The Law and Gospel About Forgiveness

[Below you'll find live stream video of today's worship services from Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio, as well as the text of the message for the day. Have a blessed week!]

Matthew 18:21-35

Today’s Gospel lesson unfolds before us like a play in three scenes.

The first scene takes place in a real life encounter: Peter asks Jesus a question about forgiveness and Jesus’ brief reply.

The second scene is the beginning of one of Jesus’ most famous parables; in this scene, Jesus shows us where forgiveness comes from.

The third scene shows us how forgiveness is often abused and the consequences for those who abuse it.

In the last verse of our lesson is an epilogue in which Jesus lays down the implacable Law of God that damns sinners to eternal punishment.

With that in the background, let’s consider our lesson.

On the heels of Jesus explaining the process by which those who sin against us can be restored to fellowship with Christ and the Church, Peter asks Jesus: “Lord, how many times shall I forgive my brother or sister who sins against me? Up to seven times?” (Matthew 18:21)

I’m not sure that Peter is really asking Jesus anything here. I think that instead of actually seeking insight or information from Jesus, Peter is playing “star pupil”: “Look how liberally I’m willing to forgive those who have hurt me: up to seven times!”

But Jesus punctures Peter’s pomposity: “I tell you, not seven times, but seventy-seven times.” (Matthew 18:22) Jesus’ words can also be translated, “seventy times seven times” and “seventy times seventy times.” However the words are rendered, the meaning is the same: “God commands that we forgive others. Period. Without condition. Without counting.”

Those who harm us or harm others may have to deal with the earthly consequences of their actions. This is why God has established governments. But we are to forgive everyone, always.

Now, this law of God–the commandment that we forgive others–is like all the rest of God’s Law: It gives a baseline requirement for anyone who wants life with God and, at the same time, it shows us that if we think we can be saved from sin and death on the basis of our perfect obedience of God’s Law, we are in trouble! We are incapable of obeying God’s Law in our own power. Who has ever heard of anyone who has walked on this earth other than Jesus who always forgave, all the time, no exceptions?

I am born into sin and that makes it impossible for me to resolve to love God or love my neighbor. I can’t resolve to perfectly obey any of God’s commands.

But if I’m incapable of forgiving as I’m required to forgive in order to have life with God, then the question arises: What’s to become of me? God commands righteousness and I’m not righteous. I can’t make myself righteous. What’s to become of me?

The second scene of our gospel lesson for today finds Jesus start the telling of a familiar parable. It’s about the interaction between a king and a man who owes his king, according to the Greek in which the New Testament was originally written, “ten thousand talents.” A talent is worth about twenty years’ worth of wages. You can do the math.

Because the man is unable to pay off the debt, the king orders that the man and his family be sold into slaves until the debt is repaid. But when the man falls at the feet of the king and begs for mercy, the king, with no hope of ever being repaid, forgives the debt–he writes it off–and releases the man and his family.

Friends, in this part of the parable, Jesus tells us what is to become of us who are incapable of forgiving as God commands us to forgive, who are incapable of obeying the Ten Commandments.

Jesus Christ takes the debt we owe for our sins and in Him, we are forgiven!

Peter would later write that Jesus “himself bore our sins in his body on the cross, so that we might die to sins and live for righteousness; by his wounds you have been healed.” (1 Peter 2:24)

In other words, Jesus, true God and true, sinless man, perfectly obeys all the Law of God we can’t begin to obey, then covers us in His righteous obedience.

In Jesus, our debt for sin–the sin for which we should be clapped into the prison of hell for all eternity–is forgiven.

God the Father hears Jesus’ prayer from the cross for us: “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.” (Luke 23:34)

All who take refuge in Jesus by daily turning from sin and following Him, throwing themselves at Jesus’ feet the way the man in His parable threw himself at the feet of the king, are forgiven and so, freed from sin, death, and condemnation…and thereby have an eternal, bottomless supply of grace by which they can in turn forgive others, any time, any place.

This is why Jesus teaches us to pray, “And forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.”

Martin Luther’s explanation of this fifth petition in The Small Catechism is worth remembering: “We pray in this petition that our heavenly Father would not hold our sins against us and deny our prayers because of them. We know we have not earned, nor do we deserve, those things for which we pray. But we ask that he would grant us all things through grace, even though we sin every day and deserve nothing but punishment. And so we, too, will heartily forgive, and gladly do good to those who sin against us.”

At the end of scene two of our gospel lesson for today, the man in Jesus’ parable walks away with his debts forgiven, freed to live with the same kind of forgiving grace he’d been given for anyone who may be indebted to him. It’s the same freedom Jesus gives to you when you hear words of absolution: “For Jesus’ sake, all your sins are forgiven!”

