Extravagant Forgiveness

Here’s my problem: I just hate to see anybody get away with something. A Texas tycoon milks his bank for millions, I think the rat ought to pay. A North Carolina wife feeds her husband arsenic, throw her in the slammer—particularly when her poisonee was a preacher, for heaven’s sake. “Throw the book at ’em”—today Texas, tomorrow my neighborhood. If a Baptist preacher can be terminated by his wife, can a Methodist like me be far behind?

Next they’ll be running for president, and then where will we be?

I am all in favor of forgiveness, as long as it is appropriate. Mercy is fine, as long as it is not an excuse for indifference to wrong. Let us have no weak-kneed, syrupy moral ooze masquerading as Christian mercy. Forgiveness is fine, as long as it isn’t a way for somebody to get off scot-free. Debts must be paid. There are penalties for broken rules. There is a clear mathematics in the face of justice. You let someone off the moral hook, he’ll think that his behavior is okay and go do wrong again. Then where would we be, morally speaking? They’d be running wild in the streets. There must be reasonable limits.

And please, Gospel of Matthew, don’t try to cover up sloppy moral thinking with sappy little stories about lost sheep:

What do you think? If someone had one hundred sheep and one of them wandered off, wouldn’t he leave the ninety-nine on the hillsides and go in search for the one that wandered off? If he finds it, I assure you that he is happier about having that one sheep than about the ninety-nine who didn’t wander off. In the same way, my Father who is in heaven doesn’t want to lose one of these little ones (Matt 18:12-14 CEB).

The Father, the shepherd, has this thing for lost sheep. He just loves to go looking for the lost, doesn’t want any sheep to stray from the fold. It’s a sweet thought.

But say we’re not talking about a little lost lamb but a goat like the guy I read about who gambled away all the money he received from a fortuitous marriage to a wealthy woman and then left his family penniless. Do you still think it’s sweet that the shepherd is out beating the bushes for the lost?

I want you to think of the worst thing anyone has ever done to you. The lie that was told about you, the time you were falsely punished, the deal on which you were cheated, the person who really insulted and wronged you (even) at a church meeting. Focus on that act and the person behind it. Now picture yourself extending the hand, forgiving that person who has so terribly wronged you.

Will you agree with me that there is just about nothing as tough as forgiving someone of the wrong they’ve done to you?

Now, few would accuse Matthew of ethical permissiveness. Matthew’s Gospel is full of rules and regulations and has an emphasis on righteousness, higher righteousness for Jesus’s people than even the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees. Which makes the sloppy way in which Matthew records the story of the lost sheep all the more perplexing. When Luke tells this same story (remember, Jesus told the story in Luke when his critics attacked him by saying, “This man welcomes sinners and eats with them”), Luke has the shepherd say, “Celebrate with me because I’ve found my lost sheep. . . . I tell you, there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who changes both heart and life [get that, who repents] than over ninety-nine righteous people [like all you good church people here on this September Sunday] who have no need to change their hearts and lives” (Luke 15:6-7 CEB).

Now wouldn’t the story of the good shepherd make more sense in Matthew if he were Luke’s good shepherd out looking for repentant sheep? Forgiveness is fine—wrapped in sackcloth and ashes. There’s got to be limits. Unfortunately, Matthew’s shepherd is out looking for strays, whether they’re repentant or not.

An acquaintance of mine has a husband who broke marriage vows, committed adultery, humiliated her, and broke her heart. She asked me, as someone tight with Jesus, what she should do.

“Why, don’t you know the story about the little lost lamb? Take him back. Go out and search for the poor lost philanderer. Bring the little wandering, wayward lamb back. Throw a party as soon as he returns from Vegas! It’s not the will of our Father that any of these little ones should perish.”

She’s a Christian. She forgave him, took him back. Next Spring, as the sap was rising, he went on his way to Vegas again, different blonde sitting beside him in the Pinto, but it was him, the unrepentant old goat.

“Pastor, what should I do?”

“Don’t you know the story about the little lost lamb? Take him back.”

“Wait a minute, pastor. That was the sappy story you told me this time last year. This is the same stupid sheep that got lost last time. Don’t you know any other stories?”

The sweet sheep story sort of disintegrates, doesn’t it, when the one sheep the shepherd shows up with is named Al Capone?

So maybe that’s why Jesus catches himself after that sweet little story about the shepherd taking back the lost sheep in Matthew’s Gospel and follows it with more realistic, sensible advice—the advice that we heard from Jesus last Sunday:

If your brother or sister sins against you, go tell him about it. If he listens, great. If he doesn’t listen, squeal on him to the whole church, and if he won’t even listen to the church and do right, let him be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector.

You, you Gentile! You IRS tax collecting stoolie, you!

“So much for these losers,” Jesus now seems to say. “Sure, go out and seek them like the shepherd. But no need to overdo it. Go out and beat the rough for the lost ball, wave the next foursome through, then to heck with it. Drop another ball in the fairway and play on.”

I take some comfort in the fact that Jesus threw this qualification in there. Otherwise, if Jesus had left it with just that story of the shepherd and the sheep, someone might have justly accused Jesus of irresponsibility, moral permissiveness, ethical sentimentality. When you’ve been wronged, try to settle it on your own. If that doesn’t work, go public with your gripe. Tell the whole church how you’ve been wronged. (We went over all this last Sunday.) And if that fails, treat him or her as a Gentile and a tax collector.

Gentiles? We’re talking Roman army officers here, the first-century equivalent of the Nazi SS tax collectors. Those conniving quislings who collaborated with the Romans to fleece their own people. When forgiveness is rejected and repentance is refused, the stakes are high indeed—treat them no better than a Gentile or a tax collector.

