Conflict is part of life. In every relationship, every group of people, there are disagreements. It happens in families; it happens in schools and factories and offices. It happens in clubs – and even in churches. And sometimes it has to happen – whether it’s carrying out the rubbish or complying the Protection of Vulnerable Groups guidelines, sometimes people need to be challenged. So we all know something about this thing that happens when relationships are strained. Peter the fisherman turned disciple certainly did. Excitable, impetuous, the sort of guy who would say what he thought first and ask questions later – I dare say he attracted a fair share of criticism. Later on he even had a bust-up with Paul. So he knew what it was to be offended at someone, as he asks “How often do I have to forgive my brother? Seven time, maybe?” He thought that was pretty good. The Rabbis recommended forgiving 3 times. Jesus says “no, seventy times seven” – 490 times, but of course the point is that you will lose count before you get anywhere near that number.
So to get the point across about forgiveness, Jesus tells a story… about a king, and two servants. Bear in mind the story is not an allegory – so we’re not supposed to try to find meaning in every detail. And it’s not a factual narrative either – so we shouldn't try to guess what the servant was thinking. It is a parable – and what we are meant to do as we hear it is figure out the one main point.
In the parable, the first servant was released from a ridiculous amount of debt; “ten thousand talents.” A talent was worth “about 20 years of a day labourer’s wages”. Let's do some sums. The Minimum wage is £7.20/h, that means £288/wk, or £14976/yr. One talent was twenty years worth of minimum wage, or £299520; and the servant in the story owed ten thousand talents – £2,995,200,000. When the first servant says “I will pay you back” he was desperate – and offering the impossible. It would take him two hundred thousand years to earn enough to pay the king back – and the Romans hadn’t invented the National Lottery yet. But the king cancelled the debt. “You don't’ need to pay it back.” That is God’s heart; that is God’s love. That is like our situation. That is how we have been treated by our heavenly Father.
That is what the cross is all about. The cross cleans us up. The Cross destroys our criminal record. The Cross pays our bill. The Cross gets Satan off our backs. The cross breaks the hold of sin in our lives. It sets us free. It ransoms us . Through the Cross, God bears the cost of forgiving us our sins. As the passage says the first servant owed his master nearly £3 Billion, and as there are over 7 billion people in the world today, that means that if we were trying to but a monetary value on it, the cost God bears in writing off our debt, our sin, for just our generation is £21 quintillion (£21x1018 ). But of cousre money is only an illustration.
There are a number of things we are not supposed to do.
1. Some of us carry a lot of shame. We have done things, said things, been places, been in relationships, that leave us feeling a great deal of shame and embarrassment. What we owed, to use the picture from the parable – was an amount we could never pay back. But we are not supposed to live with the embarrassment, the shame, the guilt, over the debt we owe. God wants to forgive us, so we need to come to him and receive that forgiveness. Yet even after we have trusted in Jesus, some of us live with shame and guilt, all the time. Most mornings I pray three prayers: One is “Come Holy Spirit.” The second is “Set a watch over my lips.” The third is called The Jesus prayer: “Lord Jesus Christ, son of God have mercy on me, a sinner.” I need to pray the last one because I am aware of the ways that the second one hasn’t been answered! It may just be the consciousness of stuff inside us that is just difficult to tame. Or it may be about big mistakes and sins. We truggle with guilt. But we are not meant to be living with guilt. God forgives us.
2. And we are not supposed to try to trade with God. We try to make a deal with God. “I’ll try harder; I’ll give to OXFAM; I’ll go to church.” But simply, that’s not going to swing it. We just don’t have what it takes to pay God back, to make amends. We need to receive God’s forgiveness. But God cancelled the debt. “You don't need to pay it back.” That is God’s forgiveness. We need to receive it.
