Over the past 10 years, our nation has witnessed some remarkable expressions of forgiveness. I want to share two with you.
One, in 2015, nine people were gunned down by a white supremacist at Emmanuel AME Church in Charleston. Some of the families, when standing face to face with the killer Dylann Roof, rightly expressed their anger, but then they called Dylann to repent, and they prayed for him. Many of them said things like, “We have no room for hate. We have to forgive.” Anthony Thompson, whose wife was killed, said to Dylann Roof, “I forgive you. My family forgives you.” Imagine that, looking in the face of murderous racism and saying, “I forgive you.” Absolutely stunning.
More recently, this past year, Erika Kirk stood before millions of people in person and online at her husband’s funeral. She forgave his killer. Look at these words. She said,
“That man, that young man … I forgive him. I forgive him because it was what Christ did and is what Charlie would do. The answer to hate is not hate.”
Followers of Jesus, whatever your political differences, we know this is the way of Jesus. This is the call for all of us. But unfortunately, we live in a culture where forgiveness has actually become controversial. For some people, forgiveness is unforgivable. It is a sign of weakness, not of strength. It is a sign of vice, not virtue. Of oppression, not compassion. A couple of examples:
President Trump, in the same funeral, spoke these words:
“I hate my opponents, and I don’t want the best for them.”
A striking contrast between followers of Jesus and non-followers of Jesus. And he’s not alone.
Look at this expression on Twitter:
“Forgiveness is completely overrated and just serves to create power imbalances. ‘I forgive you’ = ‘I am morally superior to you’ however you look at it.”
To forgive is to claim moral superiority.
Again, many today view forgiveness as a sign of weakness, a trivializing of evil, a delusional response. Like, “Forgive and forget, and everything will be rosy.” Or a cover for abuse: “I can hurt you because you have to forgive me.”
One author in the New York Times calls forgiveness “an extension of the patriarchy,” a means of exposing women to unsafe conditions, a harming of the victim. A call to forgive, from this perspective, is a call pile guilt on top of someone who’s already been hurt. Is this what Jesus is teaching?
When he modeled and expressed forgiveness in the face of abuse and hate, was he trivializing evil? Was he multiplying victims? Was he piling guilt on top of people who had been hurt? No. We desperately need to see Jesus and hear Jesus this morning. Would you pray with me?
Our Father, the relationships that you give us are sources of some of our greatest joys. There is nothing on earth like sharing a good meal with friends, with family. Even walking through suffering with a loved one is so different. Playing together, laughing together, worshiping together. You made us to be together.
But these same relationships can at times cause unimaginable pain. When we say harsh things to one another, when someone is intimidating, manipulating, humiliating, or when someone chooses a lifestyle of self-destruction, it is devastating to us. When our political differences make us question everything about someone we once thought well of. When we say things we regret. When we hold on to resentments. What was a gift becomes a curse, and the relationships that can bring so much joy can bring so much sorrow.
So Father, we gather this morning, we say in your presence, “We’re tired of hurting. We’re tired of being hurt.” We pray daily, forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. Show us what that means, please. We pray this in Jesus’s name, amen.
Today, we’re nearing the end of the sermon on relationships in Matthew 18. This is Jesus’s most intense sermon on relationships in the New Testament. It can be broken into four parts:
He begins with the basis or foundation of relationships, that is, childlike humility. We define childlike humility as “the sanity of self-forgetfulness.” The sanity that this childlike humility is actually the basis or the beginning of true mental and relational health.
Secondly, the value of relationships, which is individual significance. Several weeks ago, we saw in verse 10 where Jesus said, “Do not despise one of these little ones.” Not one. There’s no person who is not significant in Jesus’s eyes.
Then, three, the upkeep of relationships. This past week, we saw online how we are to go alone, and then go together, and then go together as a church.
Then today we’re focusing in on the healing of relationships, and that is continual forgiveness. “Continual,” meaning forgiveness for Jesus is not merely episodic. It’s not just an event, it is a way of life.
This section of Jesus’s sermon has three parts. You could call it the question, the illustration, and the application. Let’s walk through those three.
1. The question
In verse 21, Peter seems to be prompted to ask a question in response to Jesus’s teaching regarding the upkeep of relationships.
If you look at the entire process in verses 15 through 20, and if you follow it all the way to the end, there’s no repentance. That seems to prompt a question in Peter’s mind. What if he does repent throughout that process? But more specifically, what if he does it multiple times? Look at verse 21.
