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Sermons from Commons Church. Intellectually honest. Spiritually passionate. Jesus at the centre. Since 2014.
Because the parables of grace, they are not warm, fuzzy fairy tales. They are a reminder that grace is always going to be a function of personal healing and relational dynamics and community growth. These parables, they're a sign of the world that Jesus longs for you and I to live in together. Here on this third Sunday in the season of Lent, that's why I'm wearing our purple stole today, perhaps as Lent is getting on you are feeling some of the weight of this season. To be frank, the global events, the past couple of weeks, those are enough to burden even the most optimistic of us, but then of course, Lent is always our annual return as a tradition, as a community to a kind of willful engagement with the folly, with the darkness that can mark our human experience.
Speaker 1:And Christians around the world, sort of, for many many centuries have engaged this season of Lent in in a variety of ways, though there are some well established traditions. We have the habit of praying for repentant hearts in this season, for justice to come. We often will take up a practice of fasting in an effort to acknowledge our rampant desire and consumption. Many Christians in this time of the year will choose to be generous in unique ways as an antidote to self preservation and greed. And we pick up rhythms like this, not because the heaviness that sometimes comes with them is inherently redemptive.
Speaker 1:Remember, as the famed monk who Thomas Merton once observed, the cross is the sign of salvation. No one is saved by their own suffering. So here's your reminder that Lent transform you it transforms you not through your discomfort, it changes you because you are journeying with Christ toward both cross and toward an empty tomb. And in that journey, Christ goes with you, the one who came and lived and died to show us all a better brighter way. So, here's my invitation, my encouragement to you to press on this Lent, friends.
Speaker 1:This season has so many gifts to offer including those that we're discovering in this teaching series we are in. If you have been following along, we are looking at Christ's parables of grace this spring and over the past couple of weeks, Jeremy's actually walked us through a couple of stories that might be familiar to many of us. The first was the Good Samaritan and then last Sunday, we considered the story of a single lost sheep. And actually, the story's more about a woefully misguided shepherd. Someone willing to leave behind so much of value to recover the small insignificant thing that got away.
Speaker 1:And I'll be honest with you, what stuck with me all week was Jeremy's invitation to consider how we all have this experience at times of being the one that others determine isn't worthy going after. And we have this tendency to rationalize those experiences in our lives because as we grow older we come to understand that no one can live completely open and free with their relational resources. Right? But then Jeremy suggested that we might also be like we find ourselves on the other side of the equation. Being the one that wishes we hadn't let a relationship go or wishing that things had turned out differently in a certain season of our lives.
Speaker 1:Wishing against all hope that life wouldn't be so pragmatic. And how Jesus seems to have told this story about a sheep to plant a question deep inside our hearts. What if you were the kind of person who would drop everything to help or to assist or to find someone who's lost? What if you were like God? Which just goes to show that Jesus doesn't always change us by telling us what to do.
Speaker 1:Now, sometimes he invites us to imagine that God might be different than we imagined. That there is no place that we could ever wander, that grace can't find us, and that maybe, just maybe, we are meant to be like that big hearted shepherd. And if you missed our message last week, you can catch up on YouTube or on our podcast as always. Today, we have yet another story to unpack but before we do that, I wanna invite us to just pause to settle ourselves. So will you pray with me now?
Speaker 1:Loving God, you are the one who guides us toward Easter light And we pause in this moment, we choose to be present to you, even as we choose to be present to our most intimate feelings. We choose to be aware of those around us. We may even choose to expand our consciousness to be aware of the chaos in our world this morning. And in response to all of that, we take up a posture of honesty today, encouraged by how this season of Lent, it invites our confession, it invites our examination, it invites our reflection. And we ask that in in turning again to ancient word and ancient image that you would speak to our anxiety and our weariness, to our complacency, to our sorrow, and that these moments would be like a light for our imagination, that there would be a sense of new hope, that we would find new perspective.
Speaker 1:These things we ask in the name of Christ, our hope. Amen. Amen. Okay. Well, today, we are exploring the parable of the unmerciful servant.
