15th Sunday after Trinity
READING: MATTHEW 18 v 21 – 35

To forgive, and really mean it

I wonder when was  the last time that you said to someone I  forgive you …And I wonder if you really meant it.

The story for our gospel today is one that Jesus tells  in response to Peter asking Jesus how often he should forgive a fellow member of the community. As many as seven times ? Jesus answers Not seven times but seventy times seven.

Jesus tells a parable of a servant who owes his master a huge sum-  equivalent to a debt of multi million pounds. The master forgives him the debt but soon afterwards the same man comes upon a fellow servant  who just owes him 100 denarii or 100 days wages – a debt that given time could have been paid off. But the first servant refuses to show the same mercy. Once the master hears the first servant is not living out the forgiveness he has been shown, he is dragged off to the debtors prison.

If we are honest, most of us would admit that forgiveness is not an easy thing in practice. The writer C S Lewis has an interesting take on the seventy-seven times. He says it may not mean forgiving seventy-seven separate offences. But it may take us seventy-seven attempts to forgive someone fully even once.

We forgive someone. We say ‘I’ve let it go’. Later  we remember the offence again. It rankles. We can’t leave it alone. We get cross. We suddenly realise that we haven’t really forgiven them. So we sigh and forgive again, saying ‘Now it is done.’  But then a couple of days later, something else reminds us of the hurt we experienced and we have to start again. . We may only have said ‘I forgive you’ out loud once. But there is much unspoken forgiving to do.

When we find ourselves trapped in this repetitive loop of resentment,  Jesus’ dramatic parable of the two debtors can reframe everything for us and break the cycle.

The story challenges to give up playing the tiresome role of the magnanimous ( but secretly resentful ) forgiver and instead to remember that we are also the unexpectedly, utterly forgiven. Then instead of making the effort to muster up a feeling that we may not be able to find, we can rather let deep gratitude for our own undeserved release from guilt, flow out naturally so we can offer genuine release and find a lasting peace.

Forgiveness is a central Christian tenet which we cannot avoid. We must first recognise our own need of forgiveness and then in turn extend  it to those who cause us hurt. This is far from easy but it is at the heart of our faith.

Today’s gospel helps us understand that in order to forgive  we first need compassion. The first servant fails to put himself in the shoes of the other servant. We must not be like him. Instead we are called to see the world from the perspective of the other person. With such compassion and with God’s grace we can both offer forgiveness AND  receive it when it is offered to us.

Jesus is telling us that forgiveness needs to be both experienced and lived out There is a limit to forgiveness – not a numerical limit but a limit that might be imposed if we fail to live it out in our relationships with others – forgive us our sins, as we forgive those who sin against us.

That phrase of course comes from the Lord’s Prayer and in its traditional form the words are forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.

Scholars tells us the word Jesus used in his language of Aramaic and which we translate as trespasses or sins would have been more like the word debt – with an economic association. I wonder if  you ever noticed how the petition about forgiveness is closely linked to the phrase before with the word And.

Give us today our daily bread AND forgive us our debts as we have forgiven those who have been in debt to us – is closest to the original meaning within the prayer of Jesus.

Bread and debt are preoccupations of ordinary men and women – the crowds in the peasant class that Jesus spent so much time with. Where will I find  food for myself and my family for tomorrow and how am I going to pay the bills of our household ? There is a strong economic emphasis in Jesus’ prayer.

Richard Rohr, argues the original context of these phrases in the Lord’s prayer is an economic one. Yet the church has spiritualised these petitions and made them refer to private individual forgiveness. This is one meaning but on the first level the petition really refers to economic indebtedness.

Rohr thinks that Jesus is influenced by the concept of the Jubilee Year that is outlined in the Old Testament. Every fiftieth year all debts were forgiven as a sign of God’s largess and magnaminity.

It is worth noting that the illustration that Jesus uses in his answer to Peter is about debt and money and not some spiritual sin or religious failure.

Putting this parable and the Lord’s Prayer together with their focus on economics challenges us to question our own economic models. In the West we see many people carrying the burden of personal debt that arises out of our consumer society. And in the Global South we see countries carrying massive national debts that causes great suffering to so many of their citizens. 25 nations in Africa such as Malawi  are having to spend more money to pay off debt than they do on education. Private companies charging high interest rates leads to schools having no books for teaching and not enough teachers so that children are suffering.

This story of Jesus asks us to  strive for better practice of genuine forgiveness in our daily lives, Perhaps it also asks  how we can persuade governments to bring in debt relief for lower income countries that could be so liberating for those countries and enable them to provide so many more services to those in need.

Image: Seventyfour images, Envato.com