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On Forgiving Debts
Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis March 6, 2005, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill II Kings 4:1-7 Matthew 18:21-35
I have long wondered why Presbyterians cling to Matthew’s blunt request that our debts be forgiven, thereby leaving trespasses to linger in the air at any given ecumenical event long after our team has gone on to the next petition. My reading this week has proffered no direct answer. The Gospel of Luke, written to the Greek gentile community, instructs us to pray hamartias, literally a “missing of the mark, an arrow gone astray, an error or mistake.” Hamartias in Latin becomes peccata, a word whose meaning I first learned when singing Vivaldi’s Gloria in high school: Qui tollis peccata mundi. In English peccata was first taken to mean sin, though in William Tyndale’s sixteenth century translation of the Bible the word is rendered trespasses. He got it from Wycliffe who in 1380 took it from the Old French word trespasser, “to pass beyond or to pass across” implying an invasion of another’s space. In this culture the leap is not far to the offense of another who has invaded our privacy. Liturgically and culturally trespasses stuck! Nevertheless, in Matthew’s sixth chapter the word placed on Jesus’ lips is opheilimata, translated in the Latin Vulgate as debita, and so by King James as debts. More Semitic in origin, Matthew’s word choice was not unrelated to the Aramaic word for sin which also had the connotation of debt: something literally owed to another that could not be paid back. The word calls to mind tangible images over and against John Donne’s more metaphysical and poetic take on the sin wherein I begunn! When spoken in prayer, the prayer Jesus taught us, “Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors,” there also comes to mind a parable found in Matthew’s 18th chapter, the parable of the unforgiving servant. The parable is told in response to a question asked by Peter concerning the number of times he must forgive a member of the church who sins against him. “As many as seven?” he asks, expecting to be heard by Jesus as entirely too generous in his mercy. “Not seven times,” Jesus replies, “but seventy times seven.” Then Jesus tells the story of a king who decides to audit his books, coonfirming from the start this tax-collector-turned-gospel-writer’s choice of debts over trespasses. The crime about to be uncovered in the parable is not a crime of murder or sexual violence or treason or even heresy: the crime concerns property. The king could be likened to a billionaire many times over whose real estate investments consistently had done well even in a bear market. As the saying goes, the sun seldom set on his assets! Long overdue for an audit, he calls in the green shades to crunch the numbers, only to discover that one of his employees (himself an asset, by the way…a piece of property, that is) had pocketed millions and millions of denarii—the equivalent of 100,000,000 laborers’ wages for the day to be exact! The king’s first instinct is to sell the slave, his wife and his children, as well as to confiscate all of his possessions…but netting what exactly? The instinct is human: when wronged we retaliate, even when what has been taken from us cannot be restored. That the manager in response to the king’s judgment suggested he be given time to pay this debt was patently absurd. Once again we recognize this human response to our being caught red-handed: we want to make things right or at least to save our necks. But the slave’s gesture is also ludicrous. One hundred million days—that is to say, an eternity—would be needed! In fact, both responses to the situation fall so far short of addressing the magnitude of the debt that only an act of vengeance could fulfill human justice on the one hand…only an act of outlandishly unmerited mercy, on the other, could reveal the cost of the forgiveness for which we dare to ask when we pray, “Forgive us our debts.” “We are God’s debtors,” says Karl Barth of this petition. “We owe God not something, whether it be little or much, but, quite simply, our person in its totality; we owe him ourselves.” Quitting the plight of the slave and listening to the parable with regard to ourselves and the one who is our Lord, we catch a glimpse of our own human condition. Instead of tending what belongs to God—God’s assets on which the sun never sets, the earth with it store of wonders untold and even our lives meant to be lived to God’s glory--we essentially abscond with our life as though it were ours to do with as we please. As for the earth, we plot it out, divide it up, post “No Trespassing” signs and stand ready to sue anyone who oversteps the bounds. As for our person, we seek our bliss, set our goals, will our own will and find it an affront that God might be due ten percent back. Then one day, or so the parable goes, a reckoning is announced. We are brought before the One who, in the beginning and at the center of human history on a cross, has bought us with a price. Millions of moments have slipped through our hands, moments we have spent as though they were ours. But where have they gone? For in truth we stand empty-handed before the One to whom we owe everything. The books show our account so deeply in the red—not in the sense of trespasses, of mistakes, of arrows gone astray, though that too—but of, well, there is no other word for it, of the debt in the form of a life owed. We now are in a