This is my reflection from the Sunday devotion that was developed for Christ Episcopal Church, Yankton, S.D.
Matthew 18:21-35 - MSG*
Peter got up the nerve to ask, “Master, how many times do I forgive a brother or sister who hurts me? Seven?”
Jesus replied, “Seven! Hardly. Try seventy times seven.
The kingdom of God is like a king who decided to square accounts with his servants. As he got under way, one servant was brought before him who had run up a debt of a hundred thousand dollars. He couldn’t pay up, so the king ordered the man, along with his wife, children, and goods, to be auctioned off at the slave market.
The poor wretch threw himself at the king’s feet and begged, ‘Give me a chance and I’ll pay it all back.’ Touched by his plea, the king let him off, erasing the debt.
“The servant was no sooner out of the room when he came upon one of his fellow servants who owed him ten dollars. He seized him by the throat and demanded, ‘Pay up. Now!’
“The poor wretch threw himself down and begged, ‘Give me a chance and I’ll pay it all back.’ But he wouldn’t do it. He had him arrested and put in jail until the debt was paid. When the other servants saw this going on, they were outraged and brought a detailed report to the king.
“The king summoned the man and said, ‘You evil servant! I forgave your entire debt when you begged me for mercy. Shouldn’t you be compelled to be merciful to your fellow servant who asked for mercy?’ The king was furious and put the screws to the man until he paid back his entire debt. And that’s exactly what my Father in heaven is going to do to each one of you who doesn’t forgive unconditionally anyone who asks for mercy.”
* The Message, copyright (c) 1993, 2002, 2018 by Eugene Peterson, used by permission of NavPress. All rights reserved. Represented by Tyndale House Publishers, Inc.
REFLECTION
God be in my head, and in my understanding;
God be in my eyes, and in my looking;
God be in my mouth, and in my speaking;
God be in my heart, and my thinking;
God be at my end, and at my departing.
(Sarum Primer 1514)
God is in us. We take God wherever we go, whether we like to or not and whether we are consciously aware of God’s presence in our lives or not. We cannot get rid of God. How God’s compassion and love is played out in our lives is matter of how compassion and love is played out in the lives we lead. The experience of God’s compassion and love in our lives is directly related to how we love and treat our neighbor.
The parable of the unforgiving servant reveals a shadowy side to God’s compassion and love; in that, God goes where we go. God shadows us. God interacts with how we act.
So the question this parable offers us today is, “Where are we taking God in our lives?”
In this parable, Jesus underscores compassion as a necessary component in loving one’s neighbor and, by extension, loving God. Jesus clearly wants us to understand that compassion, in the form of forgiveness, is not something owed us but rather flows from God’s grace that brought everything into being. There are strong psychological and spiritual applications that can be derived from this parable. As such, it is important for us to see the servant as an archetypal figure for the human tendency towards selfishness and being unaware of one’s connection to something greater than one’s self. The king in this parable represents God, our creator to whom we belong and whose will is being carried out in our lives
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In Jesus’ day a servant was not an independent hired hand. A servant for all practical purposes was considered a member of the household he or she served; in this case, a king. In essence, such a servant owed his livelihood, his life, and that of his wife and children to the king. The king could do whatever the king wished to do to him, including killing him and his family without trial, because the king’s word was law and no one would have batted an eye should something like that had occurred in the culture and times in which Jesus told this story.
In this parable, we see that the king has no interest in taking his servant’s life because of his malfeasance. The servant’s life has value, as do the lives of his wife and children. The king is not necessarily vengeful as he is pragmatic in trying to recoup his loss. So the king considers having the servant and his family sold as slaves in a slave market to offset some of the monetary loss caused by the servant’s foolishness.
The servant, understanding the precarious situation he is in, pleas for mercy from the king; promising to pay back what is owed the king. The king is indeed merciful. In fact, the king goes beyond mercy. The king is compassionate.
The king does not desire the punishment of his servant but rather considers the potential his servant has; in that, the servant can learn from the error of his ways and straighten himself out. As such, the king decides to forgive the servant’s malfeasance and the entire debt the servant owes; keeping his servant and the servant’s family under his roof.
It is an extravagant gesture on the part of the king, and in that gesture, we understand the depth of God’s compassion towards the burdens we place on ourselves.
The servant, however, has no appreciation for the extravagant compassion and grace of the king. He learns nothing because he believes he got away with his dereliction. It is likely the servant sees such a forgiving, compassionate act as proceeding from a weak will; therefore, the servant sees no need to amend his ways because he feels free to pursue his own desires and devices.
In a matter of minutes, the servant forgets the huge debt that was forgiven. And no sooner than he feels that he escaped being sold into slavery, he finds himself enslaved by his selfish ways.
When this servant comes across someone who owed him a significantly smaller debt, instead of showing the compassion the king had shown him, he mocks it by demanding payment and resorting to physical violence. When the person who owed the servant a small amount pleas for mercy, the servant shows him none and delivers him to a jailer to take vengeance on him.
When the king is made aware of his servant’s vengeful and ruthless treatment of others, he is brought before the king. Once again he pleas for mercy, but this time the compassionate king goes to where he knows his servant’s heart is. In his compassion, the king allows his servant to experience his own ruthless vengeance, and the servant finds himself living in the hell he caused others until he fully grasps the compounded weight caused by his dereliction to be compassionate.
This is the shadowy side of God’s compassion, allowing us to taste the bitterness of our dereliction to love and be compassionate. God is present wherever we are. God is with us even in the moments of dereliction and in having us taste the bitterness of our actions or lack thereof.
This shadowy side of compassion is strictly God’s domain, not ours. Only God knows the hearts, the minds, and secrets of all. We do not know our own hearts and minds at times; much less, the hearts and minds of others, which underscores our need to be forgiving of others so that we can fully experience being forgiven by God.
This brings us to Peter’s question at the beginning of today’s Gospel lesson, “How may times should we forgive a person?”
When Peter suggested forgiving someone seven times, he no doubt thought he was being very generous and was probably thinking (like most of us) that any reasonable person can only be expected to forgive up to a certain point, at which point, one is entitled to put the hammer down. Jesus counters that thinking by saying we should forgive“seventy times seven.”
The point Jesus is making is that we should never give up on forgiveness or on being forgiving. Forgiveness is born of compassion that understands the suffering and burdens brought about by our actions or the lack of them. Without forgiveness we remain imprisoned by the weight of our wrongdoing to others. Without being forgiving, we attempt to keep others imprisoned by the wrongs they have done to us.
This is why Jesus taught us to pray that God forgives us our wrongdoing as we forgive those who wrong us. To be unforgiving in this life can eventually lead one to feel unforgiven by life itself. To feel unforgiven has a tremendous impact on one’s life just a being forgiven does. This is readily observable in ourselves as was demonstrated in the parable of the unforgiving servant who could not experience the feeling of forgiveness because he lacked the will and desire to be forgiving.
God’s compassionate and loving will is being played out in our lives because we are the products of that will. This is why Jesus also taught us to pray, “Thy will be done on earth as in heaven;” so that God’s will is manifest in us and through us, as we are carried along by the flow of that loving and compassionate will to be where God is and, like God, to be full of compassion and mercy.
Amen.
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Until next time, stay faithful
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