Forgiveness: Matthew 18. 21-35

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

We believe in the Holy Catholic Church, the Communion of Saints

Opening Activity: Discuss in small groups

Church…. What is it?

Reading 1: Colossians 1. 15-29

We move on to the second part of the creed. The first part is all about God - Father, Son & Holy Spirit. Who God is, what God does... Now we look at what happens when we encounter God... Church, Forgiveness, Resurrection, and Eternal life…These are all outworkings of believing in (and knowing) God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit...

At first glance, “The Church” seems the odd one out in all this. We begin by saying we believe in God, father Son and Holy Spirit. We end by saying we believe in forgiveness, resurrection, eternal life. But in the middle, we believe in this “Church” business … Sunday services, Missionary prayer letters and tea and biscuits.  From the sublime to the ridiculous! 

The word “Church” in our Bibles translates the Greek word ecclesia – assembly. Literally, the group called out. In ancient Greek cities, when an important decision had to be made the town crier would call everyone – at least all the adult free men – to meet. The same thing happened for great festivals and sacrifices in the Old Testament: the people would assemble to worship. That is the word Paul uses in our reading…And he uses the word in the singular: the Church; the assembly; the worldwide body that has Jesus as its head. And Jesus uses the word in the same way when he says “On this rock I will build my church”. (Matthew 16. 18)

So what is the Church?

• Not a place, but people. I shouldn’t have to say that. But I will anyway. (After all we still have a sign outside that calls this building “Church”.) When the King James Version talks about “robbers of churches” (Acts 19. 37) it is actually wrongly translating a totally different word that really means temple-robbers.
• Not just any people, but God’s people. And in fact, God has always had “his People” and has always chosen to relate to and enter into covenant with “his People”. Although it translates the word assembly, our English, Scots and Germanic word “Church” or “Kirk” comes from the Greek word “Kurios” meaning “Lord” and it was invented because Church is the people who belong to the Lord.
• The Church is not just a collective noun for "all the Christians in the world." The, Church, the people of God, is an entity in its own right. It is a “Thing.” The Church is there. Philosophers sometimes talk about “nominalism & realism” in the use of language. "Geography" is the name we give, to the study of what we know about the physical features of places on earth, and how people have developed and used its resources. Geography doesn't exist - it isn't REAL. Mountains,oceans and cities are REAL. Church isn’t just the name we give to the vague idea of a group of Christians. It is real.
• The Church is not an institution or organisation but an organism. It is a living thing. It’s not just for people. It is people. Of course it needs an element of structure, leadership, and so forth. The structure – the leadership, the particular way a group of Christians do something, is not in itself the Church. Any more than some of our family traditions are the same as family. When I was a kid we always had Christmas at home, we always had our tea at 5.30 when Dad came home from work, and we always did what Dad said even if we tried it on with Mum… But that was simply the way we structured our life together. We were family. We belonged together.
• The Church is not merely a natural, human thing but a supernatural and spiritual thing. It is not merely something we do in response to the Gospel, But something God does, as we respond to the Gospel. (1 Cor 12. 13: “In one Spirit we were all baptised into one body”) It is an ongoing, living miracle of unity and reconciliation. What Paul means in verse 20 is that through Jesus we are right with God – and we are are as a consequence all reconciled with one another – Jews and non-jews who used to be considered aReading 1:s outsiders are now insiders to a relationship with God and therefore to the people of god. (Eph 2. 14-17 ¹⁴“For he himself is our peace, who has made the two groups one and has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility. ¹⁷ He came and preached peace to you who were far away and peace to those who were near. ¹⁸For through him we both have access to the Father by one Spirit.”) The Church is Christ’s body. It is a result of what Jesus has done on the Cross. It exists because of what God has done.
• It looks not inward but outward. The Church has spiritual authority derived from Jesus who is over all things "whether thrones or dominions or principalities or authorities;" but its authority is not about grabbing but giving; not about self-advancement but self-sacrifice. Not coercive or exploitative but generous. Paul says he completes "what is lacking in Christ's afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the church". That doesn't mean there is more to do to put us right with God. What it does mean is that Jesus continues to suffer as his body, the Church suffers. Before he was a Christian, Paul made the Church – and Jesus – suffer. Now as a missional leader his not afraid to take his share of Jesus' sufferings. The Church's victory in mission is accomplished through sacrifice. When we were in Gloucester there was a Pastor who advertised his healing ministry with the question "Why suffer?" Of course it's a rhetorical question. But the answer is simple. "Because Jesus suffered". The world wide church does triumph, & heal & grow, But it does so through living sacrificially and generously.

When the emperor Constantine became a Christian & tried to “Christianise” the Empire (about 300 years after Christ) it made life a lot easier for the Christians. "No more persecution, guys!" But what resulted was a disaster – because the Church became an institution, it became humanly resourced, and it moved away from the Jesus way, the outward looking way of sacrifice & generosity, and instead began to me coercion & conquest.

So we believe in the Holy Catholic Church, the communion of saints. One Church, that belongs to God (that's what “Holy” means), and exists all over the world (that is what “catholic” actually means – the “hol” in catholic is the same as the “hol” in holistic and hologram and in our world “Whole”). It is the Church across the whole world. The Hcurch is “The communion of saints.” It is the shared lfie of the saints. We may not always be that saintly but we are all “saints. We belevie in one church which is the shared life of all the disciples of Jesus all over the world. We are all apart of it; we all contribute to it; we all benefit from it. And the Church never loses a member by death. The communion of the saints, lasts forever. The church is not only on earth but in heaven. What a privilege to be part of that amazing community/family/body.

But what is the practical, concrete difference that believing in this Church makes to our lives.

Paul – and Jesus – also use the word ecclesia in another way. ways. Paul speaks about the churches, and refers to the church in a city, the church in someone’s home. You will find that in Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, 1 and 2 Thessalonian.) Jesus talks about sorting disputes between his followers by taking them “to the Church”. That has to be a locally focussed gathering of people. It is in the local Church that we our faith in the holy catholic church, the church all over the world, finds solidness, becomes thick and visible and practical. Anglican Renewal Ministries was a Church organisation that had as its strap line at one time “To be real it’s got to be local...”

If we believe in the church, the holy, catholic church, the Communion of saints, then that affects how we live in the LOCAL CHURCH...

The local Church must be

• people of God not a building.
• A real thing; not just a name for something we do together
• organic not organisation; family not an institution.
• Supernatural not merely physical...As Chris said last week "it is the Holy spirit that makes the difference between a meeting of the Church & any other meeting". The Spirit makes it a community of love and reconciliation; the Spirit makes it a community of practical care; the Spirit makes it a community of healing.
• generous and sacrificial not exploitative or manipulative.

The Church began, with 120 people receiving the Holy Spirit in power, and going out to speak about Jesus; four thousand responded by turning to God and being baptised, and becoming the first ever local church. The life they lived in that local church in Jerusalem was a miniature version , of the one holy catholic church. We hear about their life together in our closing reading.

Reading 1: Acts 2. 42-47

© G Lilly March 2017