“Then Peter came up [so he stops Jesus in the midst of this sermon] and said to him, ‘Lord, how often will my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? As many as seven times?’” (Matthew 18:21)
Peter is most likely thinking he’s being an overachiever, looking for the star on his paper, because rabbis in that day generally taught a “three strikes, you’re out” policy. So Peter doubles that, adds one, number of perfection, “How about that, Jesus?”
Jesus doesn’t seem to be impressed. In verse 22, he said to him, “I do not say to you seven times, but seventy-seven times.” Or seventy times seven times.” The point is not to raise the limit, but to eliminate it. Forgiveness doesn’t own a calculator. Forgiveness doesn’t keep score.
2. The illustration
After answering Peter’s question, Jesus provides an illustration. Jesus tells here a story, a parable. It’s a little different than most parables. It could almost be called an allegory. You’ll see as we walk through this.
There are three main characters: a king and two servants. The king is settling his accounts. He calls a servant or steward in and reveals to him that he owes the king 10,000 talents. A talent is equivalent to 20 years of wages. So 10,00 talents is equivalent to 200,000 years of wages.
Some people wonder, “How could anyone accrue a debt like that?” Well, remember, kings’ head servants or stewards (think governors) collected taxes. If this guy has been collecting and embezzling taxes for many decades, he accrues an unimaginably big debt. If you factor in inflation, it comes out to tens of billions of dollars in today’s money.
The king knows he can’t pay, so he commands that the man, his wife, and his children be sold into slavery to begin paying off the debt, which was not unusual in the ancient world.
Servant A responds. Verse 26, he “fell on his knees imploring him, ‘Have patience with me, and I will repay you everything.’” This is a ridiculous request, because he can never pay. But it gets even more ridiculous. Look at verse 27:
“And out of pity for him, the master of that servant released him and forgave him the debt” (Matthew 18:27).
“Pity.” We’ve seen that word before. It’s one of those Russian-sounding Greek words, “splanchnizomai.” It means “to be moved with compassion.” Sorry, I just massacred two languages in one fell swoop. “It was moved with compassion.” It’s very much like the gospel in that this servant just heard the worst news ever (“you owe a debt you can never pay”) and then he hears the best news ever (“paid in full”).
So the servant went out, lived his life, overwhelmed with gratitude for the king’s generosity, and passed that kind of mercy onto everyone he came in contact with, right? Wrong. Look at verse 28.
“But when that same servant went out, he found one of his fellow servants who owed him a hundred denarii, and seizing him, he began to choke him, saying, ‘Pay what you owe’” (Matthew 18:28).
A denarii is worth one day’s wage. Factor in inflation, it comes out to around $23,000. Servant A was just forgiven a debt 600,000 times bigger.
Servant B responds in verse 29, “…fell down and pleaded with him,” almost identical words, “Have patience with me, and I will repay you.” But Servant A, verse 30, “refused and went and put him in prison until he should pay the debt.”
The story continues in almost comical extravagance. Think of the extravagance of Servant A’s debt— unpayable. The extravagance of the king’s generosity, unfathomable. And now the extravagance of Servant A’s cruelty: despicable. When the fellow servants heard this, they returned to the king. Verse 32,
“Then his master summoned him [that’s Servant A] and said to him, ‘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” (Matthew 18:32-34).
At this point, the story leads us to the place where we’re emotionally ready to respond, “Yeah! This guy is a jerk!” Until we get to the application. Verse 35, the application.
“So also my heavenly Father will do to every one of you, if you do not forgive your brother from your heart” (Matthew 18:35).
This story is like being invited to a Super Bowl party tonight. You get there, excited about the snacks. Halfway through the game, they turn off the TV, your friends form a circle, and they look at you, and they say, “We need to talk.” And you suddenly realize what you thought was a Super Bowl party is an intervention. That’s this story.
It’s like, “Yeah, get Servant A! He’s a jerk!” And Jesus turns and says, “You know who the King is? The King is God.” This is where it feels like an allegory. The king is God. Servant A is you. Servant B is the person who has offended you. …And the light gets turned on me.
Jesus’s point is super clear: When you get forgiveness, you give forgiveness.
When you give it, you get it. That’s it. Forgiveness in, forgiveness out. If you want to say it in a little more sophisticated way, our expression of forgiveness corresponds to our experience of it.
If we’re reluctant to give it, the solution is to return to what I have received and receive that, because when we are truly forgiven, we truly forgive. As Jesus said to the Pharisee who was scandalized that Jesus received worship from a woman with a questionable past in Mark 7, Jesus said,
“He who is forgiven little, loves little” (Luke 7:47b).
