"Sodagate" and the Parable of the Unforgiving Servant - Matthew 18:21-35

Living in community is hard. Just ask teenagers who live under the same roof. We recently went through what I like to think of as Sodagate at our house. It all started when one teen had a friend over and they drank the other teen’s soda, which was supposed to last the rest of the week. This was a clear violation of community rules. And when there is a transgression like this, there is often retribution, such as eating the other person’s restaurant leftovers without permission, which only escalated Sodagate. I think there are two lessons to be learned here. The first is that one would hope for some grace when it’s your friend who is over and you want to offer them soda, even if you’re out of your own. And second, it’s exhausting to keep score of everyone’s transgressions.

If only our missteps in community were limited to things like soda and leftovers. If we kept it to small things, the Bible could have been a whole lot shorter. Almost all of it is devoted to how to be in community with each other and with God, lessons we seem to need to hear over and over again. The truth is that we hurt one another all the time, in small ways and large. On the large side, for example, the fraud this week of parading fake alien mummies in front of a governmental body for personal gain comes to mind. But so do the more common hurts, the betrayals we receive and inflict on one another. Jesus is clear that forgiveness is the answer. But when the betrayal is big enough, we want to hold onto our hurt and put forgiveness off into the future. I’m reminded of St. Augustine’s prayer, “Lord give me chastity, but not yet.” Forgiving a big transgression can feel like that.

It’s no wonder that Jesus had to teach about forgiveness from several angles. It’s one of the most needed but complicated aspects of community life. What we just heard from Matthew’s Gospel is Jesus’ third attempt in a row to get his message across, because forgiveness is just difficult.

To set the stage, Jesus has told the disciples about a shepherd who left the 99 sheep and went after the 1 lost sheep, to illustrate God’s unconditional forgiveness. The disciples reply that Jesus can’t mean this as practical advice, right? So Jesus tries a different angle. Okay, forget the first story. The shepherd gives the lost sheep three chances to get found, and then he gives up on it. Three strikes and the sheep is out. That can’t be right, Peter figures out. Which leads us to Peter’s honest question this morning. “Lord, how often should I forgive? As many as seven times?” I’m sure he thinks this constitutes an extravagant amount. To which Jesus replies, “How about seventy times seven?” In other words, keep going, you’re not even close.

On the surface, the lesson seems to be that we are supposed to forgive people maybe more times than we can count or that we think they deserve. Which is fine, I suppose. But like the disciples, we are still in danger of missing the larger point of the lesson. If we think that forgiveness is only about taking the high road or a kind of higher standard for people of faith, forgiveness is just a task we can check off our Christian to do list, or an opportunity to congratulate ourselves for good behavior, which doesn’t sound much like Jesus. There must be more to it, a bigger picture.

Enter the parable of the unforgiving servant. A servant owes the king an unbelievably large amount of money, say a billion dollars. The Greek is pretty close to that. There is no way he will ever be able to repay it. So he pleads for mercy, and the king says sure. The servant then harasses a fellow servant who owes him about a hundred bucks. This enrages the king. “'You wicked slave! I forgave you all that debt because you pleaded with me. Should you not have had mercy on your fellow slave, as I had mercy on you?’” Jesus continues, “And in anger his lord handed him over to be tortured until he would pay his entire debt. So my heavenly Father will also do to every one of you, if you do not forgive your brother or sister from your heart.”

That’s an ominous ending for a story that started out as a parable of grace, much like the good shepherd going after the lost sheep. It’s clear that we are supposed to learn the unconditionality of God’s grace through the example of the merciful king. But this story is also about the hard time we have accepting the terms of grace, or the forgiveness of others who have done wrong. When the unforgiving servant rejects a system that runs on grace, he acts just like some famous characters in other parables that Jesus liked to tell. He’s just like the older brother of the prodigal son, who grumbled miserably about their father’s mercy and ended up missing the party. The unforgiving servant is like the guy who was invited right off the street to attend a wedding banquet but refused to put on a wedding robe. He spent his time outside the celebration, miserable. Judgment comes to those who refuse to accept the terms of grace, and it’s of our own making. In the words of Robert Capon, when we insist on keeping score, as is our nature most of the time, our ledger of the wrongs done by and to us becomes, forever, the pointless torture it always has been.

The Gospel has given us forgiveness to meditate on this morning, and its place in our spiritual lives. Maybe you struggle with a brother who has stolen your soda. Or maybe you have a hard time seeing how God’s grace extends to the alien fakery guys. Or maybe you’ve been badly betrayed, or you have done the betraying. Forgiveness might feel impossible, at least right now. We’ve all been there, by virtue of being humans in community. The best option is to trust Jesus at his word, that forgiveness extends to us all, even when we wander off from what God desires of us.

And we can take Jesus at his word that grace and mercy are essential to how God operates, that’s the bigger lesson here. The only exception to grace seems to come when we reject a system that keeps bringing people back into the fold. If this were an easy teaching, Jesus could have said it once and been done with it. Instead he told story after story to help us heal from the pain of our human scorekeeping.

One last word - if you happen to struggle with forgiveness right now, know that you are not alone, and that God’s grace is with you in the struggle. But try not to sit outside God’s banquet too long. God wants to welcome you back in.