Speaker 1:And I wanna jump right in because we need to cover conversation partners, we need to talk about community discourse, we're gonna talk a little bit about the limits of parables, and then we'll talk about what Jesus did. And for this story today, we're actually gonna jump to the gospel of Matthew chapter 18 and we're gonna start reading in verse 21 where we see that on one occasion Peter came to Jesus and asked him, Lord, how many times should I forgive my brother or sister who sins against me? Up to seven times? And Jesus answered Peter and said, I tell you not seven times but 77 times. Therefore, the kingdom of heaven is like a king who wanted to settle accounts with his servants.
Speaker 1:Before we jump in, as we have already had to do in this series, let's take a moment to consider the context in which these parables emerged. Here, it's notable that Matthew sets our parable of interest as the final and therefore most important in a series of short stories. Chapter 18 actually begins with Jesus telling his friends that they need to become like little children. Then, he includes his version of our lost sheep story from last week, followed by some instructions on what to do when someone sins against you. And it's on the heels of those instructions that not coincidentally Peter steps up and asks, well, how many times do I need to forgive my sibling?
Speaker 1:Or perhaps, perhaps, perhaps, he was asking the question that all the disciples wanted to ask. How many times do we need to forgive Judas for being such a loser? John's gospel, if you don't know this, John's gospel tells us that Judas, one of Christ's friends and inner circle, he was the bookkeeper, but he also had this habit of taking bonuses from the shared money bag. And the point is that Peter steps up and he asks this question and he senses that maybe maybe Jesus is going to answer in a particular way so he offers an anticipatory answer. And he does this maybe because we we know that there were at the time some rabbinic teachings of the period where a person was told that they should forgive someone else twice but not a third time.
Speaker 1:So perhaps Peter, knowing Jesus's disposition, thinks to himself, there's no way. This guy's too nice. There's no way he's gonna settle for the basic requirements of the law. And perhaps, knowing that the number seven is the symbolic number of perfection in Jewish thought and interpretation, Peter attempts to show his advanced front of the class understanding of Jesus' teaching by saying, I'm guessing I should forgive, what? I don't know, seven times?
Speaker 1:And Jesus says something like, not seven. 77. Or perhaps 77 time or 70 times seven as some manuscripts record. And Christ's hyperbolic point being clearly that in relationships between his followers, relationships predicated on divine love for each other, there is no cap on forgiveness. And to drive the point home, he tells the story about a king.
Speaker 1:But before we get to that, I wanna make just a quick observation here. Our parable today, it emerges from a conversation. Not unlike almost all of Christ's pronouncements and teaching throughout the gospel. And this observation should have profound theological implications for us. The truth is that incarnation, the visitation of God in Christ's human form, its brilliance and power were revealed in the conversation partners it took up.
Speaker 1:The gospel, if you look quite closely, it often emerges in dialogue. And put differently, Christ is going to tell this parable and reveal divine character and unique way because Peter was talking to him. Because Peter had a habit of speaking his mind and asking hard questions because Peter tried Jesus' patience. Because Peter broke and inspired Christ's heart. And if incarnation and the scriptures themselves were formed through this kind of dynamic dialogue guided by the spirit, then perhaps we should not underestimate how conversation still has powerful sacred properties.
Speaker 1:How the people who love you and encourage you reveal God's faithful goodness. How wise friends and mentors, these people can shape your decisions and your future. How the spirit of the living God can use your kind words and your curiosity and sometimes your honest questions directed at others. The spirit can use those things to spark divine encounter. Remember, we only get this story because Jesus knew how to have a heart to heart.
Speaker 1:And the ramifications of that conversation, they're still being felt. We're reading this story here today and it is a profound one. Jesus tells his friend Peter, he says, if someone offends you, you should go on and on and on forgiving. Why? Someone may have asked in that circle.
Speaker 1:And Jesus said, well because the kingdom of heaven is like a king who went to settle his accounts with his servants. And Jesus went on. He said that that as that king began the settlement, a man who owed the king 10,000 bags of gold was brought to him. And since the man wasn't able to pay, the master or the king ordered that he and his wife and his children and all that he had be sold to repay the debt. And at this, the servant fell on his knees before the king and he said, be patient with me.
Speaker 1:He begged him and he said, I'll pay back everything. And the king took pity on him, cancelled the debt and let him go. But when that same servant went out, he found one of his fellow servants who owed him about a 100 silver coins. And the first servant grabbed this man and began to choke him and he said, pay back what you owe me. He demanded it right then and there.
