Sermon on 3-22--Introduction On Forgiveness

One thing I love about the Bible is that the people that show up in the Bible have the same kinds of questions and struggles to trust and follow Jesus as people like you and I do. Perhaps no character is quite as easy to identify with in the gospels as the person of Jesus’ disciple Simon Peter. Peter often speaks what might be on our mind if we were walking and talking with Jesus while we were on earth. He speaks what we might think, but might not have the courage to voice.

Perhaps, then, it comes as no surprise that Peter asks the question he did. After Jesus gives them a biblical foundation for reconciling with someone who has done something sinful and offensive in one’s church, Peter speaks up. He asks, “How often should we forgive someone? Seven times?”.

Then Jesus answers that we should have to forgive someone seventy seven times. After this Jesus tells a parable to illustrate his point.

He asks us to imagine that there is this king. And financial times were getting a little tight, so he decides to call in some of the debts of people who owed him money. And he found this man who had defaulted on his debts big time. How the collection agencies had not gotten after him we will never know, but they had not. The man owed 10,000 talents. Now a talent is 15 years worth of wages. Which to my calculations, based on average family income in Fowler, ranges somewhere between 4 and 4 and ½ billion dollars.

Needless to say, this servant did not have the money that he owed the king. He was a citizen, a businessman, but not wealthy. He did not have that kind of money. So the day came when the servant’s day of reckoning had come and he stood before the king. He had scraped together a few thousand bucks maybe, but not much more. And the king said that he was going to need to sell the man, his wife, and his children into slavery to begin to somehow reconcile the debt. The servant fell to his knees, begging and pleading to have a chance to find the way to earn this man’s money back. He fell on the floor, he cried, and he flailed around. He begged and pleaded for a chance to make this right.

Somewhere, deep down, this king had a heart. And he forgave this miserable servant. He looked at him and pitied him. Hear that again—he saw the position he was in as simply pitiful, and in a move of extraordinary mercy, the king forgave his debt.


Then a few days later, this servant went down the road, and ran into someone who owed him money, who was also a servant of the king. How much money did this poor guy owe him? Somewhere around 6,500 dollars, if you count a day’s wages by what a substitute teacher makes in Fowler. Well the fellow servant did not have the money to pay back the servant who had just had a debt of billions cancelled. And when our forgiven servant found this out, he assaulted him. He tackled him, and grabbed him around the throat, and began to almost kill this fellow servant for not making good on his debt.

Well, the other servants noticed what had happened and they ran to the king and told him the story. And Jesus says the story ends with the man having his debt reinstated and him being tortured and thrown into prison for what was most likely a life sentence.

In Jesus’ story the king is God. To whom we have a debt we can never repay.
This selfish and pitiful servant is our own pitiful, pathetic selves.
And, the fellow servant that we almost kill is that person that we judge. That person we refuse to forgive, even though we know how much we have been forgiven.
This story that shows up later in Matthew is a story makes the same call on our lives as we put on ourselves when we pray the Lord’s Prayer. “Father God, forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors”.

Both the parable and the prayer challenge us with the knowledge of two things. First, how desperately we need to be forgiven, and how pitiable and needy we are in God’s eyes. Second, how challenging and difficult it is to be a forgiving person even after we have received God’s forgiveness.

So let us dig a little deeper into understanding what this prayer says. Let’s begin with discussing what forgiveness is, and what forgiveness is not. Then, let us talk about our need for God’s forgiveness. Then, once we have gotten this far, let us talk about what it means for us to forgive others, and why is it is so important.