Ecclesiasticus 27:30-28:7
Romans 14:5-12
Matthew 18:21-35
Psalm 103 or 103:8-13
It was my privilege to speak to you a year ago this Sunday, just after the events of September 11. On that day I asked you to be lightning rods, to stand here on the prairies and pray for our country and for the world, so that we would not, in our anguish, become the thing we hate.
I'm not sure we're getting very good results so far: in the mean time more innocent people have died in Afghanistan than in New York, and now the war clouds are gathering against another nation of people who have the misfortune to have very wicked rulers. But of course we can't know how many people have been spared, thanks to our prayers, and how much worse things could be if it weren't for our being faithful. Last week I read about a poll taken among Minnesotans: most of us think there will be other acts of terror in the future, and most of us think they won't happen here. So we are uniquely gifted, privileged, I think: far from the daily tensions and emergencies that face people in other parts of the country and the world, we can focus our prayerful energy in this quiet place, for the sake of the world's peace.
But because we have this great privilege, because we can do great things for the world while other people are busy just keeping the world steady from day to day, I'm going to talk to you about the Gospel demand for something even harder than praying for peace and for justice-because today's gospel is about forgiveness, about mercy. It asks us to do more than justice; it asks us to love mercy above all things.
There can't be much doubt that these lessons are meant to reinforce the command to forgive-to forgive what is done to us, what is owed to us, by our fellow Christians, by our neighbors in society, presumably even by our enemies and oppressors, by those who attack us and hate us. Old Jesus Sirach is pretty calm and reasonable about all this, but the parable in the gospel is really over the top; it makes the whole thing so absurd, so crazy, that we have to realize it's-well-serious!
Let's try to get a grasp on just how absurd the gospel lesson is. The central character, the "unforgiving slave" owes his master (who in the story is a "king") ten thousand talents. If we think of this in terms of wages, one talent was equal to about fifteen years' wages for a laborer. (With the minimum wage just over $5 an hour, that would come to roughly $150,000 per talent: multiplied by ten thousand that makes one billion, five hundred million dollars, which is a pretty hefty personal debt, especially for a slave. And this was before credit cards!
To think of it another way, at the time this parable was told, the annual revenue of Herod's kingdom was about nine hundred talents. If this slave was the king's tax collector, he must have pocketed the entire revenue of the kingdom for more than ten years! (You would think someone would have noticed in the meantime.) It is as if a single individual had been responsible for Enron, and WorldCom, and a dozen other major scandals.
Meanwhile, the other slave in the story owes a measly hundred denarii, equivalent to one one-hundredth of a talent: a hundred days' wages for a laborer. The proportion to the other slave's debt is as one cent to $10,000.
In other words, just as Jesus' reply to Peter about how many times one should forgive conveys "without limit," so the story's numbers about the size of the debt to be forgiven say that there is no imaginable stopping point.
For most of us this is a pretty heavy guilt trip, this demand to forgive without limit. But what we usually don't think about (because it's even more painful) is that there is something even harder that we have to do before we can begin to even think about forgiving other people: we have to accept that we have already been forgiven. It's kind of uncomfortable to think that I need to be forgiven: by God, and by other people, too-people I hurt even without realizing it, without noticing. Mostly I think about all those other people who need to be forgiven, and how it's my duty to forgive them. I don't have to think very hard to call to mind quite a list of people who need more forgiving (quantitatively speaking) than I do! Besides, don't we all wonder if forgiving the people who do injustice, "letting them get away with it," won't simply give them a free hand to go on oppressing, stealing, and abusing? I read a newspaper column on Wednesday that was actually arguing for peace in the world, but the writer said in passing: "Yes, we must kill the murderers of 9/11." Yes? This Jesus guy seems to have had other ideas. I'm not saying it's not a problem for us, though, and this story doesn't really give us a solution. But it does suggest a line of thinking, about the relationship between justice and mercy.