You could change that to, “He who is forgiven little, forgives little,” or “he who is forgiven much, forgives much.” But wait, that’s not how it worked in the story. Servant A was offered extravagant forgiveness, but he then went and choked Servant B, demanding that he be paid.
What caused the breakdown? This is a question we need to wrestle with for a few minutes. There are many ways, but let me mention two common ways we shut down forgiveness, like Servant A.
One is we deceive ourselves. This could be called the religious performance deception. We don’t see our debt as unpayable. When Servant A said to the king, “Have patience with me, and I will pay you everything.” Everything? Really? Tens of billions of dollars.
The word he uses there, patience, another interesting Greek word, “makrothumeo.” It means long suffering, but the two parts are interesting. “Makros,” think Big Mac, something big, in this case, a long time. And “thumos,” anger, wrath.
What the servant is essentially saying is, “I know I deserve judgment for this. I know the debt is real, but I need time. Just be patient.” You can imagine the king saying, “How much time do you need? Do you need a week? How about a year? How about 200,000 years to pay a debt equivalent to 200,00 years of work?”
Many of us manifest this same mindset of Servant A on Sunday. We hear the word of God, and the Spirit speaks to our hearts and convicts our hearts. But rather than running to Jesus for the unmerited kindness (favor through Christ), we think to ourselves, “Okay, this week’s going to be different. I just need time to show you, God, I can do it without messing up.”
You could imagine God saying the same thing that the king would say: “How much time do you need? Need a week? Need 200,000 years of purgatory? Is that going to do it?” No. The reason is we owe a debt we cannot repay.
If we miss this, we miss the big picture of the gospel of Matthew. Because even though Jesus, throughout Matthew, is teaching us beautiful truths, moral truths, relational truths, they are all embedded within the story of the cross. He’s heading for a cross. Why is he doing that? He tells us over and over again. One example, Matthew 20:28,
“…the Son of Man [his name for himself] came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many” (Matthew 20:28).
A ransom is money used to redeem a slave. He’s buying us out of bondage to sin, a debt we could never pay ourselves.
1. We deceive ourselves.
The reason this is relevant to forgiveness is that, if I believe I have a payable debt, I believe my neighbor does too, and I’m going to be much more likely to choke him, demanding justice from him, because I assume, “I can get justice. I can live up to the standard of God. I didn’t need Jesus to die or rise for me. No way. It’s me. I can do it.” We deceive ourselves before God, and that comes out in our relationships.
2. We dehumanize others.
The second way we shut down forgiveness is we dehumanize others. We dehumanize others. This comes in many different forms. It is especially prominent today on social media, as it is unusually easy to dehumanize political opponents. Both conservatives and progressives are good at it.
We don’t see our neighbor as forgivable.
I could walk through a lot of examples. I’m just going to do one, and that is, in a particular fashionable mindset—it’s quite fashionable today in social justice movements, critical theory, intersectionality—there is a tendency to categorize different people as “oppressor” or “oppressed.”
When you bear that label/you are put in that category, it is immutable, unchangeable, and it is untethered from your character or your actions. It really doesn’t matter what you do. Let me illustrate this.
A staff writer for the Harvard Crimson wrote an article entitled “Beware of the Male Feminist.” By “male feminist,” she’s not talking about a misogynist. She’s talking about the most female-friendly, safe male you can imagine. And she says this:
“What these male feminists fail to realize is that, as men, they will always be oppressors. [Take that in: ‘always be oppressors.’] No matter how many feminist marches they attend or how much feminist literature they read, they are not exempt from perpetuating the subordination of women.”
By their very existence, they are oppressing whether they oppress or not. This movement tends to place people in categories based on gender or skin color. If you happen to be the wrong one, then you’re put into the category of “oppressor,” whether you oppress or not. Why? Because you are, by your very existence, reinforcing hegemonic social structures.
The reason this is dehumanizing is because, when we create different classes of people, we are canceling forgiveness. Forgiveness in this context becomes unforgivable. It’s an act of oppression. Like Servant A, we create kinds of people who deserve mercy. Like, when I’m shown mercy, it makes sense, doesn’t it? And when you’re shown mercy, it doesn’t.
Miroslav Volf grew up in the former Yugoslavia. His father was tortured in a communist concentration camp for being a Christian. His younger brother was killed. He saw unimaginable violence, injustice, and ethnic animosity. Yet he writes in his book Exclusion and Embrace—and every word of this is important:
“Forgiveness flounders because I exclude the enemy from the community of humans even as I exclude myself from the community of sinners.”
