The Kingdom of Heaven Matthew 18:12-20; 21-35
“CAN'T KEEP COUNT!”
When I was growing up, I showed a natural aptitude for mathmatics. At one point my uncle even encouraged me to follow in his footsteps in accounting. But as I pursued that at the college level I found that the questions I was inclined to ask in class were not....appreciated... (sit among cong)
Don: Mrs Stapleton, I have a question about this math lesson.
Miss S: Yes? What is it, Pieper?
Don: Given that, sooner or later, we're all just going to die, what's the point of learning about
integers and fractions?
Miss S: (stare at him; then look about) Any other irrelevant questions, class? Turn to page 83.
Don: Nobody likes us “Big Picture” people. (from Calvin & Hobbes: Jungle Cat, p. 124)
Evidently, I wasn't meant for a career in accounting. Fact is, the words, 'budget' and 'finances', cause my eyes to glaze over. The only spread sheet of interest to me nowadays is the one that goes on my bed. And yet, I can't help but marvel at the bewildering mathmatics recorded here in Matthew's gospel, particularly in the perplexing parables Jesus told, like this one in Matthew 18.
Consider again this little ditty: “If a man has a hundred sheep and one of them wanders away what will he do?” (Matthew 18:12) Sounds to me like an old-fashioned story problem. One thing I like about Jesus' math questions is that he provides the answer. Wish I'd had him in Accounting 101!
“What will he do...? Won't he leave the ninety-nine other sheep on the hills and go out to search for the one that is lost? And if he finds it, I tell you the truth, he will rejoice over it more than over the ninety-nine that didn't wander away!” (Matthew 18:12-13)
Okay, wait a minute! What kind of math is that? So this math-challenged shepherd leaves the other nintey-nine wooly-brained creatures grazing on the hills - vulnerable to wolves, thieves and the inclination to wander themselves? What kind of shepherd is this? How is this good math? How does risking ninety-nine for the sake of one add up? Mrs. Stapleton would never have approved!
In another of his kingdom parables Jesus said that “Seeds that fell on fertile soil produced a crop that was thirty, sixty, even a hundred times as much as was planted!” (Matthew 13:8)
Those are some seeds! If you try to work that out on your phone calculator, it doesn't calculate! That was also the reaction from Jesus' disciples the day he asked them to feed over five thousand people:“But we have only five loaves of bread and two fish!” (Matthew 14:17)
Rabbi, they say, it doesn't add up! What you suggest, it doesn't compute! Then there's the yarn Jesus weaves about a farmer who hired people to work in his vineyards. Some clocked in at sunrise, some at morning donut break, some at lunchtime, others at afternoon tea time, and still others an hour before quitting time. Everybody seemed content until payroll time when those who'd worked twelve hours under the scorching sun learned that the loafing late-arrivals who'd barely gotten their hands dirty received exactly the same pay. Even the farmer's accountant was taken back.
The farmer's defense? “Friend, I haven't been unfair? Should you be jealous because I am generous with others?” (Matthew 20:13,15) The math of grace has a shrill note of unfairness...!
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It grates against our sensitivies – our passion for justice, especially when we feel we are in the right and others in the wrong. Consider Peter's quest for a mathematical formula for grace. “Lord, how often should I forgive someone who sins against me? Up to seven times?” (Matthew 18:21)
Peter thought he had Jesus' odd math figured out. After all, the rabbis of the day tabulated the maximum number of times one is expected to forgive at three. So Peter doubles the number and adds one for good measuret, using a number with the biblical implication of perfection – seven!
But Jesus uses the new math of grace: “'No, not seven times,' Jesus replied, 'but seventy times seven times!'” (Matthew 18:22) The implication is clear. Grace, or forgiveness, is not the kind of thing you can count on an abacus – or even on a calculator!
Peter's question prompted another of Jesus' convicting stories, this one about a servant who has somehow piled up a debt of mind-boggling proportions to his king. In the original Greek we're told the amount exceeds that of 10,000 talents – a talent being the largest form of currency of the day, equiva-lent of over 300 tons of silver. This is a massive debt equal to billions of dollars in today's currency.
The implication is that a servant couldn't possibly accumulate such a debt without having been guilty of stealing and other dishonest forms of acquisition. Confiscating the man's family, children and all his property and assets would not make a dent in repaying his debt. It's an unforgiveable debt! So “The man fell down before the king and begged, 'Please, be patient with me, and I will pay it all!'”
(Matthew 18:26)
“Riiiiight! How are you going to do that? You and what billionaire?” The guy doesn't have a prayer. There's no way, no matter how much time he's given, he'll ever be able to repay his debt!
Nevertheless, moved by pity, the king abruptly cancels the debt and lets his scoundrel servant off scot-free. That would've made an outlandish but happy ending but then suddenly the plot twists. The scoundrel servant who's just been forgiven seizes a colleague by the throat, a fellow servant who owes him a mere fraction of his own debt and demands instant recompense. 'Pay what you owe!' His fellow servant pleads for mercy, using the very same words the scoundrel used earlier with the king, but to no avail. This ingrate of a servant has his peer thrown in prison until he pays it back.
