Just One More Time

Like last week, the Gospel for this morning is frightfully familiar to many here. If you’ve grown up in church—as I have—have spent significant chunks of your summers at church camps or Vacation Bible Schools—as I have—you know the parable of the unforgiving servant very well. As I remember it, this parable was in fact the second parable that I learned, coming hot on the heels of the parable of the sower.

For how many this morning is this true? This is a story you’ve heard many times before? For how many is this a new story? This is one that you don’t recall hearing, or being the basis for a sermon before? Whether it’s familiar or not, for how many is it an off-putting parable? Unnerving?

Well, I think it’s off-putting. Unnerving. Frightening, even. And I also think it’s true, life-giving and good news. It’s all of that together. Let’s dig into it.

Notice first the that the passage doesn’t stand on its own. We’re still part of a larger conversation about what it means to welcome a child into God’s kingdom and what it means to be a child who can be welcomed into God’s kingdom. We’re still part of the larger conversation that began last week.

You remember it. As the disciples were arguing about who was the greatest in the kingdom, Jesus brought a child before them and said, “If you would enter the kingdom, you must become a child; and whoever welcomes a child in my name welcomes me.” Jesus then unpacks this pithy little saying with two commands and a practice. Command #1: Don’t erect stumbling blocks that prevent “children” from entering the kingdom. Indeed, Jesus is quite harsh in his assessment of those who do so: they are better off drowning. They are like gangrenous hands or feet or infected eyes: for the sake of the body, cut them off. Command #2: Don’t despise them. Your heavenly father is like a shepherd who will search out the one lost sheep to bring it into the fold. Why would you despise those whom your heavenly father loves in this way?

Then comes the practice that we focused on last week. Do we want to be the kind of community where stumbling blocks are avoided? Do we want to be the kind of community that does not despise the least and the lost whom God would bring to safety? Then, we are to pursue reconciliation amongst ourselves. And if we do, not only we have the promise of the Lord’s abiding presence, but we also have the promise of answered prayer that reconciliation might be achieved. I don’t ever want to be a part of the difficult conversations that Jesus calls us to have, make no bones about it. But I do want to be a part of a community that welcomes the least, welcomes the lost, that is truly child-like in its trust in God. And I hope you do, too.

What is certainly the case, as we consider our Gospel passage for today, is that Peter—I love Peter—wants to be a part of that kind of a community! We miss that if we read this passage independently of what has come before. But now, I hope you see that Peter’s question “how often should I forgive?” is built upon the complete acceptance of what Jesus has just said. “Jesus, I agree. I am with you. I want to be a part of a community that continually pursues reconciliation, a community that welcomes and does not despise, a community that is made up of and searches out those who are the least and the lost.” That’s not written in our text this morning, but only on this assumption does what Peter does say make sense.

How many times will I have to have this awkward conversation with someone, Lord? How many times should I forgive the brother or sister who sins against me? Seven times? Peter wants to buy in. Peter, ahead of the rest as always, has glimpsed the Gospel, the life-giving good news, embedded in Jesus’s apparently difficult words and he wants to be the child who enters. He wants to be the one who welcomes the child in Jesus’s name. He does not want to be a stumbling-block. He does not want to despise those whom the Good Shepherd embraces. Peter here is almost and example for all of us!

The almost is important. Before we can assess Jesus’s rebuke of Peter, we have to see him as the good guy and we have to see ourselves in him. Peter in this moment represents all that is good about the typical disciple. He has caught the vision. He wants to put it into practice. And he asks a sensible question of the Lord about how to do so, about where the limits and lines in reconciliation are to be drawn. It will not do for us to cluck our tongues at poor Peter, knowing the correction that he’s in for. For, I wager, that in his desire for the kingdom, in his vision for the growth of the kingdom, in his generosity in extending the bounds of the kingdom, he surpasses many of us. I know on many if not most days, Peter here surpasses me.

“How many times Lord, 7?”

“I tell you the truth, not seventy times, but seventy-seven times.” What’s Jesus doing here? Is he exaggerating for the sake of effect? Well, yes and no. The meaning of Jesus gentle rebuke is clear enough to anyone, I think. The scope of forgiveness is to be boundless. Not 7 times, but 77 times. It’s a magnification to make a point. But there’s more to it than that.

Do you remember Lamech’s boast in Genesis 4? “I have killed a man for wounding me, a young man for striking me. If Cain is avenged sevenfold, truly Lamech seventy-sevenfold.” Lamech, the son of Cain, the son of the first murderer has learned the lesson of his father all-too-well. He has continued in the practice of exacting violent revenge, and done it in such a way that the violence will only increase. As the generations pass, the violence does increase until, in Genesis 6, the earth is so full of vengeance that God regrets creating humanity, he calls forth the waters from which he drew creation to destroy it, and he starts over with Noah and his family.

When Jesus multiplies Peter’s offer by 11, we hear an echo of Lamech and an invitation to the undoing of the cycle of violence and vengeance that continues up until today. It’s perhaps best expressed by Sean Connery in the movie the Untouchables, when he tells Kevin Costner how to beat gangster Al Capone: “You wanna get Capone? Here’s how you get him. He pulls a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue. That’s the Chicago way. That’s how you get Capone. Now, do you want to do that?” It’s no accident, by the way, that this conversation is presented as both characters are kneeling in a church, while Connery’s character holds a rosary. The way of Jesus and the Chicago way cannot be harmonized.

