“YOU CAN’T GIVE WHAT YOU DON’T HAVE”
Matthew 18:21-35
(09-14-08)

Last week we read from Matthew’s gospel about addressing conflict
and seeking unity within the fellowship of the church.
This week’s lesson from Matthew follows immediately after last week’s text
and the theme remains very similar.
Peter, hearing how Jesus desires that members of the church should seek to be reconciled, asks Jesus, “Lord, if another member of the church sins against me,
how often should I forgive? As many as seven times?”
No doubt when Peter said seven times,
he thought he was being quite magnanimous
but Jesus would shock him with his reply.
“Not seven times I tell you, but seventy seven times.”
Some commentators have suggested that Jesus used the number seventy seven
as a direct allusion to Genesis 4:24,
where Lamech, a descendant of Cain, the son of Adam and Eve,
boasted that if his ancestor Cain was to be avenged seven times should anyone kill him, then he should be avenged seventy seven times should anyone kill him.
So in effect Jesus was saying that forgiveness is the antonym of revenge,
that his followers must renounce the very human intention
of getting even with those who harm them.

To further his point, Jesus told a parable about a king and his slave.
Note that the parable is prefaced by the words,
“The kingdom of heaven may be compared to…”
Peter asks a question about forgiveness which is rooted in earthly expectations,
but Jesus’ answer is set in the heavenly reality of the kingdom of God.
From the very beginning we are told that in God’s kingdom the expectations are different.

A man who is a servant to the king owes the king an enormous sum of money.
He owed the king ten thousand talents.
One talent was the equivalent of twenty years wages for a labourer.
So the servant owed his king the equivalent of 200,000 years worth of wages.
It was an incomprehensible amount of money.
One wonders just what this servant had done to squander so much money!
The king was obviously quite displeased with the servant
and ordered him to be sold, along with his wife and children,
so that something might be salvaged from his losses.
But the servant fell on his knees and pleaded for the king to have patience with him,
“Be patient with me and I will pay you everything.”
And the king, amazingly, changed his mind.
Not only did he not sell the servant, along with his family,
but out of pity for him, the king set his servant free and cancelled his entire debt load!

Talk about a get of our jail free card!
But no sooner had this servant left the presence of the king,
then he came upon a colleague who owed him the equivalent of 100 days wages,
that would be just over three months.
The man who had just been forgiven of 200,000 years worth of wages,
would not show the same forgiveness with his colleague for a far smaller amount of debt
and had his colleague thrown in jail.
His treachery did not go unnoticed.
His fellow servants reported what they had seen to the king
and before the sun set the servant was before the king again
and this time there would be no mercy shown.
He was ordered to be jailed and tortured, until he could pay back all that he owed. Clearly it meant that he would be tortured and jailed forever.
Jesus ends the parable with an ominous warning.
“So my heavenly Father will also to do every one of you,
if you do not forgive your brother or sister from your heart.”
Why was the king of the servant so angry with him?
The text clearly states that the king was angry
because the mercy he showed his servant
was not shown in return by the servant to his colleague.
Now why did the servant not show mercy to his colleague,
especially given that he had just received an enormous dose of mercy from his king? Perhaps the answer lies in the fact that you can’t give what you don’t have.
I believe that servant who was forgiven his large debt
did not truly appreciate the nature of the mercy that was shown him
and therefore did not have it in himself
to give away something that he was not aware that he had received.

Earlier I asked what the servant could have possibly done
to squander 200,000 years worth of wages.
The amount is excessive.
The people listening to Jesus would have understood the figure
to represent something outside the realm of possibility.
The bible is full of such language.
As the preacher Fred Craddock puts it,
when God makes promises, they are seldom small.
When God made the promise of the covenant to Abraham,
he told him that his descendants would be as numerous as the dust of the earth
and more than all the stars of the sky.
Whether it’s the image of a camel trying to pass through the eye of a needle
or someone walking around with a log in their own eye
while trying to pick out the small slivers from the eyes of another,
Jesus often used the language and imagery of hyperbole to make his point.
And Jesus’ answer to Peter’s question, how many times must I forgive,
whether it is recorded as seventy seven times as in our version of the text,
or seventy times seven in other versions,
is an example of this hyperbolic speech.
When such numbers are used it’s a sure sign
that we’re no longer talking about earthly matters, but heavenly ones.
The point is that the servant’s debt to the king is un-payable.
No one could live long enough to make such restitution.
But restitution’s not the point.
The key word is mercy and mercy has nothing to do with restitution.
Mercy is undeserved, it is unwarranted, it is unmerited.

The text points out, however, that the servant never truly understands the nature of mercy.
He is a creature defined by merit.
When told by the king that he would be sold and his family along with him,
he responds by pleading for more time,
have patience with me and I will pay you everything.
Did he believe what he was saying?
How was he going to pay back 200,000 years worth of wages?
But the servant still clung to the idea of merit.
I will pay you back.
Though the king moved beyond merit to mercy,
I’m not convinced that the servant ever understood the mercy which was shown to him.
I picture the servant leaving the presence of the king,
not with the humility of someone who has just been shown great mercy,
been granted something he never deserved or could hope to have merited,
but with the smug sense of someone who has just gotten away with something.
There would seem to be no other way of explaining
how this servant could go from what had just happened to him
to what he does to his colleague who only owes him a small amount of money.

I am convinced that if he understood at all the concept of mercy,
if he had received the forgiveness of the king as an act of mercy
and not of sheer luck on his part,
he could not have treated his colleague in the manner in which he did.
You can’t give what you don’t have.
The problem with the servant of the king
is that he doesn’t have an understanding of mercy in him to give to someone else.
And I suppose if that was the end of the parable, it would be one thing.
But the end of the parable says,
“And so my heavenly Father will also do to every one of you,
if you don’t forgive your brother or sister from your heart.”
Such forgiveness is not merit based, but mercy based.
And if we’ve never accepted the mercy of God in our lives,
we will find it impossible to extend that mercy
to those who have hurt us, offended us, sinned against us.
You can’t give what you don’t have.