In scene three, the forgiven man walks away from the king who has forgiven him, like we walk away forgiven and made clean by Jesus at the end of worship on Sunday mornings. But you know, saints are also sinners. And we sinners tend to have long memories of the sins committed against us and short memories of our own need for forgiveness.

The forgiven man spots someone who owes him the equivalent of one-hundred days’ wages, a fraction of the huge debt he was just forgiven. He clutches the other man by the throat. “Pay me back!” he demands. When his debtor begs for mercy, just as he has begged a few moments before, the forgiven man will not forgive the debt. Then he has his debtor thrown into prison.

The king gets wind of this and calls the man to appear before him. He tells the man: “I canceled all that debt of yours because you begged me to. Shouldn’t you have had mercy on your fellow servant just as I had on you?’ [Then Jesus says] In anger his master handed him over to the jailers to be tortured, until he should pay back all he owed.” (Matthew 18:32-34)

By the standards of the Law, you and I deserve to die, everlastingly separated from God.

But Jesus has canceled our debt to God.

He saves us by grace, that is, by God’s charitable love for us.

All who repent and believe in Him are justified, made right with God, by that grace.

When we receive the gospel Word–in Jesus Christ, all your sins are forgiven, all your debts to God are gone–we are debt-free.

And when we are no longer indebted for our sin, while we will surely live in this world in mutually accountable relationships with husbands, wives, children, parents, and fellow members of Christ’s Church, we don’t have to keep score, we don’t have to hold grudges, and we don’t have to play God. We can trust God to sort things out in His way and live unencumbered by guilt or shame.

There are times when, even after we’ve forgiven others, we must not forget. It would be foolish, for example, for someone who has been in an abusive relationship to go back to live with their abuser after they’ve forgiven, that is, let go of their desire to make the abuser pay.

In what I call the epilogue to today’s lesson, Jesus says, “This–[eternal imprisonment and torture for our sin]–is how my heavenly Father will treat each of you unless you forgive your brother or sister from your heart.” (Matthew 18:35)

Clearly, Jesus means it when He tells us to forgive others. Failure to forgive is eternally fatal.

But what do we do when we can’t forgive? 

It happens to me. When that happens, I remember that Christ died for all my sins, including the sin of not forgiving others. So, I take refuge in Jesus.

This is what I think we can do. We can turn to Jesus and pray, “Help me to forgive that person as You forgive me, Lord. When I can’t feel forgiving, forgive them through me. You know I want to do Your will. You know also that I’m a sinner. Forgive them through me.” I have prayed that kind of prayer many times and as I turn to Jesus honestly, I find that he lifts the burden of my unforgiving attitude from me.

Jesus didn’t die for perfect people. Jesus died for imperfect people. And if you earnestly desire to do the will of God and follow Jesus, God will in no way pour contempt or condemnation on you. And He will make you an instrument of His forgiveness, even when you’re not “feelin’ it.”

The Greek New Testament word for forgive is aphiemi. It literally means release.

When I forgive you or you forgive me, we release each other from the debt we owe for our wrong. We also release ourselves from the strain on us when we pretend that we’re God.

It’s because God forgives us that we can forgive others. So, I tell you once more this morning: “Dear friends in Christ, in the name of Jesus, I forgive you all your sins. You are released by your Savior.”

Now, you can share that word of forgiveness and release with others. Amen

Forgiven and Forgiving: Living in Jesus' Kingdom (AUDIO)

Here.

[Blogger Mark Daniels is the pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church. This message was shared during this past Sunday's worship services.]

Forgiven and Forgiving: Life in Jesus' Kingdom

[This is the message that was shared during both worship services with the people of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio, earlier today.]

Matthew 18:21-35
At the end of last Sunday’s gospel lesson, Jesus describes how people living in His Kingdom, the people of His Church, are to resolve things when we believe we have been sinned against.

As today’s gospel lesson begins, we can almost read Peter’s mind as he asks Jesus, “Lord, how many times shall I forgive my brother or sister who sins against me? Up to seven times?” (Matthew 18:21)

“I’m willing to forgive someone who’s doing me wrong,” Peter seems to be saying. “But. Lord, if they keep sinning against me, when do I get to stop forgiving?”

Jesus tells Peter how many times he is to forgive a fellow believer: “I tell you, not seven times, but seventy-seven times” (Matthew 18:22).

Some translations render Jesus’ words as “seven times seven.” Others put it, “seventy times seven.” Various ancient copies of Matthew’s gospel can support any of those translations. But we can’t get hung up here and miss Jesus’ point.

