Love and Forgiveness: The Unforgiving Servant
A Call to Forgive
VIDEO: signs of forgiveness:
35 lSo also my heavenly Father will do to every one of you, if you do not forgive your brother mfrom your heart.”
Matthew’s Advice to a Divided Community
pleads for humility, forgiveness, and mercy
Matthew locates a story of a king and his servants.
I’m a “Forgiveness Aspirant,” not an expert.
I’m WAY better at holding a grudge than I am at letting it go,
It begins and it is framed by Peter’s initial question on how often he should forgive.
Lord, how often ywill my brother sin against me, and I forgive him?
Lord, how often ywill my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? z
Lord, how often ywill my brother sin against me, and I forgive him?
DISCLAIMER:
“seventy times seven,” which is forever and ever forgiveness; repeated/perpetual forgiveness. Bernard Brandon Scott, “The King’s Accounting: ,” Journal of Biblical Literature 104 (1985): 429
This is hard.
Matthew locates a story of a king and his servants.
A “twice told tale” of the King’s forgiveness with the servant’s lack of it
a story of a king and how he relates to his servants and a story of how God deals with those who do not forgive.
What the heavenly father will do to to every one of you, if you do not forgive your brother from your heart.
me no likey
Will do… to every one of you
Let the Holy Spirit sink that in...
if you do not…from your heart...
What does this mean?
Not forgive?
if you do not?
from your heart?
“Don’t do likewise!”
a negative example:
It should emphasize to us the King’s mercy and not his revenge.
The main point of the parable is :
“everyone says forgiveness is a lovely idea until they have something to forgive”
C.S. Lewis
. . . you must make every effort to kill every taste of resentment in your own heart—every wish to humiliate or hurt him or to pay him out. The difference between this situation and the one in such you are asking God’s forgiveness is this. In our own case we accept excuses too easily; in other people’s we do not accept them easily enough.
But even if he is absolutely fully to blame we still have to forgive him; and even if ninety-nine percent of his apparent guilt can be explained away by really good excuses, the problem of forgiveness begins with the one percent guilt which is left over. To excuse what can really produce good excuses is not Christian character; it is only fairness. To be a Christian means to forgive the inexcusable, because God has forgiven the inexcusable in you.
How can we do it? Remembering where we stand
This parable lists three things we need to pay attention to, let’s go through them:
A “twice told tale” of the King’s forgiveness with the servant’s lack of it
heavenly father6 will do to everyone of you, if you do not forgive your brother from your heart.”
a story of a king and how he relates to his servants and a story of how God deals with those who do not forgive.
a story of a king and how he relates to his servants and a story of how God deals with those who do not forgive.
What the heavenly father will do to to every one of you, if you do not forgive your brother from your heart.
negative example:
“Don’t do likewise!”
the king’s forgiveness with the servant’s lack thereof
A negative example
a negative example:
A negative example
It should emphasize to us the King’s mercy and not his revenge.
a story of a king and how he relates to his servants and a story of how God deals with those who do not forgive.
It should emphasize to us the King’s mercy and not his revenge.
Took pity on him, canceled the debt, and let him go.
Take Pity
If you want to avoid the feast of fools, if you want to avoid being twisted and being put into prison by your anger, the first thing you have to do is take pity on the person who has wronged you. That doesn’t just mean you feel sorry for them. This is a very important word in the Bible, this word that’s translated sometimes “have compassion,” sometimes “take pity.” The word literally means to have your heart go out to somebody.
Cancel the debt
What does it mean to have your heart go out to somebody? It’s a good, vivid term. What does it mean? It means you’re identifying with them. It means you’re putting your heart in them in a way (in their life, in their body), and you feel something of what they feel. Isn’t that what it means? You identify with the perpetrator.
According to the Bible, you grant forgiveness before you feel it.
No! If you wait to feel it before you grant it, you’ll never grant it; you’ll be in prison.
According to the Bible, you grant forgiveness before you feel it.
No! If you wait to feel it before you grant it, you’ll never grant it; you’ll be in prison.
What does it mean to have your heart go out to somebody? It’s a good, vivid term. What does it mean? It means you’re identifying with them. It means you’re putting your heart in them in a way (in their life, in their body), and you feel something of what they feel. Isn’t that what it means? You identify with the perpetrator.
What does it mean to have your heart go out to somebody? It’s a good, vivid term. What does it mean? It means you’re identifying with them. It means you’re putting your heart in them in a way (in their life, in their body), and you feel something of what they feel. Isn’t that what it means? You identify with the perpetrator.
To have pity on somebody who has wronged you means you deliberately do the internal work of reminding yourself of how much you have in common. You put yourself in their place and you empathize, you sympathize. That is not the sort of thing your heart really wants to do. Your heart wants to accentuate the differences between you and the perpetrator, the wrongdoer, but according to the text, what you must do if you’re ever going to avoid the jailhouse of anger is you have to actually identify, as much as you can, with the person and say, “I’m really the same.”
