Audio link http://dl.dropbox.com/u/23575548/110911Matthew18.mp3
(Psalm 19.14) May the words of my lips and the meditation of my heart be pleasing in your sight, oh Lord, my Rock and my Redeemer. Amen.
Don’t you love it when someone gives you something? Maybe you’ve been in line to buy tickets to a concert or a movie and someone else has come up to you and given you some tickets he bought and couldn’t use. Or maybe you enjoy cruising slowly around town and seeing what people have put out by the curb to give away. You might just get a treasure of some kind! Or maybe you have higher hopes. There’s a reason people buy lottery tickets, right? It isn’t because they are hoping to win the price of the ticket. It’s because they are hoping to win a whole boatload of money. The higher the cost of something we’re given, the greater our gratitude. When we win big, we are usually glad in a big way.
Let’s imagine you are buying a house. Some of you probably are. You have a mortgage. As long as you make your payments each month you make progress on paying off the loan. One of these days you’ll own the house all the way and get to keep it without making monthly payments. How would you like it if the bank that holds the loan on your house sent you a letter saying that your bill has been satisfied and that you no longer have to send in any money?
In our reading from Matthew’s Gospel today we have an even bigger example of a gift. There’s a servant who owes his master ten thousand talents. Did you ever stop to think how much money this is? It’s a difficult thing, since we don’t really have an equivalent economy. A talent was a weight of money, not a coin. It was too much money to be coined. So it could be measured in weight as a talent of silver or of gold. The weight was the same. A silver talent, probably the more common weight of money for accounting purposes, was enough money to outfit and supply a war ship for a month, including paying the soldiers, feeding them, and providing their equipment. The warships carried approximately three hundred men. So picture making payroll and supplies for about three hundred people for a month. This is a talent. The servant owes the master ten thousand talents. That’s enough to pay for a war ship for about eight hundred years. It’s an incredible amount of money. It’s more money than a master would have. It’s more money than a government would have, in fact. And without a doubt, it’s more than any sane master would lend anybody, not to mention a servant. The servant would not have any means to pay it back, ever.
Every parable has in it what I like to call the “no way” moment. Do you see that moment here? There’s no way in the world this situation could exist. Jesus pictures it to point to the very impossibility of the thing. There’s no master who has that kind of money or who could or would lend it to anyone. No human master, at least. But we confess there is a divine master who has all the riches of heaven and earth. And this divine master, God, has given to us, his servants, all that we need. He has provided us with our food and drink, our clothes, our families, our employers, all that we need. He has provided us with life and health. He has provided us with absolutely priceless things such as happiness, joy, delight. And this he does, day after day, beyond measure, pouring out his many blessings upon his people.
How do we respond to God’s goodness and mercy? Do we rejoice in the good gifts our Lord has given us? Do we live in accordance with them, claiming him as the Lord and master, realizing that he is the one in whom we live and move and have our being? Do we recognize that all we have is a gift? Or do we, like this servant, decide that what God has given us is something we have borrowed from him? What is our attitude toward our Lord’s provision? Do we consider it something that we can earn, that we could buy, that we deserve in some way? Let it never be, or we may suffer the same fate as the servant in the parable.
Look at the situation with me. The servant has apparently decided this is a debt. The master, knowing this, wants to bless the servant. He intends to show the servant that all he has comes from the master freely. There is no debt. There is no payback. The servant hasn’t done anything to deserve the blessings. And he can’t. He never could. He just receives the blessings of the master. So we picture the conversation between the master and the servant. The servant indicates that he intends to pay for his keep. The master shows him the bill. It’s an incredible bill. But the servant has claimed responsibility for the bill. So the master does what any master would. He announces the plan to sell the servant, his family, and all he has to collect what he can. The bill remains outstanding. Best to try to collect something. After all, the servant affirmed that it was his bill. The servant then begs for time. He will pay it. He will work his hardest. He will manage to come up with the means to do so.
Let’s be real, though. The servant won’t be able to pay his bill. You won’t be able to hire three hundred men for eight hundred years during your lifetime with your income. Or if you are able to do so, our church finance committee wants to talk with you about your giving. And this servant is no more able to pay his bill than you are. You have received priceless gifts. If you wish to pay for them, it’s time for you to start sweating and figuring out how you’re going to do it. Because you can’t. That should be very clear.
What does the master do? He forgives the debt. The servant has affirmed that he owes the debt, though the parable would seem to indicate the master was giving him all this as a gift, not as a debt account. But the servant wants it to be a debt. So the master, wishing to be generous beyond belief, just like he’s always been generous beyond belief, forgives the debt.
Likewise, our Lord has forgiven us our debt. With Adam’s sin imputed to us we become heirs to a tremendous debt, a debt of forgiveness. We owe God perfect righteousness and perfect obedience. Yes, perfect. How are we doing on that? Have we sinned against our Lord in thought, word or deed? Any one of the above will incur the debt. Have we failed to love and trust him perfectly? Ever? Have we sinned in what we’ve done or in what we’ve left undone? Then we deserve his wrath. We deserve his anger. We deserve death and destruction. That’s the kind of debt we have. And no matter how many good works we do we can never make up for our sin. God demands perfect righteousness all the time. As soon as we sin, and we all have sinned in Adam, we all have come short of our Lord’s perfect demands. We are under the curse. We owe a debt which we can never, never pay. But our Lord has forgiven us that debt. He proclaims us not liable for the penalty, for he has taken the penalty of our sin upon himself. Our Lord and Savior forgives us our sin and cleanses us, dressing us in his own perfect righteousness.
How do we react? Do we walk in this forgiveness that our Lord has given us? Or are we like the servant in the parable? He goes out, forgiven, and chooses to do something which may help him pay his own debt. He takes the debt back upon himself, trying to collect it from others who owe him. Is this an insignificant debt he tries to collect? Some of you may have Bibles which identify it as “a few dollars.” That isn’t an appropriate understanding of it. A hundred denarii is the figure mentioned by Jesus. This is about four months’ wages. It’s a lot of money. If you owed me four months’ wages I’d be pretty eager to collect it. And if I owed it to you, you’d want it back too. It’s an amount that we would have trouble forgiving. Yet what does our Lord demand? He has forgiven us a debt we could never pay. Should we not also forgive others the debts they owe us, even significant ones? How significant is my debt of sin before my Lord? All other debts pale before this one. And my debt has been forgiven. It is not my business to be taking it onto myself again and again. I am supposed to leave it forgiven.
So we have a debtor who has been forgiven. He takes on the burden of his debt again. In the end his Lord lets him carry that burden again. This is the destruction of the poor debtor. He has condemned himself. May we never do so! Let us rather walk in the forgiveness which our Lord has provided in Christ Jesus, letting him bear our sins, that we should bear them no more. Let us receive with joy the reconciliation our Lord has provided on the cross. Let us delight in the good gifts of the Lord, who has given himself for us.
Our Lord and Savior, you have cancelled the debt of our sin. Let us walk in newness of life, clothed in your righteousness, for you ever live to make intercession for us. Amen.
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