But Jesus isn’t talking about cheap grace. In the Bible, God’s forgiveness has a transforming effect on our lives. “Because of God's great mercy to us I appeal to you: Offer yourselves as a living sacrifice to God, dedicated to his service and pleasing to him” (Romans 12. 1 GNB) Forgiveness leads to surrender, through the process of love. Jesus once was invited to a posh meal – and in Jesus’ time, if you invited a guest of honour to your house, your guests would eat the food, but other people could come in and listen to the conversation. So this woman turned up and poured ointment on Jesus, and began crying and washing his feet with her hair. Jesus said that how much we have been forgiven reflects in how much we love. (Luke 7. 36-50) If we love him, we keep his commands. (John 14. 15)
That is the only deal you can make with God. You receive his forgiveness and his transforming Spirit into you life. And in so doing, you surrender your life to his forgiveness and his transforming Spirit. God makes us different to the world round about us. It means being shaped by the character of a forgiving and loving God.
The servant in the story as he is coming out from his interview with the king, bumps into another servant, who owes him a hundred denarii; a denarius was the usual daily wage of a day labourer (£7.20/hour =£57.60 so 100 days = £5760). So it wasn’t a few pence – it was a serious debt. The cost of a good second-hand car. But it was only a tiny fraction (0.0002% or two millionths!) of what the first servant had been forgiven. He attacks, threatens and finally imprisons the other servant. And as a result, the master backtracks and un-cancels his debt. For someone who has received God’s huge and costly forgiveness, the most inappropriate thing, the most unfitting thing that we can do, is to harbour any unforgivingness, resentment, ill-feeling or grudge, towards another human being.
Now, we sometimes struggle with "forgiveness". It seems harsh that someone brought up by a real "wicked step-mother" & half-starved as a small child, should have to forgive those who caused that harm. It seems harsh that the person who suffers through medical negligence or drunk driving should forgive that doctor or drunk driver. It's as though you're asking me to say "it doesn't matter." But forgiveness doesn't mean "it doesn't matter." It does matter. Perhaps that's why Jesus said the second servant owed over £5,000. It is a big deal. Forgiveness says "what you did was really wrong, and caused real pain & maybe lasting damage. It was serious, but I forgive you. I give up the right to get even. I give up the right to feel resentful. I give up the right to keep hurting you back. I give up the right to know you're losing sleep over what you did. I give up the right to damage your reputation." For us, as for God, there is a cost attached to forgiving. But the cost of not forgiving is so much worse.
Corrie Ten Boom was a Dutch Christian who was imprisoned in Ravensbruck concentration camp for hiding Jews during the Nazi occupation. Her father and older sister died in that camp. She was starved, humiliated and tortured. Then after the war at a Church Service, she recognised a man walking towards her to shake her hand: he had been one of her guards. Overcome with feelings of hatred, she hesitated, then stretched out her hand towards the man: it was then, in the act of obedience, that the feelings of resentment and anger left her.
If there is a behaviour that has the potential to loosen our grasp of salvation, to rob us of the benefits of our relationship with God, it is unforgivingness.. It can imprison us. It can torture us. It can cause us to be obsessed with the person we have come to resent. When we don' t forgive someone, it can be like allowing them to live rent-free in our heads. It can make us physically ill. the person who said "Not forgiving someone is the drinking poison & hoping the other person will get sick." If you are struggling with something physically or emotionally, it is always yourself "is there someone I haven't forgiven?" Especially if there is a connexion between a trauma event and the dis-ease.
So the Creed says “We believe in the forgiveness of sins.” And as be believe it, we need to live it! I want to say that all of us can walk out of this building today, knowing that we are forgiven. Maybe you’ve lived by trying to make a deal with God. Maybe despite being a Christian you are still living with shame over stuff in the past and present. God wants to forgive you. Maybe you are feeling resentful today because of something that happened, maybe years ago: you need to let it go. Maybe you carry pain because of something that happened to you. The fact that you are forgiven, can release you to let it go, and healing can come.
Forgiveness isn’t a feeling it’s a choice; and it needs to become a habit as we do it over and over again.
© Gilmour Lilly March 2017
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