Peter’s question addresses a human problem from a human perspective.
But the parable of Jesus grounds forgiveness in the nature of God.
To be able to forgive someone seventy seven times or seventy times seven times,
means that we can’t think of the forgiveness Jesus speaks of in terms of merit.
We can’t constantly forgive people if we base our forgiveness on their merit,
or on ours for that matter.
When people hurt us, when people offend us, when people sin against us,
its not a case of being patient with them so that they can pay us back,
so that they can make amends.
Forgiveness is about moving beyond what people merit from us
to showing mercy to them.
Only by being rooted in mercy
can we begin to understand what Jesus’ answer to Peter’s question really means.

Some of you may have read William Young’s bestselling book, “The Shack.”
It’s a fictionalized account about a man named Mack
whose daughter is kidnapped and murdered in a shack in the Oregon wilderness.
Four years after the murder Mack gets a letter, apparently from God,
inviting him back to the shack for a weekend.
What Mack experiences in that weekend is a revealing look at how people
and in particular, churched people,
deal with grief, anger, judgment, forgiveness and ultimately, mercy.
Mack is angry, he is angry with the man who took his daughter’s life,
he is angry with the God who would allow such a heinous crime
and he is angry with himself for not being able to protect his daughter.

At one critical point of the book Mack is told by the embodiment of Wisdom, Sophia, that he will have the opportunity to judge God.
And Mack, in his anger and pain,
judges that God is to blame for knowing what would happen to his daughter
and yet allowing it to happen anyway,
for knowing that a man would end up as a monstrous murderer
and yet allowing him to be created anyway,
for having the power to stop such evil and yet not stopping it.
Mack finds that God is to blame.
Having found God guilty, Sophia then invites Mack to judge the world.
If he is able to judge God so easily,
then surely he would be able to judge the world as well.
He is told that he must first judge his five remaining children,
that he can choose two to go to heaven and the other three he must condemn to hell. Mack recoils at the suggestion
that he would condemn any of his children to an eternity in hell,
but Sophia counters that she is only asking Mack to do what Mack believes God does. God creates the world and all that is in it out of his love,
but Mack has believed that most of that creation
God condemns to an eternity of torment,
away from his presence and apart from his love.
So, continues Sophia, which three of your children will you condemn to such a fate?
Mack refuses to be the judge any longer.
How, he wonders, could God ask him to choose among his own children?
How could he sentence any of his children to hell
no matter how much they had sinned against him?
I can’t do this, Mack says softly.
You must, Sophia replies.
I can’t do this, Mack replies, his voice growing louder and more vehement.
You must, Sophia repeats softly.
I-will-not-do-this, Mack shouts.
Finally, when pressed even further by Sophia, he blurts out, could I go instead?
If you need someone to torture for eternity, I’ll go in their place.
Would that work, could I do that?
And now crying and begging, Mack says, please, let me go in their place,
I would be happy to take their place, please, I am begging you.
Finally Sophia says, now Mack, you sound just like Jesus.
You have judged well.
But I haven’t judged anything, says Mack.
Yes you have, you have judged them worthy of love,
even if it costs you everything.
That’s how Jesus loves.

Jesus says that the kingdom of heaven is like this.
The kingdom of heaven is rooted in mercy, not merit.
We don’t get to heaven because we’ve earned the right,
if we go, we go because God is merciful to us.
We haven’t done anything to merit God’s forgiveness in Jesus,
we receive it as a gift of God’s mercy.
If we know that mercy of God in Jesus the Christ, Jesus his Son,
if we can say that we know what its like to have deserved hell but be offered heaven,
if we know that Jesus has taken our place because he has judged us worthy of his love,
even if it cost him everything,
then we know mercy, we know God’s mercy.
Do we know that mercy of God, do you?
Because you can’t give what you don’t have.
And it is only from having that knowledge and experience
of God’s mercy in Jesus in our lives
that we can begin to understand and respond
to the notion that we must forgive the brother or sister who sins against us,
not just seven times, but over and over again,
because we don’t forgive on merit but with mercy.
Do we judge those who have sinned against us worthy of love,
our love, God’s love?
That’s the question, isn’t it?

There are some people in our lives whose sole reason for existence
seems to be to test our patience,
to push us up against the boundaries of what we think we are capable of.
There are people who we are convinced don’t deserve our mercy.
I wonder, why have we’ve come to that decision?
There are people we know who we just can’t seem to forgive anymore.
I wonder, how have we tried?
Have we based our forgiveness to them on merit, or has it been mercy based?
Let me be clear about one thing.
Mercy does not mean that in our forgiveness we turn a blind eye to abuse or exploitation. Mercy does not mean that we ignore the consequences of evil actions.
Even as God judged us still worthy of his love, despite our sins,
it didn’t negate the reality of our sins.
Jesus still suffered and died on the cross.
But mercy does means that we still find those who have hurt us
and offended us and sinned against us worthy of love,
a love that will call the offender to repentance,
a love that will hold the abuser to account,
a love that says that God is not finished with them yet.
Ultimately you can’t give what you don’t have,
but remember the warning of Jesus at end of the parable.
We can’t give what we don’t have in our lives.
But if we do have it, if we do know it,
if we have received the mercy of God in our lives,
if God has judged us worthy of his love,
then we have no option but to share it with others.

And to God be the glory, now and forevermore, Amen.