The Sermon: Matthew 18.21-35
Forgiving Others
One of the most striking characteristics of the Christian faith, and of Christian practice, is that of forgiveness. When we’re talking about forgiveness, it’s absolutely necessary to define the term. I say this because many people have a wrong idea of what biblical forgiveness really is. Those influenced by Eastern thought, for example, often see forgiveness as a moral weakness. To forgive someone is seen as excusing the evil they’ve done; it’s seen as tantamount to injustice. Biblical forgiveness, however, is all about justice: but it’s a sort of justice that goes beyond the human appetite for revenge and deals with the root cause of evil itself. We see this most vividly in the cross of Christ.
When we talk about the cross of Christ and the purpose it served, it’s so easy to become removed from the actual event. We can become so lost in a maze of theological terminology and scriptural proof-texts that we keep the cross at a manageable distance. We keep ourselves from coming face-to-face with the blood that was spilled, the agony that was endured, and the cosmic importance of God crucified. We can easily get to the point where we see the cross as the hinge of sound doctrine, as an academic knowledge but hardly anything else. We so easily forget that what happened on the cross was a turning point in human history, the long-awaited fulfillment of what God had promised He would do: namely, that He would deal with the evil in the world by overpowering and defeating it. The cross of Christ gives us a glimpse into the paradox of how God does things: while it seemed that the powers of evil were leading Jesus to the cross in triumphal procession, Paul says in Colossians 2:15 that, in reality, it was the other way around! He says that Christ disarmed the rulers and authorities and made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them in [the cross]. When we talk about Jesus’ death, usually we do so in terms of the atonement. The atonement is one of the most shocking and stunning realities of what Christ accomplished on his cross, but sadly it is one that can become detached from the overarching purpose of the cross itself. We must remember that in the cross, in the suffering and death of Jesus, evil itself was defeated and dismantled.
The doctrine of the atonement teaches us that through the cross, God forgives us our sin so that our relationship with Him can be restored. In Galatians Paul says that Christ became a curse for us; in 1 Corinthians Paul says that he who knew no sin became sin for us; Christ bore the wrath of God, taking our place and paying our debt, so that we don’t have to. The Apostle John calls Christ our propitiation in 1 John 2; by taking our place, Christ became our pardon before God. But the buck doesn’t stop there. The atonement finds itself truly coming to life within the framework of what has been called the Christus victor approach to the cross. The Swedish theologian Gustaf Aulen set about peeling through both the writings of the New Testament and the writings of the early church fathers to determine just how, precisely, the early church saw the cross. He came to the conclusion that the early church perceived the cross to be the moment and means by which God dealt decisively with evil, destroying its power and thus dismantling it. To quote our friend Gustaf, “[The cross was a Divine conflict and victory; Christ—Christus victor—fights against and triumphs over the evil powers of the world, the ‘tyrants’ under which mankind is in bondage and suffering, and in Him God reconciles the world to Himself.” The cross is indeed God’s wrath pouring out on Jesus so that we who stake ourselves to him won’t have to bear it; but the cross is so much more than that, and we see this not least in Colossians 2.13-15:
And when you were dead in trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made you alive together with Him, when He forgave us all our trespasses, erasing the record that stood against us with its legal demands. He set this aside, nailing it to the cross. [the Atonement; now Christus victor] He disarmed the rulers and authorities and made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them in [the cross].
At the cross, Jesus faced-off with evil. Evil, personified by sin and death, sought to lead Jesus to the cross but soon discovered that Jesus had been leading evil to its own defeat. Jesus’ resurrection dismantled evil’s foothold over creation. At the least, Christ’s resurrection from the dead reveals that evil has indeed been defeated, since the ultimate consequence of evil, that of death, couldn’t hold down the One who defeated it. So we see that in his death and resurrection, Christ purchased our forgiveness by appeasing God’s wrath towards us and by defeating the power that evil had held over us. In Romans 6 through 8, Paul is adamant: because of Christ’s death and resurrection, we are freed not only from the legal guilt of our sins but also from the power of sin itself. This is what redemption and liberation is all about: we are freed, because Christ defeated evil on the cross, dismantling its power over His people. We live in a new era in cosmic history where sin’s power has been broken and we can experience reconciliation with God through Christ; and one of the biggest characteristics of this new age is the FORGIVENESS OF SINS—not just sins between us and God, but sins between us and our fellow man. Paul is unforgiving in his command to forgive others:
Ephesians 4.32 – Put away from you all bitterness and wrath and anger and wrangling and slander, together with all malice, and be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ has forgiven you.
