Grace,
mercy and peace be to you from God our Father, and from our Lord Jesus Christ.
The sermon
text for today was inspired by the Holy Spirit through the apostle St Matthew. And
we read from this gospel reading today:
I forgave
you all that debt because you pleaded with me. And should not you have had
mercy on your fellow servant, as I had mercy on you?
Prayer: Lord
Jesus, send to all of us today your living and abundant Holy Spirit, to me that
I may preach well, and to all of us that we may hear well. Amen.
In Matthew chapter 18, we read a
lot of things about the forgiveness of sins. And last week in our Gospel reading,
we read about how Jesus gives to his listeners and to us some very specific
instructions about how to go about reconciling with a person who has sinned
against us.
And our reading from today
follows on from that. And so at the beginning of the reading, we kind of get a
sense in which Peter has been carefully listening to what Jesus has been saying
and that he’s been carefully thinking things through. And he might be thinking
about all kinds of situations in his own life where he has been unwilling to
forgive people who have sinned against him. And so he says to Jesus: Lord,
how often will my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? As many as seven
times? This is as if Peter wants to say, “Look, Jesus, I could be spending
a lot of time following this process and these instructions, seeking to be
reconciled to these other people. How long should I keep doing it?”
But Jesus doesn’t want him to
keep records, and keep counting. Jesus says: I do not say to you seven
times, but seventy-seven times.
Now, this whole parable today,
hits at something right at the centre of our Christian faith. This has to do
with something that Christians throughout the world talk about every single day
that the world goes around. This parable explains for us a certain part of the
Lord’s Prayer: Forgive us our sins and we forgive those who sin against us. Here
in the Lord’s Prayer, Jesus actually gives us the words to pray, and teaches
and instructs about exactly what kind of things we should pray about. And this
is right at the heart of things: Forgive us our sins.
Now, in some sense this part of
the Lord’s Prayer is so incredibly important. When we come to God in prayer, we
are entering into his holy throne room, but we do it as sinners. In a sense,
the only people who enter into this throne room to speak with God are sinners,
because they are the only people that Jesus actually teaches to pray. There’s
no one on the earth that Jesus teaches this prayer to, except sinners.
So when we come to God in prayer,
because we are sinners, Jesus teaches us in the Lord’s Prayer that this is not
the normal way that things work. Normally, if a person is going to approach
God, they have to be completely and totally holy and without sin. If we are not
completely and totally perfect, then praying to God is a completely dangerous
thing. We could be completely consumed by God’s anger, and we have every right
to be.
So if we are going to come to God
as we are, then something needs to be done about this sin that is in us. We
need to realise that if God is going to listen to our prayers at all, that he
is going to have to do something about this sin, and overlook this sin. We’re
going to have to ask him to forgive it.
Now, right at the heart of our
understanding of prayer is the understanding that we enter into God’s holy
perfect presence, only because he forgives us our sins. And without this
forgiveness of sins, we are totally unable to pray at all. Everything we pray
for or pray about is heard by God completely by his mercy, by his grace,
because of his free love.
But also, what’s the reason why
God the Father forgives us our sins? We learn this in the first word of the
Lord’s Prayer. Can anyone think of what the first word of the Lord’s Prayer is?
It’s that little word: our. Jesus is the one who teaches us to pray, and
he is completely and totally sinless. And he knows full well that we are
completely and totally sinful. And so when he teaches us to pray, he teaches us
to say not “my Father”, but “our Father.” We don’t say “my Father”, because God
is not my Father by myself and because of my works, and my worthiness, and my
sinlessness. Even when we go to our room and shut the door, we don’t change the
words of the Lord’s Prayer and say, “My Father”. Instead we say “Our Father”
because every prayer we make is never a prayer that we pray by ourselves, but
it is a prayer that we pray together with our perfect, sinless, holy brother,
Jesus himself. Jesus himself comes and prays with us, and he joins in with our
prayer, and our prayers are simply joining in with his prayer. And it’s because
of Jesus, and his holiness, his purity, his sacrificial death, his wonderful
resurrection, that we can join in with him and approach God’s throne with
boldness and confidence.