While teaching at seminary, I told the students in a class on pastoral care, “As a pastor, make it a rule to go anywhere, anytime with your people once. But twice or three times to bail them out at midnight? Forget it. Even pastors, especially pastors as the moral guardians of the community, must have their limits.”

So it was at this point that Peter’s hand went up—Peter, who is there for all of us. “Lord, did you say limits? What are the limits? Three strikes, then you’re out? One verbal warning, then you get a technical? No? Oh, that’s right. We’re Christians. The world’s doormats. Okay, let’s say, just to show that we’re long-­suffering, we forgive seven times. How do you like those numbers, Jesus?”

And Jesus replies, “I’d suggest something more akin to seventy-seven times.”

And even Peter, who I bet was as lousy at arithmetic as he was at theology, knew that Jesus was talking big money.

“Why, if we forgave people who wronged us that often, we’d go to our graves forgiving. We’d lose count forgiving by the time we were in our thirties.”

Right, says the shepherd. Think about it. You’d go to your grave forgiving.

So what about that earlier business of telling them to their face, then to the church, then treating them as a Gentile and a tax collector? I think that business is the key to this whole passage. If it isn’t, then these verses are a hopeless muddle; Jesus saying one thing in his parable about the shepherd and the lost sheep, taking it back with his hard line on the limits of forgiveness, then linking it with a complete non sequitur about forgiving seventy-seven times—which means, for all intents and purposes, forgiving without limits. If Jesus was playing this thing straight about calling our brother or sister a Gentile and a tax collector, then the whole thing is a muddle.

You have to watch Jesus. There are times when Jesus will say something, even in a Gospel as straightforward as Matthew, and you think he means one thing only to find out later that he meant something quite different. I think it’s Jesus’s sly way of showing us that the good news he brings isn’t self-evident. Sometimes it doesn’t make sense, as we are accustomed to sense; it isn’t reasonable, the way we define reason.

You also have to watch Jesus because you have to interpret what he says by what he does.

As we reflected on in last Sunday’s sermon, there are many times in our congregation when we don’t confront each other with wrongdoing or offense. We overlook it. Refuse to mention it. We say we do it for “love,” but to be honest we do it because it’s just too risky and troublesome to get into such “private” matters. Jesus here insists that wrongdoing be made public, that we take lots of time and trouble with each other in the church. Jesus gives explicit instruction about how to handle wrongdoing. But even with this detailed instruction about forgiveness, there seem to be limits: “Tell him to his face,” he says, “then, if he still doesn’t say he’s sorry, tell it to the church. And if even that doesn’t work, treat him like you would a Gentile or a tax collector. That’ll fix him.”

And we think we know what that means. We know what we would mean. Gentile? Tax collector? In other words, treat him as an outcast, excommunicate, incarcerate. That’ll fix him. But when Jesus follows up with his advice to Peter on the limits of forgiving someone seventy-­seven times—that is, with no limits at all—we know that what we would mean is not what Jesus means by treating someone as a Gentile and a tax collector. It’s a setup.

The one who speaks is the one of whom it was said, “All the tax collectors and sinners were gathering around Jesus to listen to him. The Pharisees and the legal experts were grumbling, saying, ‘This man welcomes sinners and eats with them’” (Luke 15:2 CEB).

At his birth, the way Mr. Higher Righteousness Matthew tells the story, the first people to show up in Bethlehem were three astrologers bearing perfume (Matt 2). Three Gentile magi, they were.

It says at the opening of his work, “across the Jordan, [in] Galilee of the Gentiles . . . the people who lived in the dark have seen a great light” (Matt 4:15-16). One of his first healings was of the servant of a Roman centurion (Matt 8:5-13). He was a light not just to the chosen but also to Gentiles. He refused to linger with the homefolks in Nazareth but ventured even out to “Galilee of the Gentiles.”

And one day when he was fooling around with a bunch of sinners, he called as disciple one whose name would be given to this Gospel, Matthew. Do you remember what Matthew was doing for a living when Jesus called him? He was not a Gentile. He was a tax collector.

Get my drift? He told us to treat the unrepentant offender as a “Gentile and a tax collector,” and he ought to know; he had enough firsthand experiences with that sort of folk.

And when they criticized him for the way he broke the law and stepped over the tradition, he answered, “Who among you has a sheep that falls into a pit on the Sabbath and will not take hold of it and pull it out? How much more valuable is a person than a sheep! So the Law allows a person to do what is good on the Sabbath” (Matt 12:11-12 CEB).

He criticized the religious leaders of his day for the burdens they heaped on people’s backs. Is that why he said, “I assure you that whatever you fasten on earth will be fastened in heaven. And whatever you loosen on earth will be loosened in heaven. . . . For where two or three are gathered in my name, I’m there with them” (18:18, 20 CEB)? Why should we be busy binding sins to other people’s backs, acting as if it’s three strikes and they’re out, when this shepherd of a God is forever out beating the bushes looking for some stray sheep, some Gentile or tax collector to bring back in?

And as I suggested last Sunday, I think that’s why Jesus says, “Where two or three are so gathered (eating and drinking with sinners and tax collectors) in my name (the way I gathered the folks whom you exclude), I’m there with them.” If we are going to be close to Jesus, we must act toward the world as he acted. We must treat outcasts and sinners as he treated them.

Ah, sisters and brothers, let us remember today that in the searching, demanding moral gaze of God’s eyes, we’re all Gentiles and tax collectors. The stray sheep that the shepherd is out seeking is us, whether we’ve strayed from the path of moral rectitude because of whom we slept with last night, or we’ve strayed from the meaning of true discipleship because of whom we condemned in church this morning.

To our surprise, we have met the Gentiles and tax collectors, and they are us. And today’s good news is, we are exactly the sort of lost sheep Jesus loves to save.