Forgiveness becomes irrelevant because my enemy is a different kind of person. He’s not like me, a kind of person who can be forgiven. He is, in a sense, unforgivable. But what Volf points out, he goes on to say,
“But no one can be in the presence of the God of the crucified Messiah for long without overcoming this double exclusion…”
What is the double exclusion? It’s when we do what he just said. We’re in this shared humanity. Think of the fact that we are all beautiful as image bearers and broken as sinners. So we’re in this shared humanity.
When we exclude our enemy, we are creating in him a monstrous inhumanity by excluding him. But at the same time, what Volf is saying, inadvertently, when we do that, we’re excluding ourselves into a category of proud innocence. So in a sense, we’re dehumanizing ourselves in the opposite direction as we are dehumanizing our enemy.
Volf goes on to explain how seeing the justice and the mercy of God together in Jesus brings us back into this shared humanity, where we begin to see—not that we commit the same sins—but that we, at the core, have the same problem and, at the core, have the same solution— no matter what our gender, no matter what our skin color, no matter our ethnicity.
How does this work? Let’s talk about the flow of forgiveness. Think down, in, out. Down, in, out.
Down: We receive forgiveness from God. And I plead with you, if you try to pursue forgiveness and you start with your enemy or with yourself, it will not end well. Start with God! Begin with the one who in him there is no darkness at all, as John says, and he goes on in 1 John 1:7,
“But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin. If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness” (1 John 1:7-9).
In: We relish in our hearts.
This is where we begin. Jesus is calling us out of the darkness of deception into the light of his cleansing, forgiving provision. Some of you right now, the Spirit is calling you, “Come to me. Look to Jesus. Receive his gift. Relish in forgiveness.”
“My sin, oh, the bliss of this glorious thought!”
Can you say that with me?
“My sin, not in part but the whole
Is nailed to the cross, and I bear it no more
Praise the Lord, praise the Lord, O my soul!”
When we sing, we are relishing his forgiveness. We don’t deserve this, but we swim in it. We take it in, and it gets worked into every part of us. The vital part of this is, when we tune our taste buds to the sweetness of forgiveness, when the resentment starts coming, we are repulsed by it. We can smell it, we can taste it. Doesn’t mean it’s easy to get rid of, but the taste jumps out to us. As Carrie Fisher says,
“Resentment is like drinking poison and then waiting for the other person to die.”
When you consume poison, depending on the kind of poison you consume, you begin to experience things. Generally, you don’t die right away. Of course, I don’t know what I’m talking about here. I haven’t tried a lot of poison, but you might have gastrointestinal issues like nausea and cramping, or difficulty breathing, dizziness, various forms of irritation or burning, chest pain, blurred vision, irritability. These are all physical signs of poison.
Something like that happens to us spiritually when we are consuming and relishing the toxins of unforgiveness, resentment, and bitterness. It’s literally eating us from the inside out.
You get a glimpse of this in verse 34 when “in anger his master delivered him to the jailers.” That word “jailers” is a very nice translation. It’s literally “torturers.” It was used in ancient Greece for “putting someone on a rack to torment.”
It could have eternal implications, but we know it has immediate implications. We all know (don’t we?) what it’s like to try to get to sleep at night, and your mind won’t stop racing, and the images are so real, and you’re having a conversation with this person that—if you could see them right now—you would give them a piece of your mind.
You try to stop, and you do for a moment. Then another thought triggers another avalanche of toxic imaginations. We think we’re seeking justice for them, but we are consuming ourselves.
Resentment is a weird thing. We hate it. We love it. As Lewis Smedes writes,
“Resentment is bittersweet. If we did not cherish it, we would let it go. What sort of rewards do we get from our resentment? Why do we keep score? First, it makes us feel superior to the person we resent… [Also, we] enjoy the feeling of hurt that the memory kindles… We feel noble and worthy as the decent person who was wrongly hurt. Resentments serve a double purpose: they give us treasured pain, and they give us a chance to justify ourselves… [Yet] it depresses us, robs us of gratitude, sneaks into other relationships.”