So you can see that the forgiveness
of sins goes right to the heart of what it means to be a Christian and what it
means to pray. Without the forgiveness of sins, we would never be able to pray
in the first place. And this forgiveness of sins we can’t earn. We can’t go
around doing certain things and when we clock up enough points at the end of
the day, then God would forgive us. No—forgiveness of sins is totally free. We
receive the forgiveness of sins, completely and totally because of Jesus and
his work, and not because of our works. In the bible, this is called being justified
by faith. God forgives us freely because of what Jesus has done for us, and
not because of what we have done. And so St Paul says: Since we have been
justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.
Through him we have also obtained access by faith into this grace in which we
stand, and we rejoice in hope of the glory of God. Did you hear this word
“access”? Because we are justified by faith, and have peace with God through
our Lord Jesus Christ, God gives us access to him and to all his gifts, and
especially in prayer. We have completely free and total access to God and his
presence.
In our Gospel reading today,
Jesus teaches this by showing us a person who owes to a king ten thousand talents.
We read: The kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who wished to
settle accounts with his servants. When he began to settle, one was brought to
him who owed him ten thousand talents. We have to understand that ten
thousand talents is an enormous amount of money. A talent was about twenty
years’ wages for a labourer. Now I tried to work out what a fruit-picker might
be paid over twenty years here in Australia, and I think that this amount would
be about $720,000. But here in the reading, the servant doesn’t owe the king
one talent, but ten thousand talents. The amount here is not 20 years of work
but 200,000 years of work, 20 years times 10,000. So $720,000 times 10,000 is
$72,000,000,000. This is a completely insane amount of money! Even the richest
of us would find it difficult to pay to the king this kind of money.
We read: Since he could not
pray, his master ordered him to be sold, with his wife and children and all
that he had, and payment to be made. So the servant fell on his knees, imploring
him, “Have patience with me, and I will pay you everything.” Did you hear
that? It says that the servant simply couldn’t pay. Of course he couldn’t pay.
Do we realise too that we can’t pay God off? We can’t slip God a $3000 dollar
bottle of wine for him to slip in his draw. It doesn’t work like that. We are
completely at God’s mercy. And not only that, but we read that in the parable,
the king’s solution to this problem was to sell the man, with his wife and
children as a slave. Not only can’t we pay God off, but we owe him our very
life. The price of our life is in his hands.
And so the servant begs the king,
and asks him to be patient. Have patience with me, and I will pay you
everything. No, the servant probably won’t be able to pay him everything,
but if he does he is going to have to rely on the king to be patient. Do you
realise that we are here today because God has been patient with us? Do you
realise that the only reason that you have been allowed to continue your life
today is because God is patient? What are you going to render to the Lord for
all his goodness to you, as the psalm says?
And we read in the parable: And
out of pity for him, the master of that servant released him and forgave him
the debt. What an amazing thing that this is! Have you ever been forgiven a
$72 billion debt? Can you imagine this? And yet, this is what we receive every
Sunday in the church. We are baptised people—we have been baptised in the name
of the Father, of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. And this means that our
unpayable debt has been completely cancelled. We receive the forgiveness of
sins through the absolution spoken by the pastor every Sunday in church. This
means that our unpayable debt has been completely cancelled. We receive the
body and blood of Christ, given for you and shed for you for [what?.. For] the
forgiveness of sins. This means that our unpayable debt has been completely
cancelled. And now, think, if this is what our completely, totally merciful God
has given to us, what do you owe God now? You owe him nothing because he
cancelled debt. But at the same time, because he has cancelled the debt, we owe
him our lives and our very selves, everything that we are and everything that
we do. But let’s understand this properly, it’s not as if God needs our bodies
and our souls and our hearts for himself as a kind of payment. Yes, he created
us, but we are so corrupted and fallen, that we have to admit to God that our
hearts aren’t worth very much! If we pray to God, I give you my soul, my heart,
my all – do we really think so highly of ourselves that in God’s sight we are
really offering him something that is valuable to him? God is like an old
beggar going through the junk and all the left overs at the dump, and he has
his big stick and he sees us like rusty old cans and picks us up one by one and
shoves us in his bag: baked beans over here, spaghetti over here, dog food over
here. But then God values as so incredibly precious. It’s a bit like collecting
bottles and cashing them in for 10c at the recycling depot. Can you imagine
what Jesus and his life and his blood would be cashed in for? It’s much more
than $72 billion! In $72 billion times $72 billion! Jesus’ blood and his life
pays us overL a thousand upon a thousand times.
