Matthew 18:21-35
Presented September 14, 2008, by J.D. Kline
The Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost
Stewardship Theme: Celebrate Abundance—Embrace Relationships
Lewis Smedes, seminary professor of theology and ethics, begins his book Forgive and Forget with a fable entitled “The MagicEyes.” It’s the story of a baker named Fouke, a righteous man with a long thin chin and a long thin nose—a man so upright that he seemed to spray righteousness from his thin lips over everyone who came near him. And so the people preferred to keep their distance from him.
But not so with Fouke’s wife, Hilda, a woman whose warm spirit invited others to come close to her, to share the gracious cheer of her heart. Hilda respected her righteous husband, and loved him too, as much as he would allow her. And yet Hilda’s heart ached for something more from him than his worthy righteousness. And there, in the midst of her need, lay the seed of sadness.
One morning, after having worked from dawn to knead his dough for the ovens, Fouke came home and found a stranger in bed with Hilda. The adultery soon became the talk of the town and the scandal of the local congregation. Everyone assumed Fouke would cast Hilda out, so righteous was he. But Fouke surprised everyone by keeping Hilda as his wife, saying he forgave her as the Good Book said he should.
But in his heart of hearts, Fouke could not forgive Hilda for bringing shame to his name. Whenever he thought about her, anger and a hardness of spirit gained control of Fouke, and he soon despised her for betraying him after he had been such a good and faithful and righteous husband. Fouke only pretended to forgive Hilda, that he might punish her with his righteous mercy.
Fouke’s fakery, however, did not sit well in heaven. So each time he would feel his secret hatred toward Hilda, an angel would drop a small pebble, hardly the size of a shirt button, into Fouke’s heart. With each pebble, Fouke would feel a stab of pain like the moment when he caught Hilda in the act of unfaithfulness, and Fouke would hate her all the more. As the pebbles multiplied, Fouke’s heart grew increasingly heavy, so heavy that the top half of his body bent forward so far that he had to strain his neck in order to see straight ahead. Weary with hurt, Fouke began to wish that he were dead.
One night the angel appeared to Fouke, telling him that he could be healed. There was one remedy for a wounded heart, said the angel—one remedy alone. It was the miracle of the magic eyes, eyes that would allow Fouke to look back to the beginning of his hurt and see Hilda, not as one who betrayed him, but rather as one who, in her loneliness and sadness, needed him. Only a new way of looking at things through the magic eyes could heal Fouke’s deep-seated anger and pain.
Fouke protested that Hilda remained guilty, a fact to which the angel readily agreed. “You cannot change the past,” said the angel. “You can only heal the hurt that comes to you from the past. And you can heal it only with the vision of the magic eyes. Each time you see Hilda through your new eyes, one pebble will be lifted from your aching heart.”
Fouke had grown to love his hatred, so he could not easily ask for the magic eyes. But the pain of his heart eventually drove him to request new vision, and soon Hilda began to change in front of Fouke’s eyes, wonderfully and mysteriously. Fouke began to see Hilda as a hurting woman who loved him instead of a wicked woman who had betrayed him.
The pebbles were lifted, one by one, and gradually Fouke felt his heart growing lighter. He began to walk straight again, and somehow his chin and nose seemed less thin and less sharp than before. He invited Hilda into his heart again, and she came, and together they began a journey into a second season of humble joy.
The fable of “The Magic Eyes” underscores the critical power of forgiveness in our relationships. Forgiveness—a quality Lewis Smedes defines as “love’s revolution against life’s unfairness. When we forgive, we ignore the normal laws that strap us to the natural law of getting even and, by the alchemy of love, we release ourselves from our own painful pasts.”
At the very heart of the gospel of Jesus stands the affirmation that you and I have been created for relationship. For the next several weeks, we will be considering the stewardship theme, Celebrate Abundance—Embrace Relationships. Relationships with our God who stands with us in the ups and downs of daily living, who loves us with an extravagant love that will not let us go. Relationships with one another in the community of faith, relationships that nourish our spirits and offer comforting hands and healing expressions of encouragement, support, care, and challenge. Family relationships. Friendships. Relationships that provide spiritual strength and undergirding. Relationships that help us become the persons God created us to be.
Celebrate the abundance of God’s good gifts, beginning with this variety of relationships that enrich our lives and enable us to respond to Christ’s call to be the church, to be a community of those who seek to live justly and compassionately, those who embrace the challenge of extending forgiveness, mercy, grace, and peace to one another, even at those times when we have been deeply wronged. As people whose faith and living have been nourished by caring community and by God’s overflowing grace, shall we not respond with grateful hearts, seeking to live in such a way that we invite others to join with us in the adventure of living grace-filled lives?
