How many of you like math? Great, two of you! That’s a lot more than I thought.
For some reason, there aren’t a lot of us
who enjoy math all that much. Math can be frustrating.
Here’s a little math trivia. Do you know how
to make seven an even number? You just remove the letter, “s.” That will make
it “even” just by doing that.
Why shouldn’t you do math in the jungle?
Because if you add 4 plus 4, you get ate!
Why is 6 afraid of seven? Anybody know?
Because seven eight nine!
Where do two math teachers go on vacation?
Times Square.
I know, I know. I’ll keep my day job.
Today’s reading from the Gospel of Matthew
requires a test of our math skills. And that math problem is, “How many times should I forgive someone
who has hurt me?”
This is the question that one of the
disciples asked Jesus. It’s a math question. How many times should I forgive
someone who has hurt me?
Actually, it’s not that difficult of a
math problem because Peter already knows the answer to his own question. In
biblical times, you were expected to forgive someone up to three times. Everybody
knew that.
Forgiving somebody for something they did
to you was seen as a very noble thing. To forgive somebody two times, was seen
as the gracious thing to do. And to forgive someone three times was viewed as being
very generous. To forgive somebody that many times meant that you were going way
above and beyond in being a very gracious and forgiving person.
Notice that when Peter answers his own
question about how many times somebody should forgive, he goes with a totally
different number. He throws out the number seven. Wow, seven is more than
double what the answer should have been.
You got to hand it to Peter. He has been
paying attention to what Jesus has been teaching. He knows that forgiveness is
central to who Jesus is. He remembers that Jesus has already taught them to
love their enemies and to pray for those who persecute them. He heard Jesus say
that if someone wants you to walk one mile, you should go the extra mile.
By going with the number, “seven,” Peter
is thinking that this will show Jesus that he is one of his brightest students.
Peter could have gone with an answer of four or five to prove his point, but he
want all the way up to seven times. To Peter’s credit, he did expand the commonly
held idea of forgiveness by 133 percent.
Peter thought he got his own math problem
right, but actually, he was still way off from the right answer. Jesus responds
by saying, “Not just seven times, but
rather as many as seventy-seven times.”
It wasn’t that Peter wasn’t on the right
track. He was. I think Jesus was aware
of this. It’s just that Jesus wanted Peter to see that forgiveness is not bound
by arithmetic. Forgiveness is not an exercise of crunching some numbers in your
head. Forgiveness is about the heart. We are to forgive others freely from our
heart.
And then Jesus drives his point home by
offering us this parable about a man who was in debt. He owed a ridiculous
amount of money to a king who wanted to settle his accounts. One bible commentary I read suggested that
the amount owed was probably equivalent to around 150 thousand years of wages.
Sometimes, Jesus likes to use wild numbers like this just to get our attention.
The king demands to be paid immediately or
he will sell this man’s family and all his possessions. The man pleads for the
king to be patient. Out of pity, the king forgives him of the mammoth debt that
was owed to him.
Can
you believe it? The king forgave this man of 150 thousand years of wages! What
would you do if you were that man? Kiss the king’s ring? Go home and write him
a thank you note? Volunteer to polish his crown everyday for the rest of your
life?
You would be so relieved, that you would
probably do something to show your gratitude to the King for freeing you from
your debt. But what does this man in the parable do? Immediately after he
leaves the King’s palace, the same King that forgave him of that ridiculous
amount of money he owed, he runs into a friend of his who owed him some money.
His friend owed him what was equivalent of
half a year of wages. Now, for sure,
that would be a sizable amount of money, but compared to the millions of dollars
that he had just been forgiven, it was small change.
You would think that out of gratitude for
what the King had just done for him, he would have been gracious toward this
man, but that’s not what happens. Instead, he demands that this guy pay up immediately.
This man pleads with him to have patience,
just like he had done a few minutes earlier with the king who had forgiven him
for his debt. We’re thinking that this man who has just experienced the largest
bail out ever will reciprocate and pass it on, but he doesn’t. Instead, he
throws this man into prison until he pays every penny that is owed him.
As we hear this story, we are in disbelief
that this man would do such a thing even though he was this close to never
seeing the light of day. How can someone who has received so much grace, turn
around and not offer some of that same grace to somebody else?
Evidently, this man doesn’t understand the
concept of “pay it forward.” Paying it forward means that we share the gifts we
have received with others. Paying it forward means that when it comes to living
graciously, sometimes we just need to throw math out the window.
Eric Law is an Episcopal Priest and he has
written the book, Holy Currencies. His book is based on four fundamental
assumptions about life and faith:
#1
– God owns everything. #2 – God gives abundantly. #3 – We are not to keep God’s
resources; we are to circulate these resources. And #4 – God’s blessings are
then recycled to create more blessings.
In his book, he says that the word we
often use for money is the word, “currency.” Currency is a word that literally means
to run or to flow. That’s why we this
word refers to electricity. Electricity has movement. In other words, money is
not meant to be stagnant. It’s meant to move in such a way that it will not
only bless you and me, but it will also be a blessing to others. That’s how our
economy is supposed to work.
The problem is when we become like the man
in the parable who received so much but was unwilling to share even a small
fraction of what he received with his friend who was in need of a helping hand.
Eric Law’s parents started a music school in Hong Kong in the 1960s
which has continued to this day in New York City with the same business model –
a sustainable business that never makes much money, but has helped their family
to make a lot of friends and has provided livelihood for many people over the
years.
Eric’s father started out as a furniture
maker and he assembled pianos. His mother noticed early on that it was very
expensive for a child to learn to play the piano especially if a family had to
buy the piano and also pay for the lessons.