In Jewish thought, seven is the perfect number. It was, according to Genesis, the number of days in the first week of God’s creation and it was on the seventh day that God rested from His labor. Seven is the number of completion and eternity.

So, how often are we to forgive our fellow believers, our sisters and brothers who by their confession of the crucified and risen Jesus, live in the Kingdom of heaven? Jesus says always.

Completely.

Totally.

Eternally.

Repeatedly.

Continuously.

While Peter stands there, undoubtedly slack-jawed and wondering why he would forgive anyone continuously and how he he could possibly do it, Jesus tells what has become one of his most famous parables. He begins: “Therefore, the kingdom of heaven is like…” Whenever Jesus uses phrasing like this, it’s a signal that the entire fictional illustration He’s about to share tells you what life in His kingdom is like. This is how things work among God’s people, the Church, Jesus is telling us.

Jesus says: “...the kingdom of heaven is like a king who wanted to settle accounts with his servants. As he began the settlement, a man who owed him ten thousand [The word here in the Greek in which Matthew wrote his gospel is murion, from which we get the English word, myriad...ten thousand] bags of gold was brought to him. Since he was not able to pay, the master ordered that he and his wife and his children and all that he had be sold to repay the debt. At this the servant fell on his knees before him. ‘Be patient with me,’ he begged, ‘and I will pay back everything.’ The servant’s master took pity on him, canceled [In fact, the word in the Greek is a form of the verb, aphiemi, literally, released, the word most commonly used in the New Testament for forgave. The king forgave, released the servant from the man who owed the king so much…] the debt and let him go.” [Matthew 18:23-27]

The first thing we learn from the parable about the kingdom of heaven is that it’s where Jesus’ disciples are set free, released! 

By the power of Jesus’ death on the cross, when He offered up His innocent body and blood in payment for the massive debt we owe to God for our sin, our debt is canceled. All who trust in Jesus and what He did for us on the cross, are set free of all we owe God for the ways our lives have violated His holiness:

• all the gossip and misuse of God’s name, 
• all the dishonesty and covetousness, 
• all the adultery and failure to worship God instead of ourselves or our kids or the world, 
• all the financial sleight of hand. 

We are set free to be the people God made us to be! As we sing in the traditional liturgy: “Worthy is Christ, the Lamb who was slain, whose blood set us free to be people of God.”

And when we come together on Sunday mornings, confessing our sins, because of what Jesus did for us and your faith in Jesus, you can believe that when I say, “As a called and ordained minister of the Church of Christ, and by His authority, I therefore declare to you the entire forgiveness of all your sins,” or words like these, it's all true!

“As far as the east is from the west, so far has [God] removed our transgressions from us!” (Psalm 103:12)

Christians needn't say, "I hope that  I’m forgiven.” You are forgiven because Jesus died and rose to bring His forgiveness to all who trust in Him. That’s the first thing the kingdom of heaven is like for those who believe!

Jesus goes on with His parable in verse 28: ““But when that servant went out, he found one of his fellow servants who owed him a hundred silver coins. He grabbed him and began to choke him. ‘Pay back what you owe me!’ he demanded. His fellow servant fell to his knees and begged him, ‘Be patient with me, and I will pay it back.’ But he refused. Instead, he went off and had the man thrown into prison until he could pay the debt. When the other servants saw what had happened, they were outraged and went and told their master everything that had happened. Then the master called the servant in. ‘You wicked servant,’ he said, ‘I canceled all that debt of yours because you begged me to. Shouldn’t you have had mercy on your fellow servant just as I had on you?’ In anger his master handed him over to the jailers to be tortured, until he should pay back all he owed. This is how my heavenly Father will treat each of you unless you forgive your brother or sister from your heart.”

The second thing we learn from Jesus' parable about the kingdom of heaven, the Church, is: It’s the dominion of God in which disciples of Jesus forgive others as we’ve been forgiven.

After teaching us to pray, elsewhere in Matthew’s Gospel, “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us,” Jesus says: “...if you forgive other people when they sin against you, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive others their sins, your Father will not forgive your sins.” (Matthew 6:14-15)

If, after being assured of God’s absolution--His forgiveness of our sins--during worship on Sunday morning, we harbor grudges or hold things against others, refusing to release them from the debts they owe us, God will clap the chains and manacles back on our lives. Our lives will come back under an eternal death sentence. We will lose our forgiveness. We’ll lose our freedom.

The servant forgiven so much by the king in Jesus’ parable should have been so grateful for his freedom that he readily forgave the man who owed him so little. Instead, he used his freedom as a license to play God over his fellow servant. No matter how often we go to worship, or how many Bible verses we memorize, hurricane victims we help, or mission trips we go on, unless we forgive others as Christ desires to forgive us, we will not be forgiven. We’ll still be imprisoned in our sin.