Speaker 1:The fellow servant fell on his knees and he begged him and he said, be patient with me. I will pay it back. But the man refused. Instead he went off and he had the man thrown into prison until he could pay the debt. And when all the other servants of this household, of this kingdom saw what had happened, they were outraged and they went and they told the king everything that had happened.
Speaker 1:And then the master called the first servant in and he said, you wicked wicked servant. I cancelled all this debt of yours because you begged me to. Shouldn't you have had mercy on your fellow servant just as I had on you? Now, we're going to get into the detail of some of the dissonance in this story in a sec but first let's just frame what's straightforward here. First, the deepest truth of this story is obviously tied to the contrasting debts and the contrasting responses of the characters.
Speaker 1:And to be clear, Jesus is telling a fantastical hyperbolic story. Recent NIV translators, as I read to you here, they've simplified things for English readers by saying that this guy owed the king 10,000 bags of gold. If you look in your bible, every bible will have this, there'll be a little note there that says it was actually 10,000 talents which isn't a denomination of bills we work with very often. Quickly here though, 10,000, the Greek word for this is myria, that's where we get our word myriad. This was the largest Greek numeral used for calculations.
Speaker 1:And the talent, this was the largest known amount of money in the ancient cultures of this text, equal to approximately 60 to 90 pounds of gold or silver depending on the metal you're measuring. Meaning that Jesus is literally saying, this guy owed a gajillion dollars. He didn't he didn't expect his audience to imagine what 204 metric tons of gold looked like because they wouldn't have been able to. This was a debt that would have taken a laborer one hundred and sixty four thousand years to repay which is a troubling amortization schedule to say the least. And Jesus' point is, think of the highest number you can conceptualize.
Speaker 1:That's how much the guy owes. And the second guy, well, he owes the first two to three months wages which isn't nothing but that's reasonable, that's realistic, you can imagine that. That contrast is one of the hinges of the story. The other is this contrasting response of the king and the first servant and it's crucial to understand that as many commentators note and acknowledge, these servants are likely imagined by the first audience as officials. They seem to have had some status and we think this because, well, in the first case because Jesus often presents servants in his stories as managers or as people responsible for others.
Speaker 1:We also think this because the story imagines a king collecting fees and debts from those responsible to him, not unlike the rulers of first century Palestine. And this means that Jesus' parable turns on the fact that the king who has every legal right to collect what's owed to him, he chooses to completely wipe out that debt. The king makes no claim to what belongs to him and that contrasts significantly with how the first servant attempts to extract everything he's owed. The first servant pulls rank. He cites privilege.
Speaker 1:He enforces the letter of the law. And that is pertinent for us because of how Matthew arranges Christ's teaching. This parable only appears in Matthew's gospel. So clearly, this story mattered to this author. And when we pair that fact with how Mary Matthew situates this episode as the capstone in a series of stories, a section that biblical scholars call a community discourse, the point of the story starts to hit a little stronger.
Speaker 1:See, Jesus' teaching throughout chapter 18 revolves around how his followers should treat each other. They should take care of the little ones and watch over the innocent. They should speak to each other like or they should seek each other like the shepherd does in the story of the one lost sheep. They should be honest with one another. They should gently correct each other.
Speaker 1:And then, when Peter comes and asks, well, what do I do when someone keeps offending me? Jesus replies, don't be so committed to claiming your rights that you lose the narrative. And, ah, that's the prickly end of forgiveness, isn't it? Sometimes, it's the people closest to us that mistreat us. Sometimes, those are the ones that take advantage of us.
Speaker 1:Sometimes, they act against our dignity and our base of being and we are justified to name that wrong and to tell the truth and to bring them to account. But if we're honest, this story exposes how it's hard to not go further than that. It's hard to not extract a pound of flesh from those who wound us. It's so difficult to not extract every bit, every cent that we're owed and more. It's easy to withhold forgiveness from the people whose reputations and lives seem to go on uninterrupted.
Speaker 1:And this first servant depicts what happens when we blindly claim and impose our rights at the expense of our humanity. See, I think that's why Matthew remembered Jesus telling this story. I think that's why he put it where he did. Because the parables of grace, they are not warm, fuzzy fairy tales. They are a reminder that grace is always going to be a function of personal healing and relational dynamics and community growth.
