Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost Year A September 11, 2005
Ecclesiasticus 27:30-28:7 Psalm 103 Romans 14:5-12 Matthew 18:21-35

At least that’s the hope of a teller of parables like the one that forms our gospel this morning. Exaggeration, symbolic numbers, connections made with other stories familiar to the hearers, graphic attention-getting images; all these gimmicks, these story-telling devices, are meant to barge right through rational defenses and grab the listener on a gut level – the place where amendment of life gets its start, the place where the realm of God takes root and grows in each of us.

When I was home-schooling our children, the first curriculum I used was a wonderful approach to teaching young children through the telling of fairy tales and myths, with all their larger-than-life qualities. Immersed in the ancient stories which owe their staying power to the deep archetypal truths they carry, our boys learned the essentials of ethics, as well as applications for basic math and history. And the writings and drawings they produced during this time were amazingly creative.

But this curriculum presupposed a settled life with ample time for preparation. We were on the road with our music ministry. Much of the teaching had to take place in the car while traveling between gigs. I began to long for something more structured, something with workbooks. Home schooling friends recommended a Christian curriculum that had been developed for missionary families.

That’s when home-schooling stopped being fun. For one thing, the approach to teaching science was strictly creationist, an interesting juxtaposition to the Natural History magazines that arrived at our house every month. When we got to the part about God putting dinosaur bones in the ground in order to test our faith, the boys – who ate, slept, and breathed dinosaurs at that time -- expressed the opinion that the fairy tales and myths we’d been studying before made a lot more sense.

Besides, they went on, they really missed those intensely interesting stories. You see, this new curriculum didn’t believe that fairy tales and myths were appropriate material for young Christian boys and girls. Instead they offered blandly moralistic stories about clean-cut young people who always told the truth and did the right thing, stories which literally bored our children to tears.

The irony in this earnest Christian program of education was that they were rejecting the very mode of teaching about the realm of God practiced by Jesus. Just imagine what today’s gospel parable would have been like if it had been edited by the well-intentioned developers of that curriculum. I invite you to follow along with the original parable in your service booklet insert while I read a more “realistic” version.

A man wished to settle accounts with his employees. He met with an employee who owed him a large sum of money and, as he could not pay, the employer threatened to take him to small claims court. The employee said to the employer, ‘Have patience with me, and I will pay you everything.’ The employer felt sorry for him and forgave him the debt. Then that same employee went to one of his fellow workers who owed him a small amount of money and demanded full payment. Although his fellow employee pleaded with him to have patience and promised to pay him back, he took him to small claims court. When the other employees saw what had happened, they were upset, and went and reported to their employer what he had done. The employer summoned the employee he had forgiven and said to him, ‘You’ve done bad thing. I forgave you all that debt because you pleaded with me. You should have had mercy on your fellow employee, as I had mercy on you.' And the employer fired him.

Given that diluted story, Jesus’ admonition to us, the listeners, at the end of the gospel-- “So my heavenly Father will also do to every one of you, if you do not forgive your brother or sister from your heart." –doesn’t carry much weight. I, for one, can hear myself responding with a yawn and the opinion that, in that case, rather than learning mercy, I’d just go find another job.

But Jesus is after changing lives. Jesus is after challenging us to embrace our birthright and grow into the image and likeness of God. So, it’s not an employer in his parable. It’s a king -- someone with absolute power over his subjects. And it’s not an employee, or even a free man who is in deep debt. It’s a slave – someone who has no power at all.

It’s not just a considerable debt which is owed the master. It’s an impossible, exorbitant, mythic amount. A talent was the largest weight in the Hebrew system of weights and measures. Weights varied from place to place and era to era, but a talent is estimated to have weighed, at the very least, 75 lbs. The unmerciful slave’s debt is ten thousand talents – that is, 10,000 times 75 or 750,000 pounds of gold or silver, give or take a shekel. In terms of today’s monetary value, five talents would make their owner a multi-millionaire. Seven-hundred-fifty-thousand talents would represent trillions of today’s dollars. So this slave owes his master a sum that is roughly equivalent to our national debt.

Unbelievable. Amazing. And that’s just what the storyteller‘s intends. We now know we’ve entered “parable land”. All bets are off. Anything can happen. It’s open season on the rational and expected. Our suspended disbelief makes us ripe for the inbreaking of the realm-of-God truth that is Jesus’ purpose for crafting and telling this story.