Paul is adamant: we are to forgive one another in the same capacity as God in Christ has forgiven us. If we want to know how we are to forgive, and what it means to forgive, we need to look at God’s own forgiveness of us, because that is the model. When we talk about God forgiving us, we don’t mean that He pretends that we were never that bad after all; we certainly don’t mean that He excuses us for the evil we’ve done and the rebellious creatures we are in our hearts; in no way do we say that He is simply ignoring all of that awful stuff about us. At the heart of biblical forgiveness is the destruction and dismantling of evil: when God forgives a person, the evil within that person and all the evil things he has done or thought isn’t ignored, excused, or tolerated as something “not so bad after all.” Rather, all of that genuinely evil stuff is defeated. Evil’s affect upon our relationship with God is destroyed. That is the heart of forgiveness.
Now listen to this: forgiveness is what happens when the evil that has taken place between two sides of a relationship is named for what it is, condemned for what it is, and then defeated for what it is. Thereby the relationship is restored. If forgiveness were anything but that, it wouldn’t be forgiveness at all.
When the Bible talks about God forgiving us and us forgiving those who sin against us, there’s no change in the meaning of forgiveness. Forgiveness means the same thing in both cases, and the command to forgive is all over the place in the New Testament. Jesus taught us in the Lord’s Prayer to pray that God will forgive us our sins in the same capacity as we forgive those who sin against us. In Matthew 18, Jesus warns that unless we forgive, we will not be forgiven; the servant who was forgiven a massive debt but who then refused to forgive the tiny one of a fellow servant had his initial forgiveness revoked. Paul tells us in Ephesians 4 that we are to forgive one another as Christ has forgiven us. I could go on, but the point is made: forgiveness is a big deal in the Christian faith. God has forgiven us, so we are to forgive others. Period.
This means that when evil takes place between us and someone else, and when that evil is pressed against us from the other person, we are to forgive. We’re not to pretend that the evil didn’t happen, or to say that it wasn’t that bad, or ignore it altogether and hope it just fades away in time. Forgiveness involves acknowledging that the evil has, indeed, taken place, and facing that evil head-on. This often means difficult and even nauseating confrontation, but it’s a confrontation that must take place. Forgiveness, after the acknowledgement of the evil between the two people, is a determination on the side of the offended to do everything in his or her power to resume an appropriate relationship with the one who sinned against them. Forgiveness involves a settling in one’s own mind that we will not allow this evil to determine the nature of the relationship.
The question is asked, “How often should we forgive someone when they sin against us?” It’s not a new question; in Matthew 18:21-22, Peter asked Jesus the same question.
Then Peter came to [Jesus] and said to him, “Lord, if my brother sins against me, how often should I forgive? As many as seven times?" Jesus said to him, “Not seven times, but, I tell you, seventy times seven.”
