pelt?

(| THE COST OF FORGIVENESS Matthew 18:21-35

The scripture lesson this morning deals with the question of for-
giveness, one of the most crucial, and yet most misunderstood elements
of the Christian Faith, Peter confronted our Lord with the question
of how far a man ought to go in forgiving one who sins against him.
Peter knew that throughout the Old Testament were scattered instructions
on how to deal with a transgressor. He knew how the Lord had warned
"If anyone slays Cain, vengeance shall be taken on him seven fold,"

He knew the song of Lamech from the same fourth chapter of Genesis:

"Tf Cain is avenged sevenfold, truly Lamech seventyfold."© He was
probably familiar with the words of the law: "Then if you walk con-

trary to me, and will not hearken to me, I will bring more plagues

upon you, sevenfold as many as your sins."3 He had heard the Rabbi's
quote from the book of Job that God forgives men three times ,# He

knew the resounding words of the prophet Amos: "Bor three transgressions of
Israel, and for four, I will not revoke the punishment."> He had

heard the rabbis! teaching that a good jew was to forgive a trans-
gressor three times. And so in a moment of magnanimity Peter suggested
to Jesus that seven might be the appropriate number of times to for-

give his brother. This was more than twice as much as was done by

the best of Jews. To his question came the answer, not seven but seventy
times seven,

The number here is unimportant. What Jesus meant was that forgive-

ness must be unlimited; that a disciple of his ought never to think

Lgenesis 4:15 gop 33:29
2Genesis 4:24 5amos 2:6
3Leviticus 26:21

fs

about counting the times he has forgiven. He knew, however, that the
same mentality that forgave three times and retalliated on the fourth
offence would do some rapid mental arithmetic and conclude that 490
was now the outside limit on a man's forgiveness. Jesus knew that
under the law men forgave three times; but all the while were anxiously
awaiting the fourth offence that they might reap vengeance. He knew
the self+righteousness men harbored as they fulfilled the law's require
ments; and he knew how very far they were from understanding what he
meant by forgiving not seven times but seven times seventy.

And so he went further; he told a parable. In that parable we
see that forgiveness lies at the very heart of life’ that no Christian
life can be without it. We see also that forgiveness is not just a high
sounding hypothesis, or a theory of interpersonal relations but a very
real and concrete demand to do forgiveness, to be forgiving, to forgive
as we have been forgiven. So basic and important is forgiveness that
Jesus began his parable with a comparison to the Kingdom of God.
There was a king who had a servant who owed him a huge sum of money.
A talent was worth roughly one thousand dollars and so the total of
the servant's indebtedness was about ten million dollars. When the
king demanded payment and found his servant unable he ordered him
sold into slavery. The servant begged indulgence, the king was
moved and absolved him of the entire amount. But then the servant,
meeting a fellow servant who owed him about twenty dollars, demanded
payment, refused to wait, and had him thrown in prison. This act of
callousness distressed the king and he retracted his original forgiveness, toc
took it back, and had the ungrateful servant thrown in prison until

he could pay the debt. The parable is concluded with the warning,

"Se also my heavenly father will do to you, if you do not forgive your
brother from the heart."

Jesus! point is clear, The Kingdom of God is built on the continual
flow of forgiveness; from king to servant and from servant to servant:
from God to man, and from man to man. Like an electrical current, if
the circuit is broken at any one point the power is shut off. In other
words Divine forgiveness has meaning only When men forgive one another,
Like the ungrateful servant who was thrown in jail--man can easily reject
the forgiveness of God and thusly find himself on the outside of the
Kingdom,

Forgiveness is more demand than Suggestion; more action: than passive;
and forgiveness is not cheap. Forgiveness costs something of the man
who would forgive--and af the man who seeks forgiveness, It asks not
our words but our actions.