Amazingly, the king shows mercy more prodigious than the debt that is owed him, and releases his groveling slave from this massive obligation. Amazingly, the forgiven slave turns around and demands from another slave payment of a small debt, responding to that slave’s pleas for mercy by most unmercifully having him thrown into prison. Amazingly, this failure to forgive occurs as the first slave is leaving his audience with the king where he has just received the gift of his master’s extravagant mercy – an incredible exercise in short-term memory loss; especially given that the plea he is hearing from his fellow slave is made in the exact same words he used with the king about three minutes before. Oh, and the debt owed the first slave by his fellow slave? Amazingly, it’s about one-five-hundred-thousandth of the debt from which the first slave has just been released.

So, here we are, broken open by the hyperbole of parable, undefended by our usual rationality, and Jesus doesn’t pull his punches, or should I say, punch line. The unforgiving forgiven slave gets his comeuppance – sentenced to prison where he will be tortured until the debt is paid.

Uncomfortable stuff, made even more unsettling as we are dropped, gasping and shaken, into Jesus’ conclusion of the parable, “So my heavenly Father will also do to every one of you, if you do not forgive your brother or sister from your heart."

I feel it necessary here to honor the conventions of “parable land” by stepping back and looking at the overall thrust of this strange, exaggerated, disturbing, larger-than-life story. Setting aside my mind’s desire to make seamless sense of it all, what does my gut tell me? What is the primary impression left by it on my spirit? What is Jesus telling us about the realm of God?

Just this –that radical forgiveness is part of the fabric of the realm of God. And, further, if that realm of God is to be manifested in us, and, through us in the world, we must learn to curb our greed and our lust for power and focus on the practice forgiveness. It’s a non-negotiable. So many things in this parable point to that – the impossibly huge debt that is forgiven, the terrible price that is paid for the failure to forgive. Clearly, if we fall short in showing mercy, we exile ourselves from the realm of God.

In order to participate in the resurrection life promised by Jesus, we must become prodigal forgivers. Jesus’ conversation with Peter that precipitates the parable underscores this imperative. Peter, in what he no doubt views as an act of great generosity, wonders if he should forgive seven times, seven being a holy number in Jewish thought, associated with wholeness and completion. Can’t do much better than that, can you?

Well, yes you can – at least according to Jesus, who replies that we should forgive those who sin against us seventy-seven times. The only other time these numbers show up in scripture is in a little tale of revenge in Genesis. Lamach, a direct descendent of Cain, kills a man who has wronged him and then proclaims, “If Cain is avenged sevenfold, truly Lamech seventy-sevenfold." Interesting that Jesus’ prescription for forgiveness matches number by number this accounting of revenge.

Like the size of the forgiven slave’s debt, like the duration of his punishment, the extravagant mercy required by Jesus of Peter tells us again that the practice of forgiveness is central to the manifestation of the realm of God. And there is something else here. Something wrapped mysteriously in the fabric of the parable. Something which, I would offer, carries as much weight as the command that we forgive. Something which is pointed to by the unforgiving slave’s sociopathic inability to empathize with, and therefore show compassion for, the slave who is in debt to him. And that is the requirement that we repent.

The unforgiving slave obviously feels no remorse over his monumental indebtedness. We get the impression that, if he hadn’t been turned in by his fellow slaves and thrown into prison, he probably would have started racking up new debt as soon as the opportunity presented itself. His inability to empathize with his fellow slave and fellow debtor is linked to his inability to recognize, regret, and repent of his own sinfulness. Remorse gives birth to repentance. Repentance gives birth to empathy. Empathy gives birth to compassion. Compassion gives birth to the capacity and willingness to forgive.

It seems to me that until we acknowledge, feel remorse for, and seek to amend our own failures to behave justly and mercifully, we – like the remarkably obtuse slave in the parable – remain unable to truly forgive others, as Jesus says at the end of our gospel, from the heart. It is in this pivotal combination of repentance and forgiveness that I experience this scripture speaking to the great challenges we face in our post- 9/11, post-Katrina world.

We are always post-something. Post-Vietnam, post-Civil War, post-Crusades, post-Cain and Able – the list of conflicts that have led to more conflicts streams out behind us like a dark wake. I can guarantee that decisions to take revenge have far outweighed decisions to repent and forgive throughout that long sad history. Yet, Jesus demonstrates to us in today’s parable that he and his father in heaven hold these amendments of life to be both non-negotiable and necessary to the process of spiritual growth and salvation.

We live in a world where revenge has both momentum and the upper hand and mercy and reconciliation are viewed by many as signs of weakness. But I say to you that, although vengeance may be of great value in this world, repentance and forgiveness are two sides of the same coin – a coin which, in the realm of God, has more value than ten thousand talents. AMEN.