It’s possible that after Jesus told this parable, Peter was as slack-jawed as he he’d been before Jesus told it. And maybe we find this teaching intimidating. I know that I do!

But the call and command of Jesus in this parable are simple and, if we take them seriously, liberating and life-giving.

Think of what Jesus accomplished for us on the cross and what the Father accomplished for us when He raised Jesus from the dead, think of all of that, as a massive, eternal blank check imparting never-depleted riches of forgiveness and new life to all who turn from sin and trust in, believe in, surrender their lives to, Jesus.

God never tires of forgiving those who genuinely repent and believe in Him. He forgives in perfect seventy-seven times fashion.

In turn, Jesus frees us from the burden of keeping score. He frees us from having to figure out who owes us for hurting us.

Jesus frees us to treat others with the same grace, mercy, and forgiveness He has given to us.

He frees us to get on with the true living of life: loving God, loving neighbor, making disciples.

By the grace of God given in Christ, we are forgiven.

By that same grace, we can forgive others.

Seventy times seven, in utter eternal perfection.

That’s what life in the kingdom of heaven is like, here on earth and in eternity.

Amen

[Blogger Mark Daniels is pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio.]

Forgiving Those Who Hurt Us

[This is the script for a sermon shared with the people and guests of Living Water Lutheran Church in Springboro, Ohio earlier today.]

Genesis 50:15-20
Matthew 18:21-35

In today’s Gospel lesson from Matthew, Jesus was asked by His disciple Peter, how often he should forgive others, “as many as seven times?” Peter thought that he was being very liberal in couching his question in this way. To forgive someone as many as seven times, Peter felt, along with the people of his day, was the height of patience and kindness.

But Jesus answers that we're to forgive others not seven times, but “Seventy-seven times.” Jesus’ answer is not a mathematical formula, but a teasing parody of the question posed by His disciple. Peter wanted to limit how forgiving followers of Christ needed to be. Jesus was telling Peter (and us), “Just as there’s no limit to how much I, God in human flesh, forgive all who repent and believe in Me, there should be no limit to your forgiveness of others.”

This teaching should come as no surprise to us. In Matthew 6:14-15, after teaching the disciples what we call The Lord’s Prayer, Jesus said: “...if you forgive other people when they sin against you, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive others their sins, your Father will not forgive your sins.”

Jesus says that we actually block His forgiveness and life with Him from our lives by failing to forgive. I find Jesus’ words terrifying, frankly. But we should remember them whenever we feed condemnatory feelings toward others.

Yet Jesus’ command that we forgive is more than a stern dictate. Forgiving others is also a gift from God that can set us free for living life to the full.

Our first lesson for this morning, Genesis 50:15-21, shows us how this is so. You know the story of Joseph well, part of whose life our lesson tells us about today. This Joseph, of course, isn’t the one who, nearly two-thousand years later, would be chosen by God to be the earthly father of God the Son, Jesus of Nazareth. This Joseph is the great grandson of Abraham, grandson of Isaac, son of Jacob, the patriarchs of Biblical faith.

At an early age, this Joseph angered his brothers because their father Jacob so favored Joseph and because Joseph reported dreams that God had given to him indicating that one day, his brothers would bow down to him.

The brothers’ resentments toward Joseph simmered until they reached a boiling point: They sold Joseph into slavery and when they came back home from the fields where they’d been tending the family’s sheep, without Joseph, they convinced Jacob that Joseph had been killed by a wild animal.

From there, Joseph’s circumstances went from bad to worse.

He became the slave and eventually, the supervisor of all the holdings of Potiphar, one of Egypt’s most powerful generals, only to be falsely accused of attempting to rape Potiphar’s wife, who had been disappointed when Joseph refused to have an affair with her. Joseph languished in prison.

Eventually, Joseph was freed and, gifted by God with both the ability to interpret dreams and lead an organization, he undertook a massive rationing program that saved millions from death by starvation when a famine hit.

You remember how his brothers, not knowing who Joseph was, came to Egypt seeking to buy food and how eventually, Joseph was reunited with his father and how God used Jacob to save God’s people, the descendants of Abraham and Sarah, the Jewish people, from extinction.

This, of course, is important for all of us because it was through the Messiah Jesus Who was given to God’s people, that salvation would become possible for all who repent and believe in Jesus.

But our lesson takes place well after Joseph’s reunion with his father. Jacob and all of his sons and their families had lived in Egypt with Joseph for some time when Jacob died.