Some years ago, I read an article (which I often refer to because it’s so good) that said when you are bitter towards someone … In a sense, you stay bitter toward people by caricaturing them, creating one-dimensional, distorted views of them. That’s how you stay angry at them. What do I mean? Well, have you ever had a cartoon drawn of you?
Over on the East Side tonight, Steve Shaffer was saying in one of his … He was leading worship, and he said somebody on the street did a little cartoon sketching of him. It was a painful experience because, even when the cartoonist is actually being kind of goodwilled toward you, the cartoonist has to exaggerate certain features.
If your ears are kind of big, they make them a little bigger. If your nose is big, they make it bigger. The brow. The circles under your eyes. I mean, that’s what cartoonists do, even when they’re trying to be nice. It’s taking one or two features and sort of blowing it up. That’s what you do in order to stay angry at somebody.
So if somebody has lied to you, you’re mad at them. Somebody says, “Well, why did they lie to you?” You say, “Because she’s just a liar!” See? Because you think of her as a liar, you think of her completely in terms … You’ve reduced her to the lie. “She’s just a liar!” What if somebody says to you, “Yeah, but … do you ever lie?”
Some years ago, I read an article (which I often refer to because it’s so good) that said when you are bitter towards someone … In a sense, you stay bitter toward people by caricaturing them, creating one-dimensional, distorted views of them. That’s how you stay angry at them. What do I mean? Well, have you ever had a cartoon drawn of you?
Over on the East Side tonight, Steve Shaffer was saying in one of his … He was leading worship, and he said somebody on the street did a little cartoon sketching of him. It was a painful experience because, even when the cartoonist is actually being kind of goodwilled toward you, the cartoonist has to exaggerate certain features.
If your ears are kind of big, they make them a little bigger. If your nose is big, they make it bigger. The brow. The circles under your eyes. I mean, that’s what cartoonists do, even when they’re trying to be nice. It’s taking one or two features and sort of blowing it up. That’s what you do in order to stay angry at somebody.
So if somebody has lied to you, you’re mad at them. Somebody says, “Well, why did they lie to you?” You say, “Because she’s just a liar!” See? Because you think of her as a liar, you think of her completely in terms … You’ve reduced her to the lie. “She’s just a liar!” What if somebody says to you, “Yeah, but … do you ever lie?”
Some years ago, I read an article (which I often refer to because it’s so good) that said when you are bitter towards someone … In a sense, you stay bitter toward people by caricaturing them, creating one-dimensional, distorted views of them. That’s how you stay angry at them. What do I mean? Well, have you ever had a cartoon drawn of you?
Over on the East Side tonight, Steve Shaffer was saying in one of his … He was leading worship, and he said somebody on the street did a little cartoon sketching of him. It was a painful experience because, even when the cartoonist is actually being kind of goodwilled toward you, the cartoonist has to exaggerate certain features.
If your ears are kind of big, they make them a little bigger. If your nose is big, they make it bigger. The brow. The circles under your eyes. I mean, that’s what cartoonists do, even when they’re trying to be nice. It’s taking one or two features and sort of blowing it up. That’s what you do in order to stay angry at somebody.
So if somebody has lied to you, you’re mad at them. Somebody says, “Well, why did they lie to you?” You say, “Because she’s just a liar!” See? Because you think of her as a liar, you think of her completely in terms … You’ve reduced her to the lie. “She’s just a liar!” What if somebody says to you, “Yeah, but … do you ever lie?”
You’re a real-life human being, but when you think of the person you’re mad at, “She’s just a liar!” What it means to make your heart go out to somebody is to deliberately (instead of saying, “I would never do that,” and, “How different I am”) say, “No, I’m not different.” In one of his essays on forgiveness, Miroslav Volf says, “Forgiveness flounders because I exclude the enemy from the community of humans even as I exclude myself from the community of sinners.”
Perfect. You can only stay mad at somebody if you continue to feel superior to them and tell yourself you’re superior to them. First of all, you exclude yourself from the community of sinners. You refuse to admit that you may not do exactly the same thing that person did, but you do things like that.
You would do things like that, or you could. You’re capable of it, if you had the chance. You can’t exclude yourself from the community of sinners, and you can’t exclude the person from the community of humans
What that means is over the years I’ve had a couple of mishaps with chairs.
I go to somebody’s house … Especially, if they have kind of nice, maybe, antique furniture
When there’s a loss, either the person who brings the loss pays, or the person who experienced the loss pays. It’s one or the other. You can either make the perpetrator pay, or you can forgive, which means you pay.
“How does that work,” you say, “if we’re not talking about money?” Well, when someone really wrongs you, there’s always a loss. You’ve lost reputation, or you’ve lost some opportunity you didn’t have and you never will get again. There’s a real debt. It’s not a monetary debt, but there’s a debt. You feel it, and you feel the person owes you. You feel the person is liable to you, but what are you going to do? There are two things you can do. Only two things. What we just said.