Many of Peter’s fellow Jews taught that the maximum amount of times you were required to forgive someone for the same offense was three times; Peter’s speculation of seven, then, is quite commendable: twice the norm and plus one! Jesus’ response is cryptic: “No, not seven times, but seventy times seven.” This isn’t some technical proposal; Jesus isn’t saying, “Forgive your brother 490 times, but after that, you’re off the hook and have a Green Light to seek revenge.” No, Jesus is looking back to an ancient prophecy found in the Book of the prophet Daniel. In Daniel 9, the prophet asks an angel how long the Babylonian exile will continue. “Will it be seventy years?” Daniel asks, “as the prophet Jeremiah foretold?” The angel answers, “No: it will be seventy times seven.” The angel tells him that it will take not seventy years but 490 years “to finish the transgression, to put an end to sin, and to atone for iniquity, to bring in everlasting righteousness.” (verse 24) Jesus’ cryptic answer echoes this promise, and he is saying, “The New Age, the End of Exile, has dawned! The kingdom has come, and the age of forgiveness has broken forth!” The Babylonian exile (and all the geographical exiles experienced by Israel) served as signposts to the greatest exile of them all: our exile from the Garden. The Exodus, when God delivered His people from slavery in Egypt, serves as a signpost to Christ’s “2nd Exodus” when He delivers mankind from bondage to death and sin. Jesus is telling Peter that the only reasonable response to this in-breaking of a new era in cosmic history is to embrace and embody the New Age: forgiving is to be a way-of-life for the members of God’s new world.
The command to forgive, then, isn’t simply a new and tougher piece of ethics that we dare not even attempt (banking, ironically, on forgiveness for our refusal to forgive). The command to forgive flows directly from the New Age that Jesus has inaugurated and sealed in his death and resurrection. The atonement isn’t simply an abstract transaction making God’s forgiveness available to all who desire it; it is the towering and shocking achievement by which evil was defeated so that God’s new age could begin. And we who claim to follow Jesus, who are members of this New Age by virtue of trusting in Christ and the Spirit living inside us, are to embody that reality by forgiving others.
The claims of the church—that a new age, characterized by forgiveness of sins and reconciliation with God, has come—is made a mockery so long as we continue to live in a stubborn refusal to forgive those who sin against us. When we are more than happy to claim God’s forgiveness of our sins and yet harbor resentment, bitterness, and an unforgiving disposition towards those around us, we are mocking the cross and living as if our faith is a sham. By refusing to forgive others, we are calling God a liar, we are calling this New Age a farce, and we are conniving with the forces of darkness and spreading our legs wide to Sin and Death (if that imagery is offensive, don’t read the Prophets). When we deny the reality of the kingdom in our own lives, we let the evil that takes place between us and other people to fester and boil inside us. The evil takes hold and spreads like gangrene through our hearts, minds, and souls. We distance ourselves from others and stop trusting people; we call it strength, but really it’s coldness. We become calloused creatures who cannot forgive nor accept forgiveness; we become broken and pitiable creatures who cannot love nor accept love. The refusal to forgive doesn’t just deny the reality of the cross, of the atonement, and of Christ’s victory over evil; it allows the evil that exists in our relationships to enslave us to the point that we become, in a sense, subhuman: we become consumed by bitterness, anger, and resentment. We become grouches and grumpies, and that’s a nice way of putting it.
One of the most difficult texts on forgiveness is found in Matthew 18.23-35. I almost didn’t include it, because it’s honestly a passage I don’t like. It’s one of those passages that unnerves me, one of those passages I’d rather table for now and come back to never. It’s what I call a “Gulp” passage: one of those texts that makes you gulp. But texts like these, that come to us like a stick thrust into our gears, shouldn’t be avoided (as is our inclination); we should pay them particular attention.
“For this reason the kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who wished to settle accounts with his slaves. When he began the reckoning, one who owed him ten thousand talents was brought to him; and, as he could not pay [as one talent was worth more than fifteen years of hard labor], his lord ordered him to be sold, together with his wife and children and all his possessions, and payment be made. So the slave fell on his knees before him, saying, ‘Have patience with me, and I will pay you everything.’ And out of pity for him, the lord of that slave released him and forgave him the debt. But that same slave, as he went out, came upon one of his fellow slaves who owed him a hundred denarii [equal to about three months of hard labor]; and seizing him by the throat, he said, ‘Pay what you owe.’ Then his fellow slave fell down and pleaded with him, ‘Have patience with me, and I will pay you.’ But he refused; then he went and threw him into prison until he would pay the debt. When his fellow slaves saw what had happened, they were greatly distressed, and they went and reported to their lord all that had taken place. Then his lord summoned him and said to him, ‘You wicked slave! I forgave you all that debt because you pleaded with me. Should you not have had mercy on your fellow slave, as I had mercy on you?’ And in anger his lord handed him over to be tortured until he would pay his entire debt. So my heavenly Father will also do to every one of you, if you do not forgive your brother or sister from your heart.”
