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+ + + In Nomine Jesu + + +
Please join me in prayer: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be pleasing in your sight, O Lord, our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.
Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ,
Grace to you and peace from God our Father and from the Lord Jesus Christ.
You know the Fifth Petition of the Lord’s Prayer: “forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us”. Jesus gave His disciples that petition, using Greek words for “debts” and “debtors”, when He gave them the rest of the Lord’s Prayer, in the so‑called “Sermon on the Mount”, Jesus’s first discourse, or section of extended teaching, in St. Matthew’s Divinely‑inspired Gospel account (Matthew 6:9-13). In that same first discourse, right after giving the Lord’s Prayer, Jesus briefly elaborated on His disciples’ need to forgive others, saying that, if they forgive others their trespasses, their Heavenly Father would also forgive them, but, if they did not forgive others their trespasses, neither would their Heavenly Father forgive their trespasses (Matthew 6:14; confer Mark 11:25b-26). In today’s Gospel Reading, part of what is considered Jesus’s fourth discourse in St. Matthew’s Gospel account, Jesus, in answer to a question from St. Peter, illustrates that need for Peter and all of Jesus’s disciples, including us, always to forgive others, by teaching the so‑called “Parable of the Unforgiving (or Unmerciful) Servant”. In the parable, forgiving financial debt in the world is likened to forgiving sins in the Kingdom of Heaven, and Jesus makes clear that, if we do not forgive others, then God withdraws His forgiveness from us. Considering today’s Gospel Reading this morning, we realize that “Because God forgives us, we forgive one another”.
Jesus’s fourth discourse is said to deal with life in the community of the followers of Jesus (Scaer, Discourses, 317). In last week’s Gospel Reading, we heard the discourse’s beginning, with its emphasis on God’s will for each and every believer to be saved, including Jesus’s directions for what to do when one brother or sister in Christ sins against another (Matthew 18:1-20). That teaching of Jesus prompted what we heard in today’s Gospel Reading, both Peter’s question, about forgiving a brother or sister who sins against him up to seven times, and Jesus’s answer, about forgiving him or her seventy-seven times—or 490 times, either way a perfect and essentially infinite number of times—illustrated with the parable about a master’s forgiving a servant’s virtually un-repayable debt but that servant’s refusal to forgive his fellow‑servant’s repayable debt (confer Luke 17:3-4). In the parable, the servant was delivered to the jailers, and so Jesus warns us that His Heavenly Father will so do to every one of us, if we do not forgive our brother or sister from our hearts.
Truly we run up a debt against one another, failing to keep perfectly God’s Commandments regarding His gifts of earthly authority, life, sexual purity, possessions, reputation, and contentment. But, with each of those failures, we also run up a debt against God, in addition to our failures rightly to fear no one but Him, to use His Name, and to receive His Word and Sacraments. We can say with the psalmist King David—who had sinned against Bathsheba, her husband Uriah the Hittite, and Joab, who was over the army (2 Samuel 11:1‑27)—that against God and God only have we sinned and done what is evil in His sight, so that He may be justified in His words and blameless in His judgment (Psalm 51:4). Jesus’s parable might suggest that our debt of sin against God is six-hundred-thousand times that of our debt of sin against one another, which too often we are unwilling to forgive one another, despite the fact that God has forgiven us and despite the Divine necessity that as God has had mercy on us we likewise should have mercy on one another. What the master says of the servant, God can say of us, that is, that we are truly wicked by nature, deserving to be cast into the jail of hell for eternity.
A time of a final settlement with God is coming, the day of our deaths or the day of the Lord’s return in glory, whichever comes first, though in some sense we settle accounts with Him every day. Brought to God, we ask for patience, not as if, if we were given enough time, then we would be able to repay Him everything, but patience so that He does not use His power to avenge Himself on us but refrains from doing so. We are not sold with all that we have in order to repay the debt, nor are we put in prison until we should repay the debt. (There is neither a place of purgatory, nor is there universal salvation after enough time has passed.) Rather, God is moved with compassion as only God can be moved, and so He forgives our debt and releases us, for the sake of His Son, the God-man Jesus Christ. We are not handed over as we deserve, but Jesus is handed over for us, in our place, to serve us by giving His life as a ransom for all (Matthew 20:28), to take our sins to the cross and there pay our debts in full (John 19:30). Because of Jesus, as we sang in today’s Psalm (Psalm 103:1-12; antiphon: v.13), God does not deal with us according to our sin or repay us according to our iniquities, but He forgives all our iniquity and redeems our life from the pit. When we repent of our sin, then God forgives our sin against Him. God does not forgive our sins against Him because we forgive others theirs sins against us, but God forgives our sins against Him for the sake of Jesus’s death for us.
God forgives our sins against Him through His Word and Sacraments—Holy Baptism, individual Holy Absolution, and the Sacrament of the Altar, where bread and wine are Christ’s Body and Blood, given and shed for us, for the forgiveness of our sins, life, and salvation. As the servant in the parable essentially worshiped his master asking for patience, so our highest worship is seeking and receiving God’s forgiveness of our sins against Him in all these ways that He promises to forgive us (Augsburg Confession XXI:3G; Apology of the Augsburg Confession IV:154, 228, 310). Those who do not forgive their brothers and sisters in Christ are not forgiven by God, but those who do forgive their brothers and sisters in Christ are forgiven by God, in all of these ways that God promises to forgive them.
God has mercy on us, and so we have mercy on one another. Joseph’s forgiving his brothers in today’s Old Testament Reading is a great example of that kind of mercy and forgiveness (Genesis 50:15-21). You may recall how Joseph’s brothers were going to kill Joseph but instead sold him to some Ishmaelites, who subsequently sold him to an officer of Pharaoh in Egypt (Genesis 37:12-36). There Joseph was successful but also was wrongly accused of trying to seduce his master’s wife and so was put into jail (Genesis 39:1-23). There God gave Joseph the interpretation of dreams, and, after years in prison, Joseph eventually came to rule over Egypt, second only to Pharaoh (Genesis 40:1-41:57). Joseph certainly was in a position to repay his brothers for all the evil they had done to him, but Joseph forgave them and even saw God’s hand in turning what his brothers had meant as evil into good, bringing it about that many people were kept alive. In most cases, how much less do we have to forgive those who sin against us? God forgives us of our sins against Him, and so we forgive our brothers and sisters in Christ of their sins against us. Our sinful natures may still need Jesus’s threat of punishment for not forgiving them, but our redeemed natures are moved by the Gospel to love our brothers and sisters in Christ by forgiving them. Yet in this world even our forgiveness of one another is imperfect, and so, with daily contrition and repentance, we live in God’s forgiveness of all of our sins, including our sins of imperfectly forgiving one another.
Considering today’s Gospel Reading this morning, we have realized that “Because God forgives us, we forgive one another”. In the Lord’s Prayer we do pray, “forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us”, and with the Small Catechism we believe, teach, and confess that we daily sin much and surely deserve nothing but punishment, but God does not look at our sins, and so we too will sincerely forgive and gladly do good to those who sin against us.
Amen.
The peace of God, which passes all understanding, keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. Amen. + + + Soli Deo Gloria + + +