So here’s the way God works. God assigned this gospel reading for me to preach on right when I’m in the middle of really finding it hard to forgive someone. I don’t want to give you the details, it’s no one around here, but all I’ll say is that of course I’m in the right. He’s a hard person to love right now, he acts like a jerk, and I’ve really had it with trying to help him out. I’m done.
But the consolation for me is that I’m probably not alone. Jesus would not have made forgiveness the center of everything he did if he hadn’t known that lack of forgiveness wasn’t almost the center of the human condition. We all carry around the inability to forgive, to show mercy, unforgiveness is so much a part of the air we breathe that we don’t even notice when we are tied in knots by it. We are so oblivious that we don’t even notice when we ourselves have been forgiven.
Here’s the servant in today’s gospel who owed what is called here in this translation “a huge amount,” the original says that this employee owed the master ten thousand talents, which if you go back and look at what a talent was, ten thousand of them is many, many times what anyone could earn in years. It’s like Jesus said that this man owed his master a billion dollars. And it gets forgiven for no good reason. The master says, well, since you could never pay it back anyway, just forget about it.
It’s almost impossible to see what a huge gesture this is. It’s like this man has his whole life and his whole future given back to him. He has been saved from a mess of his own creation, he probably embezzled the money or did something stupid with it, and he did absolutely nothing to deserve this forgiveness. So of course that makes it even more awful to think that this same man who has had everything forgiven, forgets it in two seconds, and refuses to make a tiny fraction of that same gesture to someone else.
And like all of Jesus’s parables, this is not a story about someone else, because whether we like it or not, the servant who was in all that debt, and had it all forgiven, that is us.
This gospel asks us why there is often so little real forgiveness and generosity in the world. And the answer is that so many people, so many of us at times, are this servant, and forget how much we have been forgiven ourselves.
What we should realize when we hear this story is that through no effort on our part we have all been redeemed, like that servant, and redeemed from a lot. We should feel like he should have felt when he was able to walk away from this reborn, given his life back. We have all already been redeemed from all of our failures, whatever we’re carrying around, God forgives it. All those things we said we were going to do and didn’t, things we said we were going to stop doing and haven’t, all the promises to ourselves and to others that we have forgotten about, what if all that could be and already is forgiven? Our debts are forgotten by a God who loves to forget them. And yet we forget that God has done this, or we just don’t believe it, we think we can’t be forgiven, or haven’t really been forgiven by a loving God.
The point today is that if we did notice it and believe it, then that feeling of liberation would overflow into how we see the rest of the world. Forgiving other people would be the most natural thing in the world. That’s what this parable is about. People who acknowledge and remember how much they have been given, they are the ones who can almost by reflex show mercy to others. And people who don’t feel forgiven, or forget what they themselves have been given, they are the people always doing the math on exactly who deserves mercy and generosity.
We probably don’t have people who owe us a billion dollars. But today’s parable affects how we think about all sorts of people, from all the difficult people in our own lives who fail over and over, to everyone from prisoners to the homeless to people who have come into this country seeking help. We hold back from giving people anything we think they don’t deserve. And the only answer to all this is just to ask God to liberate us, to show us that we need to be part of this big pyramid scheme of forgiveness that God wants, where we take our own forgiveness and pass it on to everyone else. Otherwise we are trapped in a constant state of resentment about the sins and the debts of others.
There’s a book out by the wonderful Jesuit priest Gregory Boyle, who works with gang members in Los Angeles and the title of the book is Forgive Everyone Everything. Now that sounds pretty extreme. Should we really forgive everyone everything? After all, there are people in jail who deserve to be there. There are people whose behavior is wrong who need to be confronted about it. That’s all true.
But still, there’s this gospel nagging at us, which tells us that there is no formula that limits forgiveness, and that forgiveness is where we find real liberation from what weighs us down. Jesus forgave the disciples who abandoned him and the people who killed him and Paul who persecuted his followers, no questions asked. He showed us how to do this. It’s the only thing that breaks the pattern of hate and resentment. So when we wonder how far to go to forgive people who do or don’t deserve it, we should think about what we’ve been given, then think about what to forgive others, and then find a way to add about a billion.