This morning’s Gospel lesson from Matthew, chapter 18, urges us to consider the transforming power of forgiveness, the ability of forgiveness to alter our hearts and turn us in radically new directions. Immediately following a time when Jesus talks with the disciples about the work of reconciliation, Peter questions in what appears to be a most magnanimous way, “Lord, how often should I forgive? As many as seven times?” Biblical translators seem unable to agree whether Jesus responds with the more traditional “not seven times, but seventy times seven,” or whether the number more accurately is “seventy-seven times.” Either way, the issue has little to do with the actual number; indeed, it has nothing at all to do with keeping count or with calculating our responses. As biblical scholar Tom Wright asserts in his commentary Matthew for Everyone, “If you’re still counting how many times you’ve forgiven someone, you’re not really forgiving them at all, but simply postponing revenge. ‘Seventy times seven’ is a typical bit of Jesus’ teasing. What he means, of course, is ‘don’t even think about counting; just do it.’”
Just do it, Jesus urges. Just forgive. Yet who among us does not struggle with this upside down way of living that includes forgiveness? Surely Jesus places such emphasis upon a forgiving spirit because he recognizes how dangerous is the gnawing power of resentment and suspicion and hostility and fear. In his book The Questions of Jesus John Dear reminds us of a truth we already know, that love is the very center of Jesus’ life and message. Jesus’ teachings and actions can be summed up in the command to love—to love God wholeheartedly, to love one another as we love ourselves, to love our neighbors, to love even our enemies. Asserts John Dear,
For Jesus, life makes sense only if we widen our hearts to embrace the whole human race, including those who hurt or would kill us. In doing so, we not only take the high road, we imitate God, who loves the whole human race…. Such outlandish love is the hallmark of Christianity.
Widening our hearts so that we might embrace an upside down way of living—a way of living that calls into question many of the assumptions about life in a world far more prone to vengeance than to healing, a world far more likely to opt for violence than to grapple with what it means to put on a spirit of forgiveness, what it means for us to heed the apostle Paul’s admonition in his writing to the Colossians, “Forgive as quickly and completely as the Master forgave you” (Colossians 3:13, The Message).
Jesus tells a rather disorienting parable of a Gentile king whose servant incurs an astronomical debt through gross mismanagement of the king’s resources. Indeed, the servant’s debt stretches credibility, for one talent equaled the wages a single manual laborer would earn over a period of 15 years. To describe the servant’s debt as reaching 10,000 talents, therefore, is to speak of a debt beyond all calculation. It is a hopeless situation for the servant, now that he has been found out. Even as he cries before the king, “Have patience with me, and I will repay everything,” both the king and the servant know such repayment is utterly impossible. And yet, in a surprising twist, the king cancels the debt.
One might assume that the servant would be overjoyed, so taken by the king’s magnanimous gesture that the servant’s very spirit would be transformed, and he would want to extend similar mercy, forgiveness and grace to others. But it is not so. Instead, upon leaving the king’s presence, the forgiven servant encounters a second servant who owes him money. By many standards the second servant’s debt of a hundred denarii is no small matter, for it represents a hundred days’ wage for manual laborers. But in comparison to the phenomenal debt that has been canceled for the first servant, it is mere trifling, something like 1/600,000th of the larger debt. Nevertheless, the forgiven servant displays harshness, rejecting all pleas for mercy and banishing the second servant to debtor’s prison.
When the king learns of the first servant’s lack of mercy, he takes back his forgiveness, crying out, “Should you not have had mercy on your fellow servant, as I had mercy on you?” (Matthew 18:33). Surely that’s the key question in this disturbing parable, for it prods us to self-examination. Are we willing to extend the same levels of forgiveness and mercy, grace and compassion, as we receive from relationship with a God who loves us with an outlandish love, and as we receive from relationship with the community of faith? Are we willing to widen our hearts and seek to embody the gracious love of our God?
Marva Dawn has an article in a recent issue of Sojourners magazine entitled “Whom Do You Serve?” Examining the power that money and material wealth can claim over us, Marva Dawn writes,
If our main goals in life are to love God and our neighbor, we can let those focal concerns guide all our decisions about money. We can ask, for example, before each purchase, ‘Will this object or this choice in food or entertainment enable me to love God and my neighbor better?’ I’m astounded by the extent to which such a question cuts to the truth of my stewardship and assists me to be more faithful.
And that’s the challenge—is it not?—to grow in the pathways of more faithful living. To allow love of God and love of neighbor to be the guiding principles for all of our life’s decisions. To put on the magic eyes—eyes of compassion and grace, mercy and forgiveness. To move beyond the customary laws of tit-for-tat, beyond a passion for getting revenge, claiming instead the outlandish love of a God who loves us with a love that will not let us go. It is a matter of embracing anew the transforming power of forgiveness and grace. It is a matter of praying, “Spirit of God, descend upon my heart…Stoop to my weakness, mighty as thou art, and make me love thee as I ought to love.”
Amen.