuses to. That’s different from someone being powerless and asked to keep quiet and keep their head down.
And likewise, there might be people in our life that no matter how much we want to, we can’t find the capacity to forgive them, and it’s not my place to tell you that you have to do it anyways, whether you want to or not. That wouldn’t be genuine forgiveness anyways. Forgiveness is always a miracle, it does not make sense mathematically, like in this parable, it comes from outside of you, it surprises you, it happens to you, it’s not something we can force our way through.
And: forgiveness is good for us. Regarding the servant who didn’t forgive after being forgiven, Jesus says: “in anger his lord handed him over to be tortured until he would pay his entire debt. So my heavenly Father will also do to every one of you, if you do not forgive your brother or sister from your heart.’” Seething in resentment, in bitterness, feeling committed to figuring out the math of who owes who what - it’s torture. Plain and simple. If you do not forgive, though you yourself have been forgiven, you will be tortured by it. That’s something we know from experience.
I’ve sermonized enough about why we ought to forgive one another. But it takes a miracle of the Holy Spirit to actually soften our hearts and throw away the scorecards. Forgiveness is a gift, it’s grace, from God. Thank God that Jesus throws away his scorecards whether we manage to do so or not.
With our foolish unforgiving servant, if he had realized for one second how very forgiven he was - how much ten thousand talents is, how much debt was put aside - maybe he would’ve had a more forgiving heart towards his fellow man. But the master in the story didn’t wait to find out before forgiving him. While we cling to our scorecards, even to our death, God throws them in the shredder and remembers them no more. You and I owe so much to God - your whole life is a gift, that you and I are here at all in this church right now is a miracle - but there is nothing to be repaid. A gift without strings, to be received and enjoyed and sometimes, by the grace of God, through forgiveness, given away.
Amen.