Today is Reformation Sunday, and I think it would be a good thing
on this Sunday to consider the possibility that as Reformed Protestants,
we have chopped away some elements ofRoman Catholicism that are essential
to Christianity. One of these elements is confession--and forgiveness,
Catholics and Protestants alike misunderstand much of Catholicism, and
no where is this more true than in the practice of confession. We
delight in castigating our Catmlic brethren for confessing to a priest
Instead of God. But any good Catholic, layman or priest, will tell
you that this is not what takes place in the confessional. The Christian
is confessing to God, the priest is the intermediary and assigns the
amount of penance needed for absolution, Now I don't agree with this, nor

woul I advise a Protestant return to the practice. The point I am trying

to make is that devout Cathiics regularly confess their sins, and more
than this they do something about it in acts of penance. O. H. Mowrer,
in a recent article in Christian Century wrote "I am still looking (but
doubt I'll ever find) for the guilty man who feels good without con-
fessing and making amends, "6

I don't think "feéling good" is the aim and purpose of confession,
but the devout Catholic who seriously considers his relationship to
God and fellowmen, and who feels guilty about his failings has the
opportunity of telling someone about it--and then doing something about
it. His personal guilt is absolved because he is doing something con-
crete to make amends. Amidst our jokes and scorn for the confessional
we ought to be asking ourselves; precisely what does the Protestant
church have to say about confession and forgiveness? If I am accurate
in my estimate the average Protestant, or at least Presbyterian, would
say the following. "We Protestants confess only to God. We don't

' Or a more

believe in that stuff about confessing to a priest.’
sophisticated Protestant might say something like this "Our doctrine

of sin goes deeper than petty rules and regulations like eating meat

on Friday. When we confess we are more concerned with a deep wrongness
inside." Unfortunately, this is as far as it goes, If pushed we can
come up with something that sounds logical, but in actuality we avoid,
at all costs, any real coming to grips with confession and forgiveness.
We have so reacted against the institutional excesses of Rome that we
have stripped the church complétely of a very important and essential

Christian practice. I grew up in a Presbyterian Church in Pennsylvania,

where the recent appearance of a prayer of confession in the order of

Ovowrer, O. Hobart: @The Almighty's Unmighty Ministers", The Christian
Century, Vol. LXXIX, No, 42; October 17, 1962, P 1254.

worship was interpreted, by many of the older members, as a definite
move towards Catholicism,

As a result of this, the word forgiveness simply doesn't mean much
at all to the average protestant. Granted our increasingly popular
practice of confession within worship, we still have yet to come to
grips with the basic nature of the act of forgiving--and with the
essential fact that forgiveness is a costly commodity. We read the
prescribed prayers, we listen to the words of pardon and that's it.

In the articlie that I've already mentioned, Mowrer is very
critical of the ministry, and I would suppose the church, in this matter
He accuses ministers of "dispensing Grace offhandedly," of blithely and
irresponsibly assuring Christians of their forgivness, without ever
seeing that the offence--and the guilt are honestly faced. He cites
the case of a woman in a mental hospital, severly depressed, obviously
suffering from unexpiated, and unrecognized guilt. Insisting that her
sins were forgiven, that her minister had assured her that she was saved,
she refused to think that there might be more to be said and done.!
Here, according to Mowrer, the church not only has failed to deal with
sin and guilt, but also by its irresponsible negligence was directly
responsible for the patient's schizophrenia. In one summary statement
= nan "The clerical sin lies rather in the practice of assuring others,
individually or collectivelyk or divine pardon in a quite premature and
abortive way--of crying ‘Peace, peace; when there is no peace! and
when indeed there ought to be no peace, "8

What, then, ought we to do? I think perhaps the soundest thing would
be to reexamine this parable in the eighteenth chapter of Matthew in

light of our failings. When we do this we cannot help but see that

Tibia pp. 1253
8tpid pp. 1253

OG.

there is a very definite relationship between Divine forgiveness and
human forgiveness.

