17 Sep SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 17, 2023
Peter asks a lot of questions. Sometimes, by doing so, he’s fishing for real answers, but at other times, it’s pretty clear that Peter is fishing for Jesus’ approval. Peter also has a habit of turning his thoughts into verbal sentences without hesitation.
By personality, he would be called an external processor. Do you know anyone like him? Someone who develops ideas while talking them through out loud? My husband Steve prefers to think out loud sometimes and it drives me nuts. When I ask him a question, I only want his final answer and don’t need to hear every thought that leads up to it, lol. God bless him.
In typical exuberant fashion, Peter asks a question but doesn’t bother to wait for Jesus’ answer. Instead, he offers his own thoughts about what would be a good generous number of times that one should forgive a church member who sins against him repeatedly.
“As many as seven?” he says, after giving it some thought. “Seven would be a lot of times and seven is a perfect godly number. I’m guessing Jesus will say seven,” Peter thinks. But, after letting Peter know that seven times would be just a drop in the bucket, Jesus multiplies the number of times church members should forgive each other’s sins to seven times eleven.
Then Jesus begins to tell a parable that contains an even bigger number: ten thousand. How many of you try to “get in” 10,000 steps per day? A wristband device makes keeping track of the number of steps you take possible, but if you had to keep track by counting in your head or on paper, that would be practically impossible, right?
Ten thousand of anything is quite a lot, wouldn’t you agree? But, if you only earned ten thousand dollars a year, that wouldn’t add up to much. But let’s say you got a bill for that amount because your heat pump went out, your car got wrecked, or you found yourself in that same amount of debt.
On top of that, whatever you owe is accumulating on average, 20% interest each month. Now, you’re in trouble. Paying off a debt of $10,000 by making only minimum monthly payments, would take more than 14 years. All the while, you’re working FT, buying stuff and paying other bills as well.
I say all of this to let you know that in the parable, the amount the first guy owed the king was equal to twenty years’ salary, twenty whole years worth of annual income. The average median income in Pennsylvania is just over 32 thousand dollars. So, imagine being in debt yourself for $650,000. This guy hasn’t been paying even the monthly minimum all this time and he hasn’t set aside any lump sum for when the king or his lord came to settle accounts.
I mean, what was this guy thinking? Would you spend money you don’t have to the tune of more than you could earn in twenty years at your regular full-time job? Did he take his wife and kids on yearly cruises throughout the Mediterranean or to multiple major theme parks in Assyria and Egypt? How many chariots did he have parked in his garage, I wonder? In any case, this guy lived way beyond his means and why the king extended him so much credit in the first place, is beyond me.
What’s important to realize is that the guy owes debt he can never pay. And yet, the king has come to settle his account. There must be some expectation of settling up, of him paying what’s owed, the amount lent and spent by him and his family. There’s no doubt the money has been borrowed and is therefore, to be repaid. And yet, the guy has made no provision to pay it back.
He cannot pay, so his lord ordered him to be sold, together with his wife and children and all his possessions, so that payment could be made. The debt was so great, it equaled the value of multiple human lives and everything they possessed. Talk about needing to liquidate your assets to pay off debt. Yikes. The IRS and debt collection agencies by today’s standards would seem like philanthropic charities by comparison to the king and his lord at first glance.
By all rights, this guy was in way over his head. He’d mortgaged the farm, the house, the detached buildings, leveraged his farm equipment, years worth of grain being stored, his gun collection, hunting cabin, livestock and any crops still standing in the fields. He’d gone way overboard in his estimation of personal worth or accountability.
In fact there was no way to describe him other than to say he fit the definition of irresponsible: not having proper regard for what had come his way or been given to him. He had proven himself to be untrustworthy by all accounts.
Yet, when faced with the truth of his overspending and the mournful state of his family’s fate, he asks for special consideration, for the king to have patience. What nerve. Sure, he promises to pay back everything in full. And, out of pity, the lord of that slave, not the king himself, but the one sent to collect on behalf of the king, does the unthinkable.
