A certain married couple had many sharp disagreements. Yet somehow the wife always stayed calm and collected. One day her husband commented on his wife’s restraint. “When I get mad at you,” he said, “you never fight back. How do you control your anger?”
The wife said: “I work it off by cleaning the toilet.”
The husband asked: “How does that help?”
She said: “I use your toothbrush!”
Ewww! What an image! But we laugh because there are times, we’d like to be able to take revenge just like that.
By contrast, we hear the story of a grandmother, celebrating her golden wedding anniversary, telling the secret of her long and happy marriage. “On my wedding day, I decided to make a list of ten of my husband’s faults which, for the sake of the marriage, I would overlook.”
A guest asked the woman what some of the faults she had chosen to overlook were. The grandmother replied, “To tell you the truth, I never did get around to making that list. But whenever my husband did something that made me hopping mad, I would say to myself, ˜Lucky for him that’s one of the ten.'”
That’s the kind of attitude Jesus would have loved. In Matthew 18:21-35 the Apostle Peter asked the question that many people would like to ask, but sometimes are too ashamed to ask. His question was: “How many times do I have to forgive a brother who sins against me?” Now Peter makes a suggestion to Jesus. He says, “Up to seven times?”
Now that seemed very generous to him because the going rate in that day was three times. The rabbis taught that you should forgive your brother three times. Rabbi Jose ben Hanina said, “He who begs forgiveness from his neighbor must not do so more than three times.”
They worked this out from the book of Amos in the Old Testament. In the first chapters of Amos, there is a series of condemnations on the countries for three transgressions and for four. From this, they reasoned that God would forgive you three times; but punishment would be given out on the fourth. They further reasoned that no person could be more forgiving than their God. So, forgiveness was limited to three offenses.
According to the Talmud and Rabbinic law, you were obligated to forgive someone three times. But after the third time you could beat the plowshare into a sword and run your opponent through. You were no longer obligated to forgive. In other words, “it was three strikes and you’re out.”
Now Peter thinks he is being very very generous. He doubles the number of times that the law demanded, and then added one free pass as a bonus. After all, any Jew knew that the number seven denoted perfection. So Peter thought he had arrived at literally the perfect answer. You had to forgive a brother seven times, and after that the gloves came off.
Well, as usual, the Lord Jesus gave an answer that was not only surprising, but absolutely stunning. V.22 tells us: “Jesus said to him, ‘I do not say to you, up to seven times, but up to seventy times seven.” Now understand that when Jesus said “seventy times seven” he was not giving a math lesson. He wasn’t saying, no, you must forgive four hundred and ninety times, but on the four hundred and ninety first time, Pow!
No, here is what Jesus was saying. The number seven denotes perfection. He multiplied perfection times perfection. The number ten denotes, in the Bible, completeness. So now he multiplies perfection doubled by completeness.
Now a Jew would have immediately been thinking in terms of infinity. In Luke 17:4 Jesus said that if a brother sins against you seven times in a day, and repents seven times in a day, “you shall forgive him.” Jesus does not allow for three strikes and you’re out. Peter thought that if someone sinned against you, and he repented, and you forgave him, and then he did exactly the same thing and repented and you forgave him again, he could say, “that’s two!”
But the Lord Jesus said, “You can’t keep a scorecard. If somebody sins against you the first time, and you forgive that brother, then you promise not to ever hold it against him again. So if he sins again, you cannot say “that’s two”, you’ve got to say “that’s one!”
Now how did Jesus arrive at this conclusion? Well you see, Peter was appealing to the law, but Jesus was appealing to love. Forgiveness has nothing to do with the law, it has everything to do with love. The law has limits, love does not. The law keeps count, love does not. The law keeps records, love does not. The law has a long memory, love has no memory.
Jesus tells about a man who has embezzled a great sum of money. In fact, the sum is ten thousand talents. Now that was a staggering amount back in those days. To give you an idea of how much it was, Jesus spoke these words in the region of Galilee. The entire tax on Galilee for one year was two hundred talents. So this man owed the equivalent of fifty years of taxes on the entire region of Galilee.
To put it another way, a man would have to work twenty years in order to earn one talent. So this man would have had to work for five hundred years to have paid back the money he stole, and that without interest. In today’s currency this would amount to roughly nine million dollars.
Now the point is, it was an unpayable debt. There was absolutely no way this man could pay back this money. But his master had compassion on him and forgave him the entire debt, wiped the slate clean.
Now this man who had just recently been released of his debt, comes upon one of his debtors. Rather than reciprocating with forgiveness, he ruthlessly demands full payment. The man only owed him a hundred denarii, which was about one hundred day’s wages. In today’s money, it was about fifteen dollars, or one six hundred thousandth of what this man owed to the king.
So think about it. The man who owed $9 million dollars was not willing to forgive the man that owed $15. Can you imagine being forgiven so much and being unwilling to forgive so little by comparison?
And yet, we who have been forgiven so much by God often find it difficult to forgive others who wrong us. Perhaps we don’t realize the immensity of what God has done for us.
A young man borrowed the family car without permission, knowing he could have it home and safely in the garage before his father found out. He hadn’t reckoned on getting rear-ended at the second intersection he came to. No way to conceal the damage, he parked the car and closed the garage door, then spent an evening agonizing over how to deal with his father when he arrived home.
