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Meet Father KempTrinity 22– 8 November 2009
Mark Twain was a master of words and he has been attributed one of my favorite quotes, which is, “It is not what I don’t understand in the Bible that bothers me, it’s what I do understand.” I must admit that I have never been able to find the source of this quote, but I believe it is one of the truest statements ever uttered under the sun. Our gospel lesson contains one of the most clear, understandable and thus bothersome statements of Jesus, “So likewise shall my heavenly Father do also unto you, if ye from your hearts forgive not every one his brother their trespasses.” Jesus clearly teaches that God’s forgiveness of us necessitates our forgiveness of others for if we fail to forgive others we, in turn, will fail to be forgiven. This is a bothersome statement. We do not want God’s forgiveness to be contingent upon our forgiveness of others. We prefer God’s grace to have no obligations, to be like a therapeutic pill that quickly heals our ailments so we can go right back into our contagious and sin infected life. We cannot ignore this passage, either, because this same teaching is found in the Lord’s Prayer, “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.”[1] There is no way around Jesus’ teaching, I have tried it myself and found every way blocked. We have to forgive others if we are to be forgiven.
Because there is no way to circumvent this issue, we are forced to ask that ever annoying childish question that Emily hears thousands of time throughout day from the mouths of my three children, “Why?”
Why this so? Why is God’s forgiveness dependent upon whether or not we forgive others? I suppose many answers to this question could be gleaned from Scripture but I would like to focus on one: trust. When God forgives us, we must trust Him to be true to His word. We must steadfastly trust in God’s promise that He did indeed scatter our sins as far as the east is from the west, that he saw Christ’s sacrifice as sufficient to wash away our offenses. We must trust God in his unwavering promise that “if we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness.” There is one other character or attribute of God we must have unfaltering trust in: His justice. We need to trust his promise to justly deal with those who trespass against us. Let me restate that: if we have enough trust in God that he will keep his promise to forgive us, then we will have enough trust in God’s justice and let him deal with those who trespass against us and on the flip side, if we do not trust that God will forgive us, we will not trust God’s justice and we will not forgive.
Let us look at Jesus’ parable for an example. In Jesus’ parable, the unforgiving servant demonstrates a lack of trust in the King’s forgiveness, which divulges his lack of trust in the king’s justice. The unforgiving servant had accumulated a debt of ten thousand talents, which is roughly equivalent to hundreds of millions of dollars. In fact, the word we translate as ten thousand was the highest Greek number having a particular word. This man’s debt was not inconceivably high, but beyond the experience of nearly all people. To accumulate a debt that great, the man would have had to been wealthy because this before sub-prime mortgages and no king would loan that amount of money to a poor farmer. Hence, when his crushing debt was forgiven, he was once again a wealthy man having no monetary needs. This means he had no logical reason to demand immediate repayment of the other servant’s small loan, which possibly totaled a mere thousand dollars. Since the unforgiving servant had no monetary needs, the best reason explaining his harsh actions is that he did not trust the king’s forgiveness of his debt and was still ruthlessly trying to get money to pay it back. A lack of trust in the king’s forgiveness created an attitude of cruel unforgiveness that landed the unforgiving in jail until he could pay off his debt, the place he should have been in the first place. In a similar way, to have our debt of sin forgiven we must trust that God will really and truly forgive us. The importance of our trust cannot be overstated, when we do not trust God’s declaration of forgiveness our hearts will be hardened and we will ruthlessly hold our forgiveness back from others carrying us further down the road of perdition.
Concerning the need for unfaltering trust in God’s justice, we can again look at Jesus’ parable. In Jesus’ day, the king was the absolute arbitrator of all interpersonal problems. Thus, when St. Paul found it difficult to get a fair ruling in Jerusalem, he appealed to Caesar, who was the Tribunica Potestas, the highest judge in the empire. If the unforgiving servant really did have a problem getting this other servant to pay back a loan, he should have appealed to the judgment and justice of the king. He as a common citizen had no right or authority to pronounce judgment on his fellow servant, but since he did not trust the king, he judged the case and handed out a stiff punishment. By usurping the King’s right to judge, the unforgiving servant was symbolically usurping the throne, giving himself the honor, glory, wisdom, and justice that belong only to a king. In a similar way, when we fail to trust God’s justice to repay those who have wronged us, we set our self up as a divine usurper, demanding others accept our petty interpretations of justice. Furthermore, when we set ourselves on God’s throne, we fall into the worst kind of idolatry: the worship of the self. Therefore, when we fail to trust God’s justice we will end up at idolatry and worship our minds that judge poorly and our hands that distribute an illusion of justice.[2]
Those portions of scripture that we understand bother us, because what we understand convicts us. We know that we should trust God to be faithful to his promise to forgive us and to steadfast in dealing justly with those who have done wrong. We know that our trust in God’s forgiveness and justice must lead us to forgive others. Finally, we know that our failure to trust God will lead us into an idolatry of our self. Nevertheless, we still struggle to forgive, we still struggle to trust, and we still struggle with our self-centered idolatry.
However, this struggle is exactly where we need to be, because in this struggle we are driven back to the cross were we see the heights and depths of God’s love for us and the length and breadth he went to assure and guarantee our forgiveness. It is the atoning work of Jesus Christ on the cross, his perfect and sufficient sacrifice that firmly anchors our trust in God. Finally, the cross firmly anchors our worship when we are visually reminded in the Eucharist of Jesus’ sacrifice that guarantees God’s forgiveness. Therefore, all those who struggle to forgive all those who struggle to trust and all those who struggle with idolatry come and taste the forgiveness of God, so that you may know in your heart, believe in your soul, and trust with your mind that God is faithful and justice and will forgive our sins because of His Son Jesus.
[1]Nor can we treat this passage as a later church innovation because even the Jesus Seminar (which excels at ascribing large portions of the gospel to late church innovation rather than Jesus) concluded that these words are most likely authentic.
[2] See Miroslav Volf, Exclusion and Embrace for an extended book length argument on the necessity of a healthy belief in God’s justice in order to forgive.