The point of the parable is meant to be-I think-that the experience of compassion should have moved the big slave to be compassionate to others, and the shocking behavior that sends his fellow slaves running to the king is an expression of his complete lack of appreciation of the need to forgive as he has been forgiven (or even one ten-thousandth as much as he has been forgiven).
And when people don't respond to mercy by giving mercy, they convert justice into injustice, mercy into indifference, and gratitude into guilt and shame. Notice how this works: the king would have behaved justly if he had punished the slave for embezzling his money. Instead, he showed compassion toward him, canceling the huge debt. He gives mercy in place of justice. Without that part of the story there would be nothing shocking in the next part: the big slave's demand for repayment from the little slave would simply be a matter of justice. But the fact that he has received mercy rather than justice means that justice is no longer good enough. Mercy must beget mercy; otherwise it produces injustice.
If our world were one in which God dispensed only justice, nothing more would be asked of us. But because God is rich in mercy, nothing less is demanded of us in turn. To fail to do mercy is to produce injustice; and indeed, that is the downward spiral in which we find ourselves.
The first step, then, toward fulfilling Jesus' command that we love and forgive even our enemies is to look in the mirror and see a forgiven person looking back at us. And it's not a bit easy. It's pleasant enough to remember (occasionally) that we are forgiven by God; it's not so pleasant to remember that we have been forgiven by other people, perhaps not because they have any affection for us, but because they love God-even a God they may call by another name.
The main problem with the "unforgiving slave" in the parable is that he can't admit to being forgiven. Surely his violent rage toward the other slave, the one he wants to collect from, isn't just driven by a desire to see justice done, to collect what is owed him! Isn't it really too much for that, taking the poor man by the throat and throwing him into prison? Is it not, instead, an expression of the guilty rage he feels at having to humble himself before the king and beg for forgiveness-and actually receiving it? We like to believe that "fair is fair," that we earn our own way and pay our debts and taxes, and everyone else should do the same. How quickly we forget the cloud of witnesses who have instructed us, the love and care that sustains us, the compassion that obliterates our mistakes and even our malicious deeds! The fact is that talking about debts, and justice, and forgiveness of debts, and so on in terms of money is really a smokescreen that blinds us to the central truth: that the treasure entrusted to us is one another; that the debt we owe is our responsibility to care for one another. We owe to one another nothing less than mercy, because mercy has been shown us in abundance.
Paul says: "owe no one anything except to love one another." If we can, once and for all, let go of the guilt of being forgiven, stop seeing ourselves as really nice people anybody would just naturally love and accept ourselves as people to whom compassion has been shown, by God and by other people, then perhaps we could get on with paying the debt of love to one another. God's love bestowed on all people is the immeasurable treasure, the thing beyond all price. It is entrusted to us: shall we dispense it in denarii, demanding strict accounting for every coin? Or shall we throw it around by talents and handfuls of talents, trusting that repayment will be made according to God's accounting, which forgives far beyond the measure of our reckoning?
This will happen, I guarantee you, as soon as we each begin to see ourselves as forgiven people. If we once and for all face up to the mercy God has shown to each of us and all of us, we can never show anything less than mercy to those around us. This is part of what Rowan Williams, our new Archbishop of Canterbury (soon to be) means when he says that "what the Church can do most effectively is not to make statements, but to look grateful." Gratitude, he says, is the foundation of everything we think and do as a church: "How does the Church so live, so speak, so worship, to constantly be pointing to what it has been given? That's the challenge."
That is the challenge for us, as Church and as members of the Church, this very day. Look in the mirror: are you grateful to be this forgiven person? If you are, what are you going to do about it? Will that gratitude spill over to the next person you meet, someone who really drives you up the wall? Will it influence how you speak, how you act, how you vote, how you spend your money and your time? If it does, then you have finally come to terms with what it means to be part of a world that, whether it knows it or not, is bathed in God's mercy.
To gather at the eucharistic table is to accept the gift of divine mercy poured out in the cross and resurrection. When we stretch out our hands to receive the body of the Lord, we commit ourselves to open those same hands in mercy toward all those whom God has entrusted to our care: God's people throughout the world. Amen.