You won’t be surprised to know I’m going to preach about forgiveness from this passage! It became a live issue in one of my churches recently, when a local drug addict stole a donation box from the premises at the end of a coffee morning. Within the church, we’ve had different opinions on whether to support a police investigation and possible prosecution, but what we are all united on is the importance of forgiving the offender.
It’s worth beginning today by remembering what the word ‘forgive’ means. In the New Testament, to forgive is to release. Like this parable, it is often compared to a financial debt. To forgive someone is to release them from the debt to you – their moral debt, consisting of what they owe you because they have wronged you.
If you get nothing else from this sermon, please understand that to forgive is to release. It is not to excuse or to explain away, it is to release. You no longer consider the other party as owing anything to you, due to their wrong actions.
And in a sense, forgiveness releases us, too. If we hold on to bitterness, then it becomes like a chain wrapped around us. Bitterness limits us. It traps us. It imprisons us. When we release someone from what they owe us due to sin, we also release ourselves from the chains of bitterness.
With those basics established, let’s look at what Jesus teaches us about the importance of forgiveness in this parable.
Firstly, forgiveness is unlimited:
21 Then Peter came to Jesus and asked, ‘Lord, how many times shall I forgive my brother or sister who sins against me? Up to seven times?’
22 Jesus answered, ‘I tell you, not seven times, but seventy-seven times.
Peter probably thinks he’s being generous here. Some Jewish teachers said you could only forgive up to three instances of premeditated sin[1]. Seven times therefore makes him pretty holy, doesn’t it? Get to eight times and then the vengeance can start?
No, says Jesus. When he says we should forgive ‘seventy-seven times’, he is explicitly reversing what the Old Testament character Lamech said, not about forgiveness, but about vengeance:
23 Lamech said to his wives,
‘Adah and Zillah, listen to me;
wives of Lamech, hear my words.
I have killed a man for wounding me,
a young man for injuring me.
24 If Cain is avenged seven times,
then Lamech seventy-seven times.’
Lamech’s seventy-seven vengeances are turned into Jesus’ seventy-seven acts of forgiveness.
Many of us know what this is like. We keep running into the person who hurt us. The old feelings begin to rise up. Maybe it’s the memories of old wounds; sometimes these people continue to injure us. The process of forgiveness has to begin all over again.
It’s no surprise in cases of people being hurt all over again that our society has come up with ‘cancel culture’. If we can just ban the people we think are wicked, those who say offensive things, then perhaps that will prevent future, lasting hurt.
But it doesn’t. Because cancel culture tells us that certain people cannot and will not be forgiven. As Christians, we have to deny that. Further, it doesn’t deal with the lasting pain. That can only be healed by releasing people through forgiveness.
Remember: we do not excuse people when we forgive them. They have done wrong, period. And our forgiveness only becomes effective if they receive it, confess what their sinful actions, and turn away from them. They may show this in a desire to make restitution. In the Old Testament, wrongdoers had to put right their actions. In the New Testament, remember the story of Zaccheus, the corrupt tax collector. When he met Jesus, he immediately arranged to repay what he had cheated out of people – and then some.
But whatever the actions of the other party, whether they accept our forgiveness or not, it is our Christian duty to offer it. And, if necessary, to keep on offering it.
Remember: Lamech took vengeance seventy-seven times, but vengeance belongs to the Lord, not us. We cannot be trusted with it. We forgive: seventy-seven times, if necessary. That is, unlimited. Our forgiveness is to be like the unlimited refills of drinks you get in places like a Toby Carvery or a Harvester.
Secondly, unlimited forgiveness is God’s model:
Here’s the issue: although the amount of forgiving God calls us to do can seem daunting at times, it is still nothing to the amount of forgiving he has done of us and of others. The master was owed ten thousand bags of gold by his servant; that servant was owed not ten thousand bags but a hundred, and not bags of gold but silver coins (verses 24, 28). There is no comparison.
This is the thing we need to remember throughout our Christian lives, and especially when we are finding it hard to forgive someone. How much has God forgiven me? And if he has forgiven me, what does that say about his desire for me to forgive others? If he has forgiven me at the cost of his Son dying on the Cross, what does that say to me when I am reluctant to forgive someone?
Now the snag with this as I see it is that some people will say, I’m a pretty good person, God hasn’t had to forgive me all that much, but someone else has done something far worse to me than I have ever done to anybody else. Hence, I am being asked to do something greater than has been done to me.
