Sermon by Reverend Dr. John W. Mann | September 17, 2023

Matthew 18:21-35

I visited a religious education class at the high school in my parish. We were talking about the nature of God. One question was whether there is anything God cannot or will not forgive. Can someone be so evil as to be beyond the reach of God’s love? These discussions have a natural trajectory that always ends up at the same place. We talked about different figures from the past and the present; the end of the line is the question, “Can God forgive Hitler?”

Is there a line we draw that says once you cross this you are beyond God’s mercy? Is it possible to determine if such a line exists, and if it does, where do you start?

When Jesus was asked about the extent of forgiveness, he answered in effect that forgiveness has no limits. Most of us can probably think of people we have been called upon to forgive. Sometimes people will apologize for their misdeeds and ask our forgiveness. Then we decide. Sometimes our conscience will pester us, saying “what about that?” I would imagine that we can all think of times when we’ve responded by saying, “That’s asking too much.”

I can’t. Or, I won’t. He or she or they don’t deserve my forgiveness and they certainly haven’t earned it. I am completely justified in my position.

Jesus told a parable about forgiveness. He said that the kingdom of heaven, or the life that God makes possible, may be compared to a king who wished to settle accounts with his servants. In the story people owed money. Some owed more than others. One guy owed an amount described as “10,000 talents.” That was a huge sum. A talent was the amount that a labor could be expected to earn over 15 years. When you consider the average life span in those days, a talent was pretty much a career’s worth of earning.

Ten thousand talents would take you 150,000 years to earn. Basically, it was an impossible sum. Jesus doesn’t say how the servant got into such debt, just that there was no way he could pay it. The king ordered that the man’s assets be liquidated and sold. His assets included him and his family.

But the servant begged and even promised the impossible, that he would pay it back. The king took pity and forgave the debt. So off went the servant, debt free.

He encountered a colleague who owed him money. A hundred denarii. A hundred denarii was a fair amount of money. It would take some time to put that kind of cash together and some months of working. It was a big, but not impossible sum.

The servant who had been forgiven the impossible debt grabbed the guy who owed him a possible debt and demanded payment. And since he didn’t have that kind of money just lying around, the first guy had the second guy thrown in the slammer until things could be settled.

Word got back to the king and he called the servant to account. He rescinded his previous forgiveness and had him thrown into prison along with the guy who owed him the hundred denarii.

Jesus said that’s what will happen if you don’t forgive from the bottom of your heart.

That’s really a strange story. Does it imply that if we are once forgiven, of even some huge insurmountable debt to God, that if we hold some little grudge against somebody, that our sins will come back to haunt us? Which would make God’s forgiveness entirely dependent upon our constant vigilance that we hold not the slightest debt against our brothers and sisters.

We can feel the outrage of the king and our sense of justice resonates with the punishment meted out to the ungrateful servant. But where in this story do we gain some sense of the life God makes possible?

When Jesus spoke of the kingdom of God, he often said things like, “The first shall be last and the last shall be first.” It is a way of living where the status quo is turned around, if not upside down.

The parables Jesus told were often about people or situations of powerlessness. The people he spoke to and lived amongst were oppressed by a political and religious system. If we identify anyone as the key player in the story, it is the second servant.

He’s going along, minding his own business when suddenly his life takes a sharp turn in a direction over which he has no control. He ends up in prison and the one person who had the power to release him, gets thrown into same cell. Now he’s really stuck. He’s being punished for his debt, and because the king took back his mercy, there is no hope for him.

The point of the parable as a comparison to the way things work in God’s realm of expectation and possibility is simply: don’t do it like these people; rather, authentic forgiveness is without condition or limit. Mercy is mercy.

What we often wrestle with in trying to forgive someone is that we are often justified in holding onto our grudge. We have good reasons for not forgiving. But are they good enough? Another way to look at forgiveness is that a grievance against someone comes with an emotional and spiritual weight. Little grievances don’t weigh much and are easy to carry. Some of them are so light that we get used to carrying them around and they become part of our baggage. But if you have too many, they will weigh you down.

Some grievances are heavy burdens, so much so that carrying them becomes who we are. It would seem like the right thing to do to let them go, to not carry such a heavy burden; but sometimes the thought of letting go of that identity of the aggrieved party carries too much risk. There are times when it’s more convenient to be a martyr than to live in the realm of mercy and grace.

In the parable, the king handed over the ungrateful servant to be tortured until the entire debt was paid off. He’s not saying that God is going to punish us unless we forgive; rather I think he is getting at the idea that we torture ourselves by hanging on to grievances past their sell by date.

The difficult part of the story is in the “how to.” There are no easy steps to forgiving someone. Sometimes it boils down to the simple dictum, “life is too short.” We all have to come to terms with the wrongs that have been done to us, the wrongs we’ve done to others and figure out what it means to seek mercy. Forgiveness is freedom – both when we are forgiven and when we forgive.

When Eva Kor was ten years old, she, her parents and three sisters, one of whom was her twin Miriam, were taken from their home in Romania to the Nazi death camp Auschwitz. Miriam and Eva were subjected to horrendous medical experiments and the rest of the family were murdered in the gas chambers. Eva survived the terrors of Auschwitz and in time she immigrated to the United States where she married and raised a family in the state of Indiana.

In 1993 she wanted to find out what kind of medical experiments she had been subjected to and she tracked down a man who had worked as a doctor in Auschwitz, Dr. Hans Munch. He agreed to meet with her and much to her surprise, Dr. Munch showed great remorse for his crimes at Auschwitz. After their meeting she decided to write him a letter offering him her forgiveness.

But then a friend challenged her. If she could find it in her heart to forgive a low-level functionary of Auschwitz, why not go all the way and forgive, posthumously, the man whom they called “the god of Auschwitz,” Dr. Joseph Mengele. She resisted the idea at first as totally ridiculous. But then she began to realize that she possessed a great power, the power to forgive.

Eva Kor attended ceremonies at Auschwitz to mark the 50^th anniversary of its liberation on January 27, 1995. Dr. Munch was there also. He read an apology to the victims of Auschwitz. Eva read these words: “I, Eva Mozes Kor, a twin who survived as a child of Josef Mengele’s experiments at Auschwitz 50 years ago, hereby give amnesty to all Nazis who participated directly or indirectly in the murder of my family and millions of others.” Eva Kor did what it is said only God can do – she forgave Hitler.

Her act of forgiveness was a scandal for some people and a blessing for others. She told of how when she read her statement she felt as though a burden of pain was lifted. She was no longer in the grip of hate and pain. She was free. Whatever was done to her was no longer causing her such pain that she could not be the person she wanted to be. She died on July 4^th, 2019 at the age of 85.

It is not for us to judge anyone’s pain and say, “You must forgive.” We have no right to do that. When we hold onto hatred and if we cherish our pain, it will poison our soul. What we can do is pray to find strength and courage. When we embrace strength and courage these will in time transform our soul to show us that we are stronger and more noble than our hatred. Then hatred is transformed into forgiveness. Forgiveness is at the heart of the gospel. Forgiveness knows no limit. In forgiving we are healed. In forgiving we are made free. Amen.