Speaker 1:These parables, they're a sign of the world that Jesus longs for you and I to live in together. This is not to say, as I hinted earlier, that there isn't some dissonance in the story. The tension actually becomes quite apparent when we read the final two verses of the parable. Some of you may have already skipped and you're happy I'm getting to this. This is where Jesus appears to end with a foreboding finish.
Speaker 1:Jesus said that in anger the king handed the first servant over to the jailers to be tortured until he should pay back what he owed. And then he said, this is how my heavenly father will treat each of you unless you forgive your brother or your sister from your heart. Can feel like a bit of a departure from what he just said and we do need to discuss where this imagery leaves us as readers. To do that, me just remind you of what I said just a second ago. This parable is part of what we call a community discourse.
Speaker 1:As scholar Klein Snodgrass points out, this text points to how there was and always will be contrasting competing truths in the ways that communities stay together and come together and do theology together. Snodgrass notes and I would agree that we can't just lightly dismiss the notion of judgment from what Jesus is trying to say. But, we have to remind ourselves that Matthew puts this parable within a section of instructions to Christian communities where Jesus is teaching that we can't tolerate sin without confrontation and reproof, but also that we must always love and forgive without limits. Both of those things are true. I can imagine that probably makes sense.
Speaker 1:However, what can cause discomfort to a careful reader is the inherent opposition between the picture of God as a king who forgives extravagantly and the picture of a God as a king who orders disobedient servants to be tortured. And I want to be clear, this is an example of how all parables and all metaphors in fact, they have their limits. For example, we all know that you can't say something like, life is a highway without acknowledging that life also sometimes is like a cul de sac or an endlessly looping racetrack at times. Right? There's a metaphor for you.
Speaker 1:Also, same is true. You can't say about your grandparents that they had hearts of gold without acknowledging their mild racism and their colorful language too. Right? Both of those things are true. Most of us learned this concept in high school English.
Speaker 1:And scholar Barbara Reid reminds us that the same is true with biblical metaphors like the one in this parable, how they contain both like and unlike features. For example, it is clear that Jesus intends for us to imagine God as being like the king, especially with the king's audacious forgiveness of insurmountable debt. Even as it's clear that Jesus does not intend for us to imagine God as being like a king that would be so out of touch and so bad at math, so as to allow an employee to rack up such significant, and this is the point, unpayable debt. That's not who God is. Yes.
Speaker 1:God is like a king who forgives. No. God is not like a king who has torturers waiting in his basement. In fact, isn't this why the story hits the way it does because God is unlike the kings we have a tendency to crown? So, what's with the dungeons and henchmen bit then?
Speaker 1:Well, don't forget, Jesus is telling a story, a parable, and parables are not exhaustive systematic theologies. As soon as you treat this one like that, you've got to explain why the second servant just gets left in prison. We don't even know what happens to that guy or why God needs people to report on the failures of others to him like the king does in the story. God doesn't need that to happen. And if you take this metaphor to its furthest limits, will end up like our medieval siblings in our tradition, imagining and conjuring pictures of the elaborate punishments that God hands out to those who step out of line, Instead of adopting a thoughtful, generous reading of this as a parable of grace in which Jesus is tapping into a well established notion in the Jewish imagination.
Speaker 1:We find this notion in extra biblical texts like the book of Sirach. We find it in gospel texts repeatedly. We even find it in the prayer that Jesus taught his friends to pray when he said, forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. This idea that our forgiveness of others is somehow and mysteriously connected to and linked with our experiences of divine forgiveness. Such a view means that Jesus was definitely serious about what happens if we fail to mirror God's mercy with each other.
Speaker 1:And such of you reads this end of the story pragmatically where Jesus says that his divine father, not unlike the king in the story, gives us over to the pain and the cost of our unforgiveness. Jesus wasn't formulating a theology of punishment or divine anger or eternal retribution here. Jesus is painting a picture of what happens when you and I, like the first servant, if we decide that we want to be in the business of exacting claims and balancing accounts. And, such a view holds that Jesus understood how unforgiveness is a kind of prison we can choose. One in which we let wounds and slights and injustices we've suffered become a debt that keeps racking up and it keeps us locked up.