She also noticed that children didn’t have
a lot of places to go after school and that their parents didn’t have a lot of
time in their busy schedules. This is
when they decided to build soundproofed rooms in their apartment and they put a
piano in each room and hired teachers to offer piano lessons.
The parents were charged a very modest
amount each month and in exchange, the students received a thirty-minute lesson
each week and they were allowed to practice there five times a week.
The fee that they collected was shared
with the teachers. Even though, their company never made a lot of money, it
ended up creating jobs for piano tuners and other workers. Eric says that this
is why his parents’ business is still going strong to this day. Their business
is designed to be a blessing for others.
This idea of money needing to flow and to
not become stagnant is what Jesus is talking about in our Gospel reading this
morning. The king’s generosity in forgiving the man’s large debt saved him and
his family from going to prison and it helped him to get a fresh start. Just as
this act of grace was set into motion, it ended abruptly by the man who was on
the receiving end.
The
man who had received a huge blessing from the king was unwilling to forgive the
smaller debt of his friend. He didn’t understand that generosity is meant to be
shared with others. He didn’t understand the meaning of currency.
If this is true of money, it’s also true
of forgiveness. Forgiveness is like currency. It’s meant to be offered and
shared again and again and again. The problem becomes when we treat forgiveness
like we do a math problem. We put a numerical value on God’s grace. That’s why
Jesus told Peter, “Not seven times, but
seven times seventy. That’s how many times you’re supposed to forgive.”
Of course, we all know that forgiving
someone is easier said than done. We might want to offer forgiveness once,
twice, or even seven times, but the painful memory of past hurts can become too
strong to overcome.
Maybe this is the whole point of Jesus’
parable. Instead of focusing on the past hurts, maybe we should focus instead
on the graciousness of the king. Maybe we should focus on how God, the king of
kings has been unbelievably gracious toward us.
In a matter of minutes, the man who had
been forgiven millions of dollars had already forgotten the King’s
graciousness. He was only focusing on what was owed to him. He forgot that
forgiveness is meant to be a way of life and something to be shared with
others.
Think of forgiveness like the breath you
take in any given moment. Your lungs can only breathe in so much air in one
breath. At some point, we need to exhale. Just think how silly we would all
look if we walked around trying to hold in the breath we just took. We’d all
have great big puffy cheeks and we wouldn’t survive if we tried to do that.
Breathing works so much better when we breathe in and when we breathe
out. When we breathe in God’s grace and forgiveness in our lives, we are to
also breathe out God’s grace and forgiveness. God’s forgiveness is meant to be
shared.
This past Thursday was Holy Cross Day. It’s
always observed on September 14. It’s a day for us to give thanks for what
Jesus did for us when he died on the cross for the sins of the world. It’s a
day to be grateful. It’s a day to celebrate God’s love for the world.
The
cross is the ultimate symbol of forgiveness. It reminds us that God went to
great lengths to free us from our debt of sin. God didn’t just forgive us seven
times. God forgave us seven times seventy times.
I’m glad that Jesus doesn’t count up to a
certain number of times that he will forgive us and then say to us, “OK, I reached my limit. You’ve sinned one
too many times.” Jesus knows that we are as dependent on forgiveness as we
are on needing to take our next breath.
When we think more about the cross than we
do the past memories of how we have been hurt by others, we are able to be forgiving
and gracious people. But when we turn forgiveness into a math problem, we’ll
end up with an answer that doesn’t even come close to how much God has forgiven
us.
Since we’re talking about math problems, I
want to see if you know the answer to this math question. A church member came
up to me one Sunday morning and handed me a little note that had this math
problem on it. I think this sums up what we’re talking about today. It said, “1
cross + 3 nails = 4 given.”
It’s when we focus on the cross and what
God did for us through Jesus Christ, that we are then able to forgive others
and yes, even ourselves.
When we focus on the cross, and receive
God’s amazing grace, we might be surprised to discover that we in turn can
forgive others not just once, or twice, or three times, or who knows, even as
many as seventy-seven times or seventy-eight times, or seventy-nine times, or how
about even eighty times?
But, who’s counting?
There is no end. There is no end. There is
no end to God’s eternal and forgiving love.
Thanks be to God!
But Who's Counting
Small Group Questions
Matthew 18:21-35
September 17, 2017
1 Our Gospel reading is on the topic of forgiveness and how many times we should forgive somebody. For some people, once is asking a lot. Peter offers the gracious response of seven times. Jesus counters with the unbelievably high number of 77 times!
This scripture reminds us that forgiveness is a touchy topic. Why do we struggle with offering forgiveness?
Jesus often used parables to illustrate what it means to be part of his kingdom. He tells about a king who forgave someone of what was equivalent of 150,000 years of wages. This man who was now forgiven of his debt ran into somebody who owed him a small fraction of what he had just been forgiven by the King. Instead of showing mercy like he had received, he demanded to be paid.
What does this parable tell us about who God is (our King) and what does it reveal about who we are?
Jesus showed us the extreme nature of God's forgiving love through his interactions with those who were considered outcasts, through his teachings to love our enemies, and through his suffering and death on the cross for the sake of the world.
Where have you experienced God's forgiving love? What helps you to remember to offer God's forgiving love toward others?
Pastor Robert ended his sermon by offering a math question. The math question is 1 cross + 3 nails = 4 given. This fun little spiritual math equation reminds us that if we want to be more forgiving in our lives, the cross is the place to turn because it reminds us of the graciousness of God our King.
As a small group, find some time to stand in the glass welcome center of our church and face toward the cross that hangs above the altar. Notice how our newly remodeled sanctuary draws your eyes toward the cross and invites you to enter the sanctuary. Walk up the center aisle and offer prayers thanking God for his forgiving and saving love.
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