Jesus’s call to radical forgiveness is to be understood as a call radically to part ways with “the Chicago way,” with “how the world just works.” That is how far down our conversion is to go, it’s a conversion away from what seems right to a man or woman to a position that will be ridiculed, reviled, and even persecuted. We are foolish when we downplay or soft-peddle the call do discipleship to ourselves or to others. Jesus’s yoke may be easy, but getting out from the old one often isn’t. Jesus knows that. And he calls us anyway.

All this to say, becoming the kind of community that Jesus wishes us to be—even when we are as on board as Peter—is a kind of becoming that must transform every part of us. The way of discipleship is not an add-on to an otherwise happy life, one in which church competes with piano lessons, soccer, hockey, quilting or whatever we do with the time when we are not at work or at school to give our lives a sense of fulfillment. The way of discipleship is THE way to the good life or it is no way at all.

Now, we can look at the parable.

What a powerful unfolding of human nature, no? An unmasking of the shadow behind Peter’s generously intended question. What’s going on here?

Well, we’re wise to remember that we are dealing with a parable, not an allegory. In other words, we are wise to remember that the point is found in the story itself, not in how or where the story “symbolizes” something in the real world.

So what’s going on? Perhaps it will help if we think of the economic structure embedded in this parable as a triangle with the King at the top. Beneath the king are his chief slaves—the ones tasked with overseeing the productivity of everyone beneath them. Beneath them are the farmers, the artisans, whomever. The people who need organizing. Who need to be taxed to keep the economy going. The king through his army provides safety and space to create wealth. The farmers and artisans take advantage of the safe space to create wealth in the form of crops, tools, and so on. The chief slaves take a portion of that in the form of taxation, and pass some of that up to the king. So, peace and protection flow from the top, down; wealth from taxation flows from the bottom up.

Now, it seems that the chiefest of the chief slaves—let’s call him the chief financial officer—is indebted to the king. That means, he hasn’t paid the king the cut of the taxes that he’s supposed to. Jesus doesn’t explain why. It might be for nefarious reasons—the CFO is corrupt and keeping too much for himself. It might be for innocent reasons—the weather was terrible, the crops failed, tax revenue went down. For whatever reason, the slave finds himself horrendously in debt, unable to repay, and threatened with the severest of judgments. So, he begs for mercy.

And the king grants him mercy! But look, not only for him. In forgiving his slave, the king is overturning the entire “normal way of doing things.” He’s declaring an amnesty, a jubilee, a cancellation of debt not only for the indebted CFO, but for all the servants who themselves are indebted to that CFO. It is a radical absolution that extends all the way down. What wide mercy! What boundless grace! The king not only releases one man from a debt, and so saves the man and his family. The king overturns the entire system of indebtedness and so saves the world.

Of course, the CFO is glad. Who wouldn’t be? But he errs in underestimating the grace of the king. He limits it. He thinks it’s just for him. For the rest of the servants, who have in fact been caught up in the king’s radical act of debt cancellation, his forgiveness, the CFO thinks it’s still business as usual. And so he goes to collect his debts. The king is enraged, he hands over the CFO to the torturers until the debt is repaid. The point of the story seems to be, the call to radical forgiveness, to seventy-seven times, is a radical call. Far from being optional, it is a call that extends to the very roots of our beings. That’s what the word radical means—to the roots. The servant wants both mercy for himself and business as usual for those beneath him and, Jesus says, in the kingdom economy, it just doesn’t work like that.

So, Peter, in the call to forgiveness, you are all in or it’s business as usual all the way down. It’s not forgiveness for me, but repayment with interest for the guy next to me. There are no limits except the limits you place. And if you place limits, you will be held to them.

So what is the image then that we’re left with?

When Jesus responds to Peter’s generous offer, he extends a call to a different way of seeing the world. It is a way which sees the awkward conversation described previously taking place regularly. He extends a call to be the kind of community, and to be the kind of disciple, that is welcoming of children and that strives to become child-like in receiving the welcome of the Lord. It is a way which sees the community as a channel of the Father’s forgiveness—his refusal of revenge—extended to us and through us to others.

Think about the triangle again. Think about the divine mercy, the divine forgiveness flowing ceaselessly down to us and through us to our community and instead of taxes, think about the offering of praise being channeled up in return. That is the vision to which Jesus calls us today. It is a radical vision—it gets to the roots of things. It is a cosmic vision—it swallows up everything. It is in no way a partial vision—an add on to an otherwise happy life. And the only way into it is conversion. Deep, abiding, and always ongoing.

Now, lest you think that’s just too hard, there is one fairly easy way of thinking about it.

John D. Rockefeller—the oil baron of the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, and for a time the wealthiest man in North America—was once asked this question: “How much money is enough money?” Do you know his answer? “Just a little bit more.”

Now ask Peter’s question: “How many times must I forgive a brother who sins against me?” Jesus’s answer, his practice that is the working out of the conversion of our souls, is not unlike Rockefeller’s answer. Here it is: “Just one more time.” And when he does it again, and you ask again, “How many times?” The answer is still the same: just one more time. “And now Lord? He’s done it again! Do I forgive him?” Just. One. More. Time. This is how the Father of mercy forgives us, forgives me.

Father of all mercy, you lavish your grace on us time and again. Help us so to treat our brothers and sisters with the same generosity that the world may offer to you right praise and fulsome worship. Amen.

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