Sermon Tone Analysis
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! Forgiveness—Disgracing Grace
After we have experienced the grace and forgiveness of the Lord Jesus Christ, we must then live it by forgiving one another.
Then Peter came to Jesus and asked, "Lord, how many times shall I forgive my brother when he sins against me?
Up to seven times?"
Jesus answered, "I tell you, not seven times, but seventy-seven times.
"Therefore, the kingdom of heaven is like a king who wanted to settle accounts with his servants.
As he began the settlement, a man who owed him ten thousand talents was brought to him.
Since he was not able to pay, the master ordered that he and his wife and his children and all that he had be sold to repay the debt.
"The servant fell on his knees before him.
'Be patient with me,' he begged, 'and I will pay back everything.'
The servant's master took pity on him, canceled the debt and let him go.
"But when that servant went out, he found one of his fellow servants who owed him a hundred denarii.
He grabbed him and began to choke him.
'Pay back what you owe me!' he demanded.
"His fellow servant fell to his knees and begged him, 'Be patient with me, and I will pay you back.'
"But he refused.
Instead, he went off and had the man thrown into prison until he could pay the debt.
When the other servants saw what had happened, they were greatly distressed and went and told their master everything that had happened.
"Then the master called the servant in.
'You wicked servant,' he said, 'I canceled all that debt of yours because you begged me to.
Shouldn't you have had mercy on your fellow servant just as I had on you?
In anger his master turned him over to the jailers until he
should pay back all he owed.
"This is how my heavenly Father will treat each of you unless you forgive your brother from your heart."
Matthew 18:21-35
Simon Isenthall, a famous Jewish writer, wrote a remarkable short story in 1976 entitled "The Sunflower."
It was an autobiographical account of an experience he'd had thirty years before while incarcerated in a German concentration camp.
While on a work detail turning a barn into a field hospital, he was stopped by a young German nurse who said, "Come quickly, come quickly."
She guided him to a young man whose head was wrapped with a bloodsoaked bandage covering both eyes.
Grabbing for Isenthall's hand, the young man finally caught it with a death grip and cried out, "I must talk to a Jew before I die!"
Isenthall said, "I am a Jew."
The young man said, "My SS troop was sent to burn down a Jewish house.
After it was set on fire, the family ran out of the house, and we gunned them down.
I cannot get it out of my mind.
I know I am about to die.
Forgive me!"
Isenthall said in "The Sunflower":
"I jerked my hand away and went out the door without a word...
That bothered me for thirty years."
And then he ended the story in a most unusual way.
He told of asking thirty-two different people to comment on his reaction.
They were Jews, Gentiles, young and old, men and women.
Out of the thirty-two people polled, the majority said that he did the right thing, that he should not have forgiven.
One of them said that the young soldier should go straight to hell.
The late Corrie ten Boom found herself in a similar situation.
During the war she and her sister were also imprisoned in a concentration camp.
They were taken continually to the delousing shower and forced to strip naked.
A lecherous SS guard ogled these very modest women during the whole humiliating time.
Corrie survived the camp, but her sister did not
After the war, Corrie became a Christian spokeswoman all over the world, preaching forgiveness everywhere she went.
One day she was speaking in Munich.
At the end of the lecture, a man came up to her and stuck out his hand and said, "Ah yes, God's forgiveness is good, isn't it?"
As she looked into his face, she recognized him as the lecherous SS guard.
His face had been imprinted on her consciousness forever.
She said, "I thought in my heart I had forgiven him, [but] as he reached his hand out, my hand froze by my side, and I could not reach out and take his hand.
Here I was, the world-famous forgiver, and I had come face to face with a man I couldn't even touch.
I prayed to God, 'God, forgive me for my inability to forgive.'
When I asked God for that, He gave me the grace to reach my hand out, take that man's hand, and say, 'Yes, God is good.' "
Something similar must have happened to or among the disciples during those years of following Jesus across the Holy Land.
Maybe it was Peter, or maybe it was Andrew or John, but obviously, as the story is told in Matthew 18, somebody needed to forgive someone else.
Peter came to Jesus and asked, "Lord, how many times shall I forgive my brother when he sins against me, up to seven times?"
The rabbis of the time always taught that a person should forgive another person three times.
So Peter, feeling magnanimous, doubled that and added one for good measure.
And Jesus answered, "I tell you not seven times, but seventy-seven," which was His way of pointing out to Peter that he had fallen far short of Jesus' conception of forgiveness.
It was as if Jesus were saying, "As long as you are talking about limitations on forgiveness, you've not understood the message of the kingdom of God that I've come to bring."
We all know how it feels to be deeply hurt People can betray our confidence or our trust, crush our feelings, or even harm us physically.
How can anyone who has been wronged by another human being possibly be so forgiving as to /keep/ on forgiving?
!! A Story of Forgiveness
I'm sure Jesus understood the sheer incredulity that the disciples must have displayed after His answer.
And so He told a parable to explain such forgiveness.
It was one of His most unusual stories, a drama in several acts.
Even the setting of the parable was strange.
The setting, scholars tell us, is not that of the Holy Land, but of some kingdom much further to the East, perhaps in what we would today call Iran or Iraq.
In this land, as Jesus told the story, a king suddenly wants to know what he is worth.
These were the days long before modern-day accounting or bookkeeping—not to mention personal computers.
The only way a king could find out what he was worth was to have his servants come in and put all he owned, and all that was owed him, on the table and count it.
And that's exactly what the king did.
Jesus explained, "The kingdom of heaven is like the king who wanted to settle accounts with his servants."
The king ran his fingers over the list of debts owed to him by his servants and decided he wanted everyone to pay up.
At that time servants were not houseboys waving fans to keep flies off the king.
Servants were men of enormous responsibility.
Today we might call them cabinet-level members of the government, vice-regents of the kingdom.
The first one to enter the presence of the king was a man who owed him 10,000 talents.
This man had defrauded the king.
It's difficult to estimate what 10,000 talents means.
To give you a comparison, all the taxes collected by Herod the Great when he was king of Israel amounted to only around 800 talents a year.
All of the gold in the Ark of the Covenant was only 30 talents.
Ten thousand talents was probably the amount of money that was in the biggest bank in the Eastern Roman Empire—the bank on the Acropolis of Athens.
We would say today that this man had done the equivalent of robbing Fort Knox—right under his master's nose.
He owed him something between 30 and 50 million dollars (since a day's wages was 17¢, this would look like our modern national debt!).
How would the king respond?
In the modern Arab world officials cut off a man's hands if he is caught in simple theft.
In that day, this servant must have thought that his head was forfeit.
For some reason, Jesus tells us that since the servant was not able to pay, the king ordered that the servant, his wife, his children, and all that he had be sold to pay the debt.
Possibly, Jesus included this point in the story to show the absolutely impossible situation of this servant.
Because even if the servant's assets were totally liquidated, it would not have equaled even one ten thousandth of what he owed the king.
With the going rate of slaves at the time, the man's whole family would not have brought one gold talent.
Because of this hopeless condition, he sorely needed mercy, grace, and forgiveness.
As you might imagine, and as we all probably would have done, the servant gasped out a seemingly futile appeal.
He fell on his knees and begged, "Be patient with me and I will pay back everything."
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