When Jesus says that our own forgiveness will be revoked if we fail to forgive others, he isn’t saying that forgiving others is an arbitrary commandment and that if we don’t do it, then God won’t forgive us. He is, rather, pointing out that the one who refuses to forgive is the same who is consumed by his or her own self-worth and pride. He is the one who exalts himself over everyone and everything else. He is the one who makes himself, and his own convictions, his god; he makes himself both Judge and Juror. And when he does this, he cannot at the same time be a servant of God. He may make a showy pretense of religion; he may read the Bible every day and pray morning, noon, and night; but his own refusal to forgive is symptomatic of the fact that he has not yet experienced forgiveness for himself.
This isn’t to say that forgiving others will be natural for those who belong to God. I have found it to be a rule in my life that I am great at forgiving others, at least until I need to forgive others. Forgiving someone who has sinned against you is hard work. It’s not an easy thing to do. In petty offenses we are more ready to forgive; in greater and ghastlier offenses, we are far more apt to hold grudges and let the evil fester inside us. When we are wronged in such a way that it tears at the fabric of our lives, we don’t want to forgive. If we experience abuse at the hands of those whom we trusted, if we are caught in a marriage with an unfaithful spouse, if we are robbed of everything we cherish by someone close to us, forgiveness is quite literally the last thing we want to do. We justify not forgiving them: the hurt was too awful, the betryal was too great, or there’s no way we could ever let something like that pass. Forgiveness isn’t easy: the cross tells us that much. Even Jesus, whose love for us far excels the love we could ever have for another person, chafed at the thought of what purchasing our forgiveness would cost him. And we are to model that.
Sometimes, if not most of the time, we won’t want to forgive. A lot of the time we won’t feel like forgiving someone, but that doesn’t matter: “You have been forgiven,” Paul tells us, “and so you must forgive.” Forgiveness often takes gritted teeth and a firm resolve; Jesus showed us his own steel resolve as he carried his own cross to Calvary. Real forgiveness takes nerves of steel—and without the Spirit living inside us, we couldn’t do it. Sometimes forgiveness doesn’t take place all at once, but it comes in small steps and over a lot of time; that’s okay.
But how do we go about forgiving someone, especially when our heart isn’t in it? There’s no step-by-step guide to these things, and how we go about it will differ from person to person. I can share with you the process I’ve found at work in my own life as I struggle to forgive those who sin against me.
The first step is to Resolve to Forgive. State it out loud. This will often be understandably difficult. Name the person, name what they did, and resolve with your voice that you intend on forgiving them. Then Pray for the Spirit to work on your heart so that you can actively forgive. The hardest part for me is Praying for the Other Person’s Well-Being. When we are wronged in such a way that we feel humiliated and violated, we want revenge; we want the other person to suffer; we don’t want them to get off the hook. By praying for the other person’s well-being (even if through gritted teeth), we are not allowing the wrong that was done to exercise unrestrained power in our hearts. We must also Pursue an Appropriate Reconciled Relationship. The key word here is appropriate: if a minister engages in illicit sexual sin with women under his care, the church needs to forgive him; but the church should think twice about reinstating him. If the person we’re seeking reconciliation with spurns our attempt, that’s okay: we can’t control that.
I encourage all of us here to examine our own lives and to ask, “Do I forgive others?” And I mean really forgive them. Do we shirk away from confronting evil when it happens? Do we seek reconciliation with those who have wounded us, even wounded us deeply? The question, I want to emphasize, isn’t “Do I forgive easily?” but “Do I forgive?” It was no easy task for Christ to procure forgiveness; we shouldn’t be surprised when it’s difficult for us, as well.