He doesn’t just extend the man’s credit, offer to consolidate his debt, or lower his interest rate. He forgives the debt, clears the books, and literally wipes his slate clean.
Can you see that these characters and this scenario in the parable are all metaphors for what Jesus did for us? On our behalf, Jesus was sent by the king as Lord to settle the king’s accounts on earth. Debt racked up by humankind for sin had reached astronomical proportions. For centuries, people had gladly opened the gift packages delivered to their doorsteps and spent all of the money God had granted.
They took what they received and indulged their families in every kind of way possible except the way the king had hoped. In fact, they forgot about the king, for the most part. They were so busy enjoying themselves, they ignored the mounting total of their accumulated debt. Pretty near, the farthest thing from their minds was that they owed a thing to anyone.
So along comes Jesus as Lord, working for the king and in conjunction with him. He was the one from on high who had distributed an entire world of goods and wealth to all people below. What is the bottom line? We owe a debt we cannot pay. We cannot pay the debt for sin. We cannot repay God for the blessings we’ve been given. And, like the guy in the parable, we don’t even realize the value of all that we’ve been given.
During “Come to Jesus” moments, we promise to do better, to give the king what is rightfully his and pay back everything in full. Here’s where the parable ties into what Peter asks of Jesus: We are unable to forgive until we receive forgiveness from our Lord. We are incapable of forgiving others until we realize the degree to which we’ve been forgiven ourselves. Peter didn’t realize that he himself had been forgiven seven times, times eleven.
The fellow slaves got it. They understood that mercy must beget mercy, and patience, patience, that compassion once received, compels us to show compassion to the next person that needs it. At the start of every funeral the minister says, “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the source of all mercy and the God of all consolation. He comforts us in all our sorrows so that we can comfort others in their sorrows with the consolation we ourselves have received from God.”
It makes no sense to throw someone and their family in prison or to torture them until a debt is paid. No one could earn enough money over the course of a lifetime to pay off that much debt. It cannot be done. The only person who has agency in this scenario is the one to whom the debt is owed.
They have all rights and possess all the power. Only they can forgive and make the debt go away. The man in debt can’t keep his promise to pay the king, regardless of how honest or good are his intentions, how sincere or humble his fear. Jesus says, “If you do not forgive your brother or sister from your heart “x” number of times, your heavenly Father the king will be very disappointed.”
Had Peter taken algebra in Hebrew school, Jesus would have said, “Forget about keeping track or counting how many times a fellow believer offends you or you forgive them. Let’s just say, not seven times, but 7 times “x”, the variable that stands for any number or a number of unknown value because we can’t count the number of times God has forgiven us.
As that Hawk Nelson song goes, “If you could count the times I’d say you are forgiven, it’s like drops in the ocean.” If we could only see how much God loves us, how God isn’t counting how many times we mess up so he can nail us to the wall. Isn’t mad about us forgetting how much he’s given us, isn’t keeping track of what we owe so he can stick it to us.
All God wants is for us to acknowledge the Lord he sent to make us aware of our debt. God wants us to ask the Lord for patience, mercy and consideration. We must admit that God deserves, that is, has the right to ask for payment in full for everything that we’ve been freely given. And finally, God wants us to understand that the value of lives, our families and everything we own is priceless to the same degree as our debt is beyond remittance.
Let us pray. We get it now, Lord. We have received everything from you that you ask us to give to others:patience, forgiveness, mercy, kindness, money, goods, and consideration. But, we always need more of those things, Lord. It’s hard to not take for granted all your good gifts, all your generous blessings, the wealth of family, friends and material things. Thank you for putting people in our path to tell us when we are being selfish, unkind or unreasonable so that we learn, improve and become more like your Son, our Lord, Jesus. In your holy name, we pray, Amen.