If that’s you, then listen to these words from the evangelist and apologist Andy Bannister:
Imagine that you died and arrived in heaven. An angel meets you at the gates of heaven and says, “Welcome, so glad you could make it, we’ve arranged a special surprise for you”. And he escorts you to what appears to be a cinema. He guides you to screen 1, sits you down alone, and gives you a large bucket of popcorn. “Welcome to the Theatre of Judgement” says the angel, smiles, then disappears as a movie begins to play.
Lo and behold, it’s the movie of your life—everything you’ve ever thought, said, or done is up there on the screen. Some bits are great, other bits make you cringe with embarrassment—all the stupid decisions, all the rude hurtful things you said about others, all those secret thoughts and selfish ambitions. All the things you did—but also the things you didn’t do.
Finally the movie ends and as the credits roll, the angel reappears. “Hope you enjoyed that,” he says cheerfully. “Now we’re going to have a second screening, and everybody else featured in the movie is going to come and watch it—all your family, your friends, your enemies, your neighbours, colleagues—everybody is going to get to watch every little detail of your life”.
Who would want that? Who would want to show that movie to their friends, family, to their dear old granny? Most of us who are really honest with ourselves know there are things deep within us that we don’t want anyone to know about—and the Bible has a word for that stuff, for that inner brokenness we try to hide from others, even ourselves. The Bible calls it “sin”.
When we are struggling to forgive or are unwilling to forgive, let’s look at ourselves. Are we really so great? And let’s look at the Cross. How much has God forgiven us in Christ?
In the light of that, why on earth would we refuse to forgive?
Because thirdly, Christians failing to forgive is a scandal:
The amount the unforgiving servant demands of his fellow servant is about one fifth of what would be paid for him in the slave market. It’s possibly only a millionth of what he owes the master[2]. Yet he makes such a scene about it. The other servants are scandalised that one who has received so much grace and mercy from the master fails to act with a comparable sense of grace.
And the world is scandalised when it sees Christians acting with a lack of grace to other people. What witness is it when we act with cruelty towards others? What witness is it when we support a politician whose policies lead to the withdrawal of healthcare from the poor, the separation of children from parents, the financial suffering of many for the benefit of the few super-rich?
Increasingly, the world looks at Christians who behave like that and they say, these people don’t remotely look like Jesus, and they certainly don’t follow his teaching.
And when that happens, the world – whom we are supposed to be reaching with the Gospel – takes one look at Christianity and says, no thank you very much. We do immeasurable damage to the cause of the Gospel when we think we can hoover up the forgiveness and grace of God for ourselves, while treating others with brutality and malice. There are far too many so-called ‘deconversion’ stories around of people who heard something of the beauty of the Christian message but walked out on church because they saw a church that would not treat others with the grace they themselves had received.
Has it ever been more urgent for the church to meditate upon the Cross, to ponder just how much we have been forgiven, and then to let that dictate how we treat others?
Conclusion
I’m acutely aware this is a tough subject. Forgiving those who have hurt us can be difficult. We need the example of Jesus and his Cross to remind us what he has done for us, and to motivate us to be Christlike in this matter.
I know that forgiveness doesn’t always come quickly. And in fact, sometimes we are more concerned to push a victim into forgiveness than we are to acknowledge the wickedness of what has been done to them. The end result is that instead of forgiving, the person who has been hurt does something subtly different but damaging. That is, they suppress their anger rather than release it. The danger in suppressing our anger is that we push it down like a Jack-in-the-box. At a later point it will spring up again with great force. And if we work to keep suppressing anger, it will come out in some other form. One such way can be certain expressions of depression.
So we come back to that theme of forgiveness being about release. Release, not suppression. We may need to feel the anger and then let it go if we are to forgive in a healthy way. When we do that, we reflect Jesus.
The other day, some words of NT Wright were posted on Facebook. They were put there in commemoration of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, but they seem fitting for this theme, too:
One might say that this is the vocation of the church: to take the sadness of the world and give back no anger; the sorrow of the world and give back no bitterness; the pain of the world and not sink into self-pity; but to return forgiveness and love, blessing and joy.
[1] Craig S Keener, The Gospel of Matthew: A Socio-Rhetorical Commentary, p456.
[2] Keener, p460.
Big Circumstance 