This is hard, isn’t it? This is why, when we’re in a battle like this and somebody throws out a cliché (like “forgive and forget”), it’s offensive. “I tried. I forgive him, and he quickly becomes unforgivable again.” Like “he keeps coming back in my thoughts,” or “there’s something else he does,” or something throughout the day that triggers another series of resentments. In Mark 11:25, Jesus says,
“And whenever you stand praying, forgive, if you have anything against anyone [notice that: anything against anyone], so that your Father also who is in heaven may forgive your trespasses.”
What he’s talking about there is what we could call non-transactional forgiveness. Non-transactional forgiveness. Transactional forgiveness is when my brother comes to me and says, “Hey Peter, would you forgive me for this?” And I say, “I forgive you,” we’ve transacted forgiveness, and that relationship is restored.
Non-transactional forgiveness is that battle in our hearts. Sometimes the person doesn’t even think they did anything wrong. Sometimes they want nothing to do with us. What Jesus is saying is, when you pray, your heart can be free even if your brother won’t be restored. In other words, don’t let him allow you to stay in bondage. Be free, Jesus is saying. But you can experience non-transactional forgiveness by praying for transactional forgiveness.
Out: We release our neighbor.
That’s the down and in parts, and now out: We release forgiveness to our neighbor. To “release” has a negative and a positive: to release the debt that we were demanding from them, and positively to release the mercy that God has poured out on us.
This “releasing” is in striking contrast to the servant in verse 28, who was “seizing and choking.” We are releasing the grip on justice with the mercy that is not native to our hearts, but is transported from God. Paul summarizes this well in Romans 12:19, when he says,
“Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave it to the wrath of God” (Romans 12:19a).
Think about where this is in Romans. Paul has spent 11 chapters outlining all the mercies of God— technically, systematically explaining how we have been “mercied” through Jesus. Then, in chapter 12, he says, “Beloved (you who are loved), give that to me. Let me take care of that for you. Give place for the justice, the wrath of God.”
We’re not going to do that if we don’t believe we’re loved. But if we are loved, it provides a security and a stability. We’re no longer brittle, ready to lash out. We’re loved, and so we can release.
A couple quick clarifications: This doesn’t mean we instantly trust this person, right? Forgiveness and trust are different. Sometimes trust takes time to rebuild.
It also doesn’t mean that there are always no consequences the second you forgive. Our brothers and sisters in Charleston forgiving Dylann Roof didn’t mean the government still has a responsibility to prosecute the crime.
Years ago, a man came into my office and confessed to a sexual crime. We ran to Jesus, talked about what forgiveness is like, and he cried out to the Lord. Then we talked about what that means relationally.
Then I asked him a question. The reason I asked is I wanted him to own this. I said, “Do you think you need to turn yourself in to the authorities?” He committed a crime. He said yes, and we went down to the police.
Someone who is truly repentant is not doing it just to evade any kind of consequences. It’s one of the signs of true repentance. But Jesus is saying, whether that person is truly repentant or not, my heart can still be free.
Years ago, I preached on forgiveness in the old auditorium. For those of you who have been here a while, you may remember this because Elly Van Slooten (precious sister, in her 80s) came forward and shared with the church what it was like as a little girl in Indonesia when soldiers broke into her home and killed her father. For all these years, she had held on to this anger. And she said before her church family, “I forgive these soldiers.” Tears — We were all crying.
As we prayed with her, I remember thinking, “Lord, when I’m in my 80s, may my heart be that tender.” May we, as your people, not become brittle, fearful, insecure, reactive, full of resentments and toxins that build up over the decades. No, Lord, every day forgive us our debts as we also have forgiven our debtors. Be free!
Some of you, the Spirit is calling you today. You’ve carried this for too long. Give it to him. Give it to him today. He can set you free. I know it’s not always instantaneous. We have to keep daily giving it over to him. The only way we’re going to be able to do that is if we are daily feeding on his mercies. The two go together.
Ephesians 4:32 summarizes everything we’ve said so well.
“Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, [how?] as God in Christ forgave you” (Ephesians 4:32).
As God in Christ forgave you.
One of the reasons Jesus gave us what we call the Lord’s Supper is so that, on a regular basis, we are relishing in his mercy, reminding ourselves with our taste buds that we are “mercied.”
So some people are going to come now, the musicians are going to come out now, and they’re going to pass out some broken bread representing the broken body of Jesus, a small cup of grape juice representing the shed blood of Jesus. If you’re online, we encourage you to participate. Grab some elements near you and join in.
As we sing and pray and pass out these elements, if your faith is in Jesus, or even right now if you’re crying out to him, join us in this and use this time to remind yourself of his mercy, and then simply pass on that mercy to others. Let’s continue worshiping.