One is you can make them pay. You can try to hurt them. You can gossip about them. You can slander, always under the guise of, “Let me warn you about this person.” You can slice up their reputation, or when you see them, you can be cold. Or maybe you just withdraw your friendship, or you just berate them, or you really tell them off and you try to make them feel horrible.
Or at the very least, in your heart, you root for them to have a bad life and you rejoice (do you remember Buechner was talking about it?), you savor anything that goes wrong in their lives. If, either directly because of you, or indirectly, the person suffers enough, you start to feel like they have paid, but if you make them pay, it puts you in jail. It twists you. It makes you more like Satan than like Jesus.
Well, what’s the alternative? You pay. “What do you mean I pay?” When you want to slice them up, you just refuse. You identify with the perpetrator, and you remember the king’s compassion (we’ll get to that in a second), and you refuse. When you want to berate them and just tell them off and make them feel bad, you refuse
You may tell them certain things they don’t want to hear, but you’re certainly not there to try to make them unhappy and suffer. Most of all, when you feel like rooting against them in your heart, when you feel like just replaying the tapes and just boiling in your heart against them, you refuse. It’s an act of the will. You say, “Well, what does that do?” What it does is it cuts off the oxygen to the self-pity and to the self-righteousness and to the self-centeredness and to the anger.
Bit by bit by bit, if you grant forgiveness, eventually, the anger will recede, and you’ll feel forgiveness. This is the place that I hope you’ll listen, if you haven’t yet. I hope this is the one thing you’ll get, because this is completely contrary to what you’ve probably learned almost anywhere else.
According to the Bible, you grant forgiveness before you feel it.
No! If you wait to feel it before you grant it, you’ll never grant it; you’ll be in prison.
Let them go!
Thirdly, let him go. This is a problem for some people. “Let him go?
He begins to choke the man, even before the guy asks for mercy, and then refuses to forgive him. The forgiven isn’t forgiving
Your Heart needs to go out to them
“Oh, I can’t forgive this person. I have to seek justice.” But when you go (not having forgiven) and pursue justice, you will find that, though you may say, “I’m doing it for other people’s sake, or for his sake, or for God’s sake,” you’re actually doing it for your sake. You’re not actually trying to wake them up; you’re trying to make them hurt.
So you’re telling them off, and you say you’re seeking justice, but you’re actually seeking vengeance.
forgive before you pursue justice, you’ll never really pursue justice. You’ll be producing vengeance, and you actually won’t get anywhere.
The great irony is you have to identify with the perpetrator so there’s no more ill will and cancel the debt and do that hard inner work of granting forgiveness before you feel it and forgo vengeance and forgo harming the person to make up for your pain.
No problem. I’m sure you all have taken good notes, and now you can go out into the world and do what you should do. No, it’s not that easy. Of course, you’re absolutely right to sit there staring at me, sort of saying, “How do we do this?” The answer is you have two resources. Let me just look at these here at the end.
The first resource, and this isn’t a resource most people in our individualistic, American society even think about, is according to the Bible (the New Testament), your community, your church is a resource for helping you, for disciplining you, for supporting you, for holding you accountable to forgive and repent, and to keep your relationships straight, so people don’t just start to avoid each other, so relationships just don’t break apart.
Up further in 18:15–17
First of all, it says, “If your brother sins against you …” This is talking about if a brother or sister who is another Christian … If you’re a Christian and they’re a Christian and you both profess the gospel (so this is for relationships in the church), if you have a ruptured relationship, it says, “… go and show him his fault
“show him his fault” is a fascinating word that is usually used by Paul to mean evangelize.
“Oh, the person won’t listen to me.” Well, maybe the person won’t listen to you because you’re stupid in the way in which you approach them. You might be. What are you going to do then? “Well, tough. I tried.”
No. You’re supposed to get other Christian brothers and sisters around you to help you get that relationship straight, to figure out … Who needs to repent? Who needs to forgive
Jesus Christ’s emotional life was this word in verse 27. “… his heart went out to them …”
If I’m telling you you must identify with the wrongdoer, you must identify with the perpetrator; you must see yourself as no better than that perpetrator
On the cross, Jesus Christ identified with you. His heart went out to you. That was the ultimate example of it. On the cross, he became you; he took your penalty for you.
Who do you have by the throat?
Our Father, we thank you for this stern warning and this amazing promise, and that is that the gospel can spring us from the prison that anger and bitterness and resentment can put us in. We pray, Father, that … For some people here this is a life-and-death situation right now. Unless we use the resources the gospel gives us, we will never escape. For all of us, we pray that you would help us to store this up and treasure this message in our hearts because someday we’re going to need it. We thank you so much that you have given it to us through Jesus. In his name we pray, amen.
Our Father, we thank you for this stern warning and this amazing promise, and that is that the gospel can spring us from the prison that anger and bitterness and resentment can put us in. We pray, Father, that … For some people here this is a life-and-death situation right now. Unless we use the resources the gospel gives us, we will never escape. For all of us, we pray that you would help us to store this up and treasure this message in our hearts because someday we’re going to need it. We thank you so much that you have given it to us through Jesus. In his name we pray, amen.