Sermon transcript:
I want to share a summer scene with you. I come home from a camping trip with the family. All the stuff, that I cannot believe we somehow managed to fit into our minivan is suddenly spread across the floor of the house, waiting to be sorted, cleaned, put away, or otherwise dealt with. There are sleeping bags and muddy shoes, food containers and flashlights, damp towels and chairs, books and games and things no one remembers packing. And the longer I look at it, the more overwhelmed I become.
That’s how I felt looking at the assigned gospel passage for this week. So, before I begin, I need to admit that I am not preaching on the entire gospel reading assigned for today. I am only reflecting on two verses of a fourteen-verse passage. The part I left out moves into a parable (or story) about a king forgiving the debts of enslaved people—a story involving all kinds of power dynamics that need to be explored carefully. There is the meaning of the story for Jesus’ original audience. Then there is what Matthew may have done with it, turning it into an allegory for the early church and its struggle to understand how to live together in community. That’s a lot. So, much like choosing to deal only with what is essential on the day we get home from camping—putting the food away, hanging the wet tent in the yard to dry, and leaving the rest for later—I have decided to focus on the two verses we just heard.
These two verses struck me as saying something important about the nature of faith—something beyond what they say about forgiveness. The truth is that the parable which follows these verses does not really say a great deal about what real forgiveness looks like in practice. It’s sparse on guidance. Because of that, too often, passages like these have been used to make forgiveness seem like an easy task involving a few words exchanged between the harmed and the one who did the harm. Worse, they have sometimes been used to place the burden of forgiveness on the person who was harmed rather than on the person who caused the harm. That is not a faithful or life-giving use of this text.
It’s wise to avoid seeing any guidance here on the how of forgiveness. Instead, I hear in these verses a profound statement about the nature of faith itself. Peter’s question is asking for some basic guidance about how to live as a person of faith. That is fair enough. We all want guidance. We want to know what is expected of us. We want to know how to faithfully navigate difficult times in our relationships. At the same time, Peter’s question reveals something about how he views faith. Peter wants to apply math to faith. “How many times?” To be fair, Peter is very generous. He is offering more than a second chance.
Still, Peter wants a formula. He wants certainty and control.1 That is what math is for. Mathematics is a problem-solving tool. Math helps us make sense of the world. It gives us predictability and a measure of control over our environment. And math has its place. Thank God for engineers, physicists, architects, accountants, and measuring cups. Math is a poor way to approach the life of faith, though. Faith is a relationship. I once knew a couple who lived their life together as if it were a book of accounts. If she bought something, he had to buy something for himself, whether or not he needed it. If he did the cleaning, she would have to make supper, regardless of how hard her day had been. It was a tit-for-tat kind of relationship. It was predictable. It offered a certain kind of security. It seemed to ensure fairness.
But it also kept them from experiencing the fullness of marriage. Their relationship was devoid of grace—the surprising acts of care and generosity that arise when we listen deeply, pay attention, and let go of our agendas. It was not so much a relationship as a living arrangement based on a formula, and I think Peter is tempted to do something similar with faith. Behind his question—and I am not suggesting that this is Peter’s conscious intent—is an attempt to set limits around who is deserving of God’s love, and under what circumstances. Peter wants to know when he can walk away. When has he met the requirement? When has he done enough? When is he free to write someone off?
But Jesus challenges Peter’s math-based approach to life and faith. “You want a number, Peter?” Jesus seems to say. “How about one million billion trillion times?” Jesus says, stop counting. Because if you are counting, you are probably just biding your time until you have permission to give up on people.2
Christian faith is about trusting and living into a relationship with the God we have come to know in the life of Jesus and in the presence of the Holy Spirit. God is love. Jesus is God’s love lived out in human life. The Holy Spirit is Love’s power and energy. Faith is a relationship in which we surrender our agendas, pay attention, and listen deeply to where love might be calling and leading us.
One agenda we may be asked to surrender is our resistance to forgive someone. The life of faith is the journey of an open heart. That means there is no writing people off forever—not because every relationship must be restored, but because we refuse to believe that brokenness has the final word. It means staying open to the possibility that what is broken and shattered may yet be healed, may yet be made whole.
Faith asks us to trust, to do our part to bring healing, and to live open to the possibility of wholeness. Who knows what the other person will do? We do not know. But we can remain open and available to the movement of love. The life of faith is a relationship that trusts God is inviting us into that wholeness—the place where God is most intimately experienced. So, there is no counting. No math. Just listening and paying attention.
That is the surprising message at the heart of Jesus’ answer to Peter. In a world that keeps score and measures what people deserve, Jesus tells a tale that breaks the rules of normal math. Seven is not enough. Seventy-seven is not the limit. There is no final number that allows us to say, “I have done my bit.” The point is not that harm does not matter. The point is not that accountability is unimportant. The point is that love cannot be reduced to a calculation and that faith cannot be reduced to rules that put us in the judges’ chair.
What is essential, before anything else in this life of faith, is the relationship—the listening, the paying attention. What is essential in the life of faith is staying open to the reality that grace is already at work and healing and wholeness is always a possibility to be anticipated. Thanks be to God.
Rev. Joe Gaspar
1 Eugene Boring, Commentary on the Book of Matthew, “New Interpreter’s Bible Commentary”, vol. 8, Abingdon Press: Nashville, 1995, p. 380.
2 Boring, 380.