Speaker 1:Morphing into a limitless account that no one could ever pay back. What's so clear to me more than anything is how Jesus didn't want that for his friends and that he doesn't want us to live that way either. And, do you want to know why I'm more convinced of this than anything? It's actually hidden in the vocabulary of the story. See, we're told about the first servant's debt.
Speaker 1:How the guy comes and he falls on his knees and he begs for mercy. He says he'll do anything. He'll pay it all back. To which every listener to the story would have chuckled to themselves and so should we. We are all in on the joke.
Speaker 1:This sucker doesn't get that there's no way out of the hole he's dug for himself. And then Jesus says, almost without fanfare that the king took pity on him, cancelled the debt and let him go. And what can go unnoticed because we're not Greek speakers is how this phrase has been translated into English, the sort of phrase took pity. It's actually derived from this profoundly descriptive word, splegnizomai refers to how the king was moved in his guts. The king is overcome by a kind of guttural embodied overwhelming compassion and in a way that makes emotional sense for the story to use a verb like that.
Speaker 1:We get it. The king must have been impacted by this man's begging because he forgave a massive debt. But here's the deal, Matthew didn't just use that verb here for emotional resonance. No. In Matthew chapter nine, he'll use that same verb to describe how Jesus had compassion on the crowds, How Jesus helped those who were following him because they were like sheep without a shepherd.
Speaker 1:In chapter 14, he will use this same verb to describe how Jesus had mercy on people and healed their bodies. In chapter 15 Jesus will take pity, the same verb, he'll take pity on those who are following him and feed their hungry bellies. In chapter 20 he'll have compassion on the blind that have come to him and he will restore their sight And what this means at the very least is that Matthew remembered Jesus telling a story about how we should forgive and keep on forgiving each other and that in that story there was a king who acts an awful lot like Jesus. A story that reminds the every reader of this story from then till now that whenever we aren't quite sure what Jesus may have thought or meant with a story, we should trust what he did with his life. Remember, Jesus was talking to Peter when he tells this story and it's hard to imagine that Peter didn't grasp the parable's deepest point because he'd seen it walking around in the world.
Speaker 1:He'd been right there as Jesus lived his days trying to transform his friends and his followers imagination of who God might be. Tales of divine anger and judgment, Peter knew those stories. What he had not encountered before were parables like this one, where God has a tendency to appear as a shepherd with dubious inventory management skills. Where God appears like a king willing to give up the practice of accurate bookkeeping And where God, time and time again, uses grace instead of punishment to change our hearts. This is what Jesus came to tell us.
Speaker 1:This is what Jesus came to show us. And maybe that sets you free to practice forgiveness in new ways this Lent. Maybe it releases you from the notion that God has ever wanted to be in the debt collecting business and perhaps it invites you to finally imagine grace at the center of your story and someone else's too. Let's pray. Loving God.
Speaker 1:There is, oh, a huge mystery in these stories. How we can sense profound divine love in them and also we can sense a kind of divine warning. There's there's just as there was with Peter, there's a divine conversation happening with you in and through this story, in and through this text and we here today, we need courage to trust the ways that you speak of divine mercy. It's limitlessness. And we need grace to turn toward it, to receive it, to let it shape each and every day.
Speaker 1:Just as we need courage today to trust the caution you offer, Jesus, the ways that you try to steer us away from harshness and exacting claims. And we acknowledge these are not easy things. We need your peace. Oh, spirit of the living God, would you come and walk with us? Surround the places of our pain, our anger, our disappointment.
Speaker 1:Come and surround the places of the most simple hope that we can hold on to and give us eyes to imagine a story more full of grace than we could have ever imagined. We pray in the name of Christ. Amen.
Speaker 2:Hey, Jeremy here, and thanks for listening to our podcast. If you're intrigued by the work that we're doing here at Commons, you can head to our website commons.church for more information. You can find us on all of the socials CommonsChurch. You can subscribe to our YouTube channel, where we are posting content regularly for the community. You can also join our Discord server.
Speaker 2:Head to commons.churchdiscord for the invite, and there you will find the community having all kinds of conversations about how we can encourage each other to follow the way of Jesus. We would love to hear from you. Anyway, thanks for tuning in. Have a great week. We'll talk to you soon.