When his dad walked in, the young man flashed a look of terror. He told his father everything, complete with profuse apology. His father walked with the son to the garage and looked long and hard and silently at the damage. Then he said, “Insurance will cover it. It wouldn’t have covered the broken trust between you and me, however. Fortunately your apology took care of that.”
“Can you ever forgive me, Dad?”
“I have already. You have learned your lesson. Forget about it.”
A week later the son, still guilt-driven, came to his father and said, “Dad, in case they raise our insurance rates because of the accident, I’m willing to earn the money to pay the difference in the premiums.”
His father didn’t even look up from his newspaper as he said, simply, “What accident?”
Our incredible, loving Heavenly Father forgives us and then forgets. Our sins are wiped away forever.
When the books of a certain Scottish doctor were examined after his death, it was found that a number of accounts were crossed through with a note: “Forgiven—too poor to pay.” But the physician’s wife later decided that these accounts must be paid in full and she proceeded to sue for the money.
When the case came to court the judge asked but one question. “Is this your husband’s handwriting?” When she replied that it was, he responded: “There is no court in the land that can obtain a debt once the word forgiven has been written.”
And that is the good news that the Gospel offers us. God’s attitude is not, “I’ll forgive but I won’t forget” but rather, “Forgiven, Forgotten Forever.” Across our debt has been written the words, “Forgiven—too poor to pay.” Once a debt has been cancelled there is no one who can collect on it. God wipes it out of his mind. Oh, if we could only do that — if we could forgive others like that; if we could forgive ourselves like that.
The next time you find it hard to forgive someone, keep this in mind: Forgiveness is as much for us as it is for the other person. If you can’t forgive, it’s like holding a hot coal in your hand; you’re the one getting burned.
Do you remember the famous Brink’s robbery? It happened in Boston, Massachusetts in January 1950. The robbery netted nearly $3 million, an extraordinary amount of money seventy years ago.
Do you know how the culprits in this robbery were apprehended? Eleven days before the statute of limitations was to expire on the robbery, out of the blue, one of the robbers confessed. His motive? Anger. Revenge. The other members of the gang had let him down. This was his way of payback.
Eleven days before the statute of limitations was to expire! Boy, I guess he showed them. Of course, he was punished right along with his buddies. Why? He couldn’t forgive.
The Greek word for “jailers” is literally “tormentors” or “torturers.” We are tormented in a prison of our own creation when we are unforgiving!
Years ago, on a television show, a comic character was angry with another fellow. He said, “I’m tired of him slapping me on the chest every time he sees me. I’ve told him to quit and he won’t. So I’m ready for him. I’ve got me three sticks of dynamite strapped to my chest. Next time he hits me it’ll blow his arms off!” The first character was about to find out that his grudge was going to cost him as much or more as it was going to cost the other fellow! The fire he’d kindled for his enemy was going to burn him more than the other.
Someone has said that harboring resentments is like taking poison and waiting for the other guy to die. Someone else has said that letting hatred simmer within us, eating at our emotions and our body, is like burning down our house to get rid of rats.
A teacher once told each of her students to bring a clear plastic bag and a sack of potatoes to school. The next day she made the following assignment to her students.
For every person who had hurt them that they refused to forgive they were to choose a potato, write on it the name of the person who had wronged them and the date on which the incident took place. They were then to put the potatoes into their plastic bags. Some of the students’ bags were quite heavy.
They were then told to carry this bag with them everywhere for one week, putting it beside their beds at night, on the seat next to them at meal time, next to their desks as they worked.
The students soon discovered that lugging this bag of potatoes around with them, paying attention to it all the time so they did not forget and keep leaving it in embarrassing places was a real hassle. Naturally, the condition of the potatoes deteriorated to a nasty smelly slime.
At the end of the week, the teacher pointed out that the burden of carrying the bag of potatoes was similar to the weight we experience when we carry around bitterness and anger. It drags us down and adds a rotting stench to our days. Too often we think of forgiveness as a gift to the other person, and it clearly is for ourselves!
We are called to forgive as we have been forgiven, to forgive with God’s depth of love.
There was an army sergeant who had become a Christian. When a chaplain asked about the circumstances of his conversion, the sergeant replied: “When we were in Vietnam there was a private in our barracks who was a Christian. We gave him a hard time. We laughed at him and made fun of him but he continued to read the Bible and pray and live a Christian life. He really irritated me. The better life he lived, the angrier I became.
“One night before going to bed, he got down on his knees as was his custom and began to pray. It made me furious. I was sitting near him and was just taking off my boots. I took those boots, hurled them through the air and clobbered him on the side of the head. He was jolted but continued to pray.
“I went to bed with my heart still filled with bitterness. When I awoke the next morning, to my utter amazement, there beside my bed were those boots; they were beautifully polished! I could not believe it.
His answer to my hateful anger was forgiving love. My heart was melted as I asked the Lord who could put so much forgiving love into the private’s heart to come in and dwell in my heart.”
The sergeant concluded by saying, “I became a Christian because that young man witnessed to me through his forgiveness of me . . . even when I didn’t want it.”
When you and I are tempted to ask “Lord, how often shall my brother or sister sin against me, and I forgive him or her?” Jesus replies, “Stop counting. Start living together in the same kind of love which I gave to you with my death on the cross. Forgive as generously as you have been forgiven…seeking reconciliation, not revenge…pouring out love, as it has been poured out to you.”
In Christ’s love,
Linnea K. Gustafson
Interim Minister Lutheran Church of the Redeemer & Zion Lutheran Church