position only to fall to our knees begging for time, more time, a second chance to offer all that we are and have to God. Perhaps this is why another theologian, Gerhard Ebling, observed that next to the petition that asks God to give us what is necessary for us to live—our daily bread—we now petition God for what is necessary for us to die, to die to ourselves so that we may really live. To be forgiven, to have our debt day by day laid aside, to bed ourselves praying over another day whose minutes accrued to our ego, our advantage, our will, our desires, to pray for mercy…undeserved…and then to be given it surely is to be changed and made new. Another chance we say to ourselves as we venture out, much forgiven, to meet the day and…so…to…forgive…our…debtors. But here the story takes a turn. Only in this petition is there a second clause, because in our human existence there is always this day given us before we lie to die. What shall we do in response to God’s mercy toward us: in friendships and in marriages, as parent to child and child to parent, at work and at home, in business and in politics, among nations and before enemies and even the church. How shall we act toward these who, one way or another, owe us, have wronged us, have offended against us? Forgive them we pray? What exactly does this entail? “In the pure, ideal sense,” says Barth, “it signifies, ‘Regard our debtor as though he or she had done us no wrong’” even though the cost of such regard to us is enormous. Begin anew with friend, spouse, parent, child, colleague, ruler, nations, enemies, and even the church as God has begun anew with us each moment? How many times, we ask. Seven? Not even seven! Jesus resumes the parable with, in Daniel Berrigan’s words, “a kind of nightmarish continuity.” We are given another servant-master scene wherein the servant-i- debt to the servant-forgiven kneels and repeats, word for word, the plea just spoken before the king. “All I ask is a few more days, you’ll have your [due]….”’ But here there is no mercy. And “besides, there’s a question of principle here. If I go around forgiving every two-bit crook in sight, what’s to become of law and order and gratitude; and religion, even?...It’s not the money, it’s the principle of the thing!” But the principle, if we enter the world of the parable, is apparently not the thing. For we are left at the end not with the principle but with the person telling the story, him in whose flesh the forgiveness that flies the face of our every miserly principle is revealed. Neither, for that matter, is time the thing, time enough to pay the debt we owe. For more time will not redeem us from our slavery to sin: only this singularly unique life completely given to God’s will, even unto death on a cross, given in the place of our lives withheld. Only in him who forgives as he has been forgiven [“Father forgive them for they know not what they do”], only he who belongs completely to God can assume the debt we owe eternally. How is it, then, that the servant is unchanged even as we are unchanged and without a clue before such grace? After he had thrown the one who owed him in debtor’s prison, the slave is brought before the king once again. “Should you not have had mercy on your fellow slave, as I had mercy on you?” the king asks and in anger hands him over to be tortured until he pays his entire debt, that is, tortured eternally. The torture, says Barth, for those who do not forgive as they are forgiven, is the torture of never knowing what forgiveness is. The second clause of this petition does not imply a condition we must fulfill in order to be forgiven by God: God will forgive you if you forgive those who have wronged you. Rather “it is a criterion necessary for our understanding [receiving, recognizing, accepting] of God’s pardon.” For those who know their only hope is in God’s mercy, know that they cannot go on without God’s forgiveness—if you have glimpsed the enormity of the life you have failed to live to God—then to forgive the debt of a fellow is the least you owe not them but God. In a sense, the hope we entertain for ourselves necessarily opens our heart, our compassion, our judgment, making forgiveness of another “not a merit, a moral effort, or a sort of virtue [but] almost a physical necessity” for ourselves! Even if the wrong to us is, in our estimation, heinous, at the least we may hand the offender over to God and be freed. Then it is as though an unbearable weight has been taken from us: both in our being forgiven and in our forgiving. Though there is one last part to this petition prayed that would seem the costliest of all to those who may with words forgive but who would eternally keep accounts. “Forgive, they say, and forget. But [we] forget,” says Berrigan at the last, “that ‘forgetting’…is redundant. Forgiveness is forgetting. What is truly forgiven is regarded as if it had never been. A radical erasure of the offense. But more: a new beginning. The ‘forgetting’ aspect of forgiving,” he says, “is at least as difficult as the ‘remembering’ aspect of the eucharist. Which is to say, without forgiveness, there can be no remembering, no healing. There is only dismembering. The old order stands intact, which is the order of malice and death and anger and war on life. But of newness, nothing. And the eucharist is mere disarray, anomie, a shambles.” So first, before you come to the table, “pray like this,” said Jesus, “…forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors.” Then “Do this,” said Jesus, “in remembrance of me.” |