Why Jesus draws the parable with such exaggerated strokes becomes clear when he reveals that the king represents our Heavenly Father. The King's question to his ingrate servant is posed to us: “Shouldn't you have mercy on (those who wrong you) just as I have had mercy on you?”
(Matthew 18:33)
The parable is told to move our hearts to a humble awareness that God has already forgiven us a debt so mountainous that beside it any person's wrongs against us shrink to the size of anthills. In short Jesus asks, 'How can you not forgive each other in light of all that God has forgiven you?' Or in the words of C.S. Lewis: “To be a Christian means to forgive the inexcusable because God has forgiven the inexcusable in you.” (C.S. Lewis) This is Jesus' radical new math...of grace!
Jesus gave us these compelling parables about grace in order to draw us out of our tit-for-tat world of ungrace and into God's realm of infinite grace. From kindergarten onward we're taught how to succeed in the world of ungrace. The early bird gets the worm. No pain, no gain. There is no such thing as a free lunch. You get what you pay for. We do things the old fashioned way – we earn it...
Remember that one? Calvin & Susie drives home the point... (sit next to Joy)
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Calvin: Susie, can I copy your answers?
Susie: Heck no!
Calvin: Why not?
Susie: Because you'd get a good grade without doing any work.
Calvin: SO?
Susie: So it's wrong to get rewards you haven't earned.
Calvin: I've never heard of anyone who couldn't live with that. (….Jungle Cat, p. 21)
Unless we see someone else getting away with it, that is! Susie's axiom applies to many things but what about in matters of personal grievances? The original language in the prayer Jesus taught us to pray uses the very same language as his parable: “And forgive us our debts as we forgive those who are indebted to us.” (Matthew 6:12) There's a good reason for that metaphor.
When someone wrongs us in some way, they become emotionally indebted to us. We now have an emotional weapon we can use against them, a leverage of sorts. By withholding forgiveness, we hold them 'accountable' – a word that has financial roots and implications. There's a debt to pay. When we truly forgive, we release the debt. We let them off the hook and in doing so set us both free.
That's what Jesus is talking about as he summarizes his parable by urging you to “Forgive your brothers and sisters from your heart”. (Matthew 18:35) The heart, from a biblical perspective, is the center of one's being – the source of all that matters to a person – and the pulse of one's life. To forgive from one's heart is to put that I.O.U in the shredder – never to be referred to again!
But if I'm completely honest, I'd have to admit, my heart is rarely in it. Undeserved forgiveness for non-repentant offenders is beyond my desire or ability to articulate or demonstrate. I want them to squirm, to feel the heat of my disfavor, to get what they deserve. Yet if I care to listen, I realize that I did not get what I deserved. I deserve punishment and instead got forgiveness. I deserved wrath and received love. I deserved debtor's prison and got a chain-free, clean credit history instead.
A powerful scene in the film, The Mission, involves a slave-trader who in a fit of jealous rage, murders his own brother. As his penance, he bears the burden of his guilt by carrying a heavy load of his former self up a treacherous ravine. The load nearly drags him down the ravine to his death. When he finally arrives a the top, the son of a man he'd captured and sold into slavery approaches him with a knife, but instead of killing him, he cuts him free from his load and sets him free.
This is what Jesus has done for you. He has severed the load of guilt, the baggage of sin & woe that you've inflicted on yourself and others. And along the way, he chooses those we have hurt, like a former slave severing the bonds of a slavetrader, to set us both free. In turn, by forgiving he or she who has grieviously wounded us, deliberately or otherwise, we sever the bonds...setting us both free!
Last week I watched a new film, The Railway Man, the true story of Eric Lomax, a British officer captured in Singapore during WW II. Tormented and tortured by the Kempetai, the Japanese secret police, Lomax survives only to suffer for years afterwards from psychological trauma. When his former CO informs him that one of their former tormentors is now a tour guide at the POW camp in which they were inprisoned, Lomax returns to settle the score. Packing a military knife he seeks justice and confronts Takashi Nagase in a room in which he'd once been interagated. In the end, though, he throws the knife in a river and embraces his Takashi in a show of forgiveness. The two became friends.
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Forgiving someone, extending grace, baffles us because it goes against the intuition everyone has that, in the face of injustice, some price must be paid. In reflecting on Jesus' parables I inevitably grasp that they are about me. I am the sheep the shepherd has left the flock to find, the prodigal for whom the father embraces, the servant whose debt has been forgiven. I am that loved....as are you! I discover, as did Eric Lomax, that the only way to be free of a lifetime of bitterness...is to forgive.
If then it is true, that “It is not my Heavenly Father's will that even one of these little ones should perish...”, then I am obliged to do all that I can to win that person back. (Matthew 18:14-15)
So my friends, “Forgive your brothers and sisters from your heart”. (Matthew 18:35)
Who might God be calling you to let off the hook, to sever the weight of their debt to you, knowing that you yourself, like the scoundrel servant, have been pardoned of a far greater deb