Professor Mowrer concludes his article with the opinion that for-
giveness, as such is either irrelevant or unecessary; and that the real
work needs to be done between man and man. We have a lot to learn from
his argument but in this we must assert the basic truth of the parable,
that the King has acted; that in the life, suffering; death and resur-
rection of Jesus Christ, God has done what needed to be done to assure
our forgiveness. The price has been paid, before even we asked about
it. That divine forgiveness is irrelevant and unnecessary we cannot
accept. "Therefore the Kingdom of heaven may be compared to "the
parable begins. Forgiveness is not optional, not a social nicety
relevant only to those who seek peace of heart. It is, rather the
very stuff of the Kingdom of God. The parable makes clear beyond a
doubt that without Forgiveness there is no Kingdom,

Secondly, the parable points out that forgiveness depends on for-
giveness. The King freely and graciously forgave his servant, but
there were strings attached. In failing to forgive his fellow servant,
on failing to allow the Kings! forgiveness the flow through him to
others, the ungrateful servant saw tht forgiveness retracted. God has
taken the initiative and provided for our forgivenes., His Grace is
literally free. But at the same time it is costly. While offtring
us grace and forgiveness God has created us free. We don't have to
accept that forgiveness, we don't even have to want it. And so in the
final analysis forgiveness is costly.

To Perter Jesus said "So also my heavenly Father will do to everyone

of you, if you do not forgive your brother from the heart." This is the

7.

demand of forgiveness, to forgive from the heart, and here it is that
forgiveness becomes costly. First of all the cost is that we recognize
a need of forgiveness. This is a hard thing to ask of us; we live by
self-made standards of rightness and wrongness. Each one of us would
like to feel that we are living the best possible life, each one of us
is just proud enough to feel that we alone have the answers, that
somehow w have the responsibility of judging our fellowmen. These
feelings of self sufficiency are enough to stand us in need of for-
giveness. We need go no further than our own immunity to humility

and self awareness. The cost of forgiveness is that we face our guilt
with integrity, existentially if you will; seeing that it is specific
and personal, claiming it as cur own and our own responsibility.

In the second place the cost of forgiveness is that we see that we
are no better off than anyone else when it comes to guilt. This is not
only a self indictment but an indictment of all mankind. It is an
affirmation th#zt our neighbor is as deserving, or undeserving, of our
forgiveness as we are of God's. This, of course, is where the cost of
forgiveness begins to mount, It is not too difficult to recite the
prayer of forgiveness, stating in very general terms that we have
offended God. But to face our neighbor, squarely, and to say "I've
offended you and you've offended me--and neighter one of us deserves
forgiveness from anyone” is another thing entirely. This assertion costs
us a little bit of our self, a little piece of the precious antonomy
of which we are so certain.

Thirdly, the cost of forgiveness, realizing all that has gone

before, is to actually forgive from the heart, This is the trans-

ference of theory to practice, Here we act out our lofty theologies;
here in the sphere of everyday living the word forgiveness begins to
take on meaning. Perhaps the most important point of the paréble is
that the arena of forgiveness is not the confines of the confessional,
or the confines of what we call the heart, or not even the sanctuary
of our church--but life; life in its everyday commonness, its
boredom and excitement, its hopes and fears, Forgiveness takes place
at the very basic interaction between man and wife, between mother
and child, between employer and empioyee. Forgiveness must occur

in the very rudimentary act of addressing ourselves to the world and
fellowmen each day; it cannot be limited; it must coat something.

The church is then, the community of forgiveness. Jt is the
pody of those who wiil to be forgiving and who have thusly become
aware tha they have been forgiven. The church is not the local
organization of the morally superior, but the congregation of those who
have faced their own guilt, and their neighbors! guilt, and who have
agreed to forgise. The church is the water shed of forgiveness. It
is where we unite cur voices in a common prayer of confession; and
in so doing are not only asking forgiveness ofGod but of each other,

The parable of thé ungrateful servant is a clear statement of the
cost of forgiveness. For God the price was the cross, the shame and
suffering of death, For us the cost of forgiveness is integrity.
Unlike the servant we must realize that we are no more worthy of
forgiveness than anyone else. Unlike the servant we must recognize
that God's forgiveness depends on our own active and continuing for-

giving, Thene are no short cuts, the cost is great. We have the

ee

option of turning forgiveness into an unnecessary, irrelevant
concept--or of seeing that forgiveness is the stuff of the Kingdom
of God.

May God grant us his grace to be forgiving. To forgive --

even as we are forgiven.