And so, this brings us back to
our reading. Peter says: How often will my brother sin against me, and I
forgive him? As many as seven times? Jesus said to him, “I do not tell you
seven times, but seventy-seven times.
Jesus calls us not to count. As
St Paul says in 1 Corinthians 13: Love keeps no record of wrongs.
And here we come back to the
Lord’s Prayer, where it says two things: not just forgive us our sins, but
forgive us our sins, as we forgive those who sin against us.
At the end of the Lord’s Prayer,
Jesus says: For if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father
will also forgive you, but if you do not forgive others their trespasses,
neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.
This is something that can really
worry us. We might think—I’m not reconciled to everyone I know. Is God going to
reject me? Does God only forgive me when I forgive other people. No—that’s not
what’s being said. God doesn’t forgive you because of your work in forgiving
people. God is the one who forgives first, and he is the one who forgives us
perfectly. And when we learn what this forgiveness is and learn to value it for
what it really is, we can’t but help to forgive other people. This is what
happens when God forgives us—if God has forgiven us such a huge insurmountable
debt, what’s a few little scraps that other people owe us?
St John says: In this is love,
not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the
propitiation for our sins.
And so now, the very fact that we
are forgiven and loved by God, means that God has taught us what true love and
true forgiveness is. We have experienced it, and how grateful we surely must be
for it!
But now, Jesus gives us strict
warning. He says to us: OK, I know that you are not full of the love that I
have shown to you, but I am going to teach this love to you day by day. You are
going to learn that each day is a day in which your sins are going to be forgiven.
But also, if you refuse to forgive other people, if you want to hold on to your
grudges, and calculate all the things that other people owe you, then it’s
clear that you simply don’t understand what I have done for you.
We sometimes say: Forgive and
forget. And God doesn’t have a bad memory when it comes to our sins. But then
what forgiveness means, is not that God forgets our sins, but that he never
acts on them. This is the same when it comes to us: we might know that someone
has sinned against us, but are we going to hold it against them, or are we
going to do go to them?
We read in our reading how the
wicked servant goes out and chokes another man and demands that he be paid for
his little debt of hundred denarii—a piddling amount in comparison with what he
was forgiven. And when the king finds out that the servant refused to cancel
his debts to other people, he says: You wicked servant! I forgave you all
that debt because you pleaded with me. And should not you have had mercy on
your fellow servant, as I had mercy on you?” And in anger his master delivered
him to the jailers, until he should pay all his debt. So also my heavenly
Father will do to every one of you, if you do not forgive your brother from
your heart.
We have to realise that not
everyone whom we forgive will receive our forgiveness. We’re not talking about
being reconciled, but about forgiving. God will not send us to hell because
other people didn’t want to be forgiven by us. But I don’t know about you, but
the words that hit me the most in this passage is where Jesus says: from
your heart. Not simply with words, and externally, but with the heart,
internally. And I’m sure that you know just how hard this is to do.
Don’t despair! Jesus forgives you
once again, and cancels your debt once again. But he also sends you again into
the world to learn one step at a time what it means to be his child and to be a
person who is empowered to forgive others. And he warns us that if we refuse to
forgive and have no desire from our heart to forgive, then we haven’t learnt
what it means that God forgives us, and it would be only a matter of time when
we become so bitter, that we can’t even stand being in God’s presence anymore.
And this is something that grieves God’s heart deeply. But we also learn here,
that just as God calls us to forgive others from our heart, what does this
teach us about his forgiveness? Of course, we learn that this forgiveness comes
from his heart, and that it pours and flows to us from his heart. And this
should always be a source of encouragement to us!
Amen.
Dear Lord Jesus, we thank you for
the wonderful forgiveness of sins that we have received from you and from the
Father and from the Holy Spirit. Open our eyes to just what a precious gift
this is. Teach us and lead us through the power of your Holy Spirit to forgive
others and to shine this brilliant light into all the dark corners in the
world, just as you have forgiven us. Amen.
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