Reflection for the Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost, Year A
Matthew 18:21–35
In worship, I began this reflection with a short video of a sheep stuck in a ditch. Someone works to get the sheep out, finally frees it, and for one glorious moment the sheep is running.
Free.
The crisis is over.
Everything is fine.
And then, approximately three seconds later…
right back into the ditch.
I have watched that video more times than I probably should have.
I don’t know whether that sheep is particularly gifted at being a sheep or particularly bad at being a sheep, but I do know this:
I recognize it.
Maybe you do, too.
Because there are moments when God somehow gets us out of the ditch—when grace finds us, when somebody forgives us, when something we’ve been carrying finally loosens its grip, when we experience mercy that we absolutely did not earn.
And we think, Thank God. I’m free.
And then sometimes we turn around and jump straight back into the same ditch.
Back into resentment.
Back into keeping score.
Back into rehearsing what somebody did to us.
Back into deciding who deserves mercy and who definitely does not.
Which makes that little sheep a surprisingly good introduction to the story Jesus tells Peter.
Peter comes to Jesus with a question about forgiveness.
And I think Peter would really like a number.
“How often should I forgive somebody who sins against me? Seven times?”
Seven is generous. Seven is gracious. And, perhaps most importantly, seven is countable.
You can make a little chart.
One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven.
And then, presumably, somewhere around offense number eight, Peter gets to say, “Well, Jesus, I tried.”
But Jesus gives him a number that basically ruins the spreadsheet.
Seventy-seven times.
Or, depending on the translation, seventy times seven.
Either way, I don’t think Jesus is giving Peter a bigger tally sheet.
I think Jesus is telling him:
Peter, stop counting.
Then Jesus tells a story about a man who has been pulled out of an unimaginably deep ditch…
and almost immediately jumps right back in.
But linger with Peter’s question for a minute.
How many times should I forgive someone who sins against me?
There is something deeply human in that question, isn’t there?
How much do I really have to do?
How patient do I have to be?
How many chances do I have to give?
When have I forgiven enough?
We understand Peter’s question.
Unlimited forgiveness sounds beautiful right up until you remember that actual people are involved.
And people are complicated.
Families are complicated.
Friendships are complicated.
Churches are complicated.
We are complicated.
Jesus doesn’t respond to that complication by pretending hurt doesn’t matter.
Instead, he tells Peter a story in which the hurt—and the debt—are very real.
There is a servant who owes a debt he cannot possibly repay.
Seriously. This is not, “Well, maybe this will take a few years.”
There is no payment plan.
There is no refinancing.
It is impossible.
So the servant does what any of us might do when we have nowhere else to turn.
He begs.
And the king does something almost unimaginable.
He doesn’t extend the loan.
He doesn’t change the payment terms.
He cancels the whole thing.
The debt is gone.
The master knows the servant cannot repay it, and so he releases the burden and sets him free.
This is where I think we Lutherans ought to feel pretty much at home.
Because we talk a lot about grace.
Grace: God’s love freely given.
And grace begins with God.
Not with what we have earned.
Not with whether we have been good enough.
Not with whether we have finally gotten our spiritual act together.
We begin worship confessing that we have fallen short. That we need God. That there are things from which we simply cannot free ourselves.
And God says:
“I forgive you.”
Before we fix ourselves.
Before we pay anything back.
Before we could possibly deserve it.
God forgives us.
That’s grace.
The strange thing about Jesus’ story isn’t that the servant receives grace.
The strange thing is how quickly he forgets what grace feels like.
Remember the sheep?
The servant gets free, runs off for just a moment…
and jumps right back into the ditch.
He walks away from the king and almost immediately runs into somebody who owes him something.
And suddenly the spreadsheet comes back out.
“You owe me.”
“Pay me.”
“Settle the debt.”
Three seconds out of the ditch, and there he goes again.
I think the tragedy of this servant isn’t simply that he fails to forgive.
It is that he experiences grace without allowing grace to change the way he sees another human being.
Because that is the rub of this whole thing.
Grace isn’t simply something I get.
Grace changes me.
Grace changes the way I see the world around me.
It changes the way I see my neighbor.
It changes what I believe people are worth.
It changes my relationship with power.
And, hopefully, it interrupts that endless tape playing in our heads that keeps trying to decide who deserves compassion and who does not.
But right here we need to be careful.
Because Christian talk about forgiveness has sometimes caused real harm.
Jesus is not telling someone who is being harmed that they have to keep walking back into danger.
Forgiveness does not mean pretending something never happened.
Forgiveness does not erase consequences.
Forgiveness does not require you to put yourself back into the hands of someone who continues to hurt you.
In fact, this passage comes right after Jesus has been teaching about accountability within a community.
And even in today’s story, when the other servants see harm happening, they do not simply ignore it.
They tell someone who is able to intervene.
Because forgiveness and accountability are not enemies.
Sometimes love requires accountability.
What forgiveness releases us from is something different.
The need to spend the rest of our lives living inside vengeance.
The need to let the wound become our whole identity.
The need to carry the ledger—or the spreadsheet—with us everywhere we go.
Maybe that is why Jesus doesn’t simply tell Peter to forgive more.
Maybe Jesus is trying to tune Peter’s heart toward another way of living.
On the morning I preached this reflection, before many people arrived for worship, the choir gathered for its first rehearsal of the year.
They are different people.
Different voices.
Some sing high. Some sing low.
Some may occasionally wonder whether they should be singing at all.
But they love music. They love being together. They love making that joyful noise the Psalms talk about.
And before they can sing together, somebody gives them a note.
Maybe it comes from the piano.
Maybe from the organ.
Maybe from someone’s voice.
But the note is given.
And everybody listens.
They adjust.
They breathe.
And they try again.
Not because anybody was terrible before.
Not because everybody suddenly becomes the same.
But because singing together requires listening for the note that draws us back toward harmony.
I wonder if forgiveness is something like that.
God keeps giving us the note.
Mercy.
Grace.
Compassion.
Forgiveness.
Again.
And again.
And again.
And we wander.
We go sharp.
We go flat.
We pull the spreadsheet back out.
We jump back into the ditch.
And still God gives us the note again.
You are forgiven.
You are loved.
You are free.
And then Jesus sends us back into this really complicated world, filled with really complicated people, and says:
Now live like somebody who knows what mercy sounds like.
You don’t have to deny what happened.
You don’t have to ignore the hurt.
You don’t even have to have everything figured out today.
Just listen again for the note.
And little by little,
day by day,
grace can retune us.
Until resentment isn’t the loudest thing in us anymore.
Until vengeance doesn’t get the final word.
Until the mercy we have received begins to become the mercy we offer.
Because there is good news.
And I hate to break it to you, but the good news is not that we are really good at staying out of the ditch.
We aren’t.
The good news is that Christ keeps meeting us there.
Pulling us toward freedom.
Calling us back into community.
Giving us the note again.
And teaching us, over and over again,
what grace sounds like.
I really hope you can hear it.
Amen.