There are two scenes recounted in the lesson. Scene #1 comes in verse 15. Jacob has died and Joseph’s brothers are in a panic. They wonder, “What if Joseph holds a grudge against us and pays us back for all the wrongs we did to him?” Joseph’s brothers could be cynical, self-centered men and they couldn’t imagine that Joseph was any different.

They projected their own cynicism and selfishness onto Joseph. Afraid for their lives, the brothers concoct a phony story to tell Joseph.

We read about that story in Scene #2 of our lesson, verses 16 through 21. The brothers tell Joseph that, just before he died, their father Jacob had directed them to tell Joseph not to exact vengeance on them for their sins against him.

Our lesson tells us that when Joseph heard his brothers' story, he wept. Joseph's brothers found it hard to believe that a believer in God like Joseph could possibly forgive them. That's why they wept.

They clearly didn't know nor understand the relationship with God that Joseph had. And that’s what made Joseph weep, filled with sorrow for their disbelief and their fear of him.

Joseph says in verses 19 and 20 of our first lesson: “Don’t be afraid. Am I in the place of God? You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good to accomplish what is now being done, the saving of many lives.”

Though I’ve read them many times, I always find Joseph’s words here breathtaking! And they often choke me up.

Joseph is saying that God can make something of the most sinful actions people may perpetrate against us.

Notice several things about what Joseph says. First: Joseph sees his brothers kneeling before him and, even though this was exactly what God had revealed would happen in the dreams he’d had as a boy, he didn’t like it.

Joseph believed God’s words in Isaiah 42:8: “I am the Lord; that is my name! I will not yield my glory to another or my praise to idols.” Joseph insisted that he wouldn’t take God’s place. He wouldn’t take God’s glory and he wouldn’t do God’s job.

When someone hurts us, we may be inclined to think that it’s only our due that the offending party should, in some way, come crawling to us for forgiveness. Joseph knew that no matter what sins others perpetrate against us, God is really the One most hurt and offended by human sin. When we are offended, it’s good to remember God’s words in Deuteronomy 32:35 “It is Mine to avenge; I will repay.” 

Though today, Jesus entrusts the Church with the responsibility of declaring God’s forgiveness to the repentant and the opposite to the unrepentant, when others hurt us, we aren’t in the vengeance business. We must trust God to sort things out.

The second thing to notice is that Joseph could see God at work even in the midst of his pain. He saw that God had used the adversities he experienced to save whole nations, including the small band of people who would become the ancestors of Israel and through Christ, the ancestors of all who confess Christ as their God and Lord.

Joseph’s connection with God allowed him to forgive his brothers. None of us can forgive others and be free of the resentments that can destroy our happiness, without God’s help and empowerment. It’s impossible to live the Christian life without a connection to the God of the universe definitively revealed to us in Jesus Christ! We can forgive only if Jesus Christ lives within us.

As Christians, we confess that God does live and work within us. As Paul puts it in Galatians 2:20: “I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I now live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.” You can't forgive others their trespasses against you. But Christ in you can!

Christ lives in you when you are a baptized believer in Him. Think of what that means for your everyday life! Even on the cross, Jesus Christ was able, we see from Luke 23:34, to pray for those who were killing Him and crying for His blood, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.” That Christ lives within every baptized believer in Christ!

We see how Christ lives in believers in a man named Stephen. Five years after Jesus’ death and resurrection, Acts 7:60 tells us that Stephen, a mere human being who, through Holy Baptism, had Christ living within him, could pray as he was being stoned to death for his faith in Christ, “Lord, do not hold this sin against them.”

When you believe in the God revealed in Jesus—the God of the Old and New Testaments, you can forgive others because you know that in Jesus, nothing can separate you from God and His love for you. Christians know the freedom that comes to us when God empowers us to forgive others as God has forgiven us because of the cross and resurrection of Christ.

The most common New Testament Greek work for forgive, aphiemi, literally means, release. Forgiveness is releasing, letting go of all pretense of being God, letting go of having any right or responsibility for holding the sins of others ocer their heads, and instead, trusting God to deal with whatever punishments need to meted out against those who sin against us. When we forgive others, God releases us to live with Him always.

Holding a grudge is like holding your breath for an extended period of time. As long as you do it, you can’t expel the toxins of bitterness and anxiety and you can’t breathe in the fresh air of God’s Holy Spirit. If Joseph hadn’t trusted in God to release His grudges and hold onto God through bad and good times, there is no way God could have fulfilled the good purposes that God had revealed to Joseph when Joseph was just a little boy that God wanted to fulfill in Joseph’s life. When we fail to forgive, there are good things that God intends to do through us that just don’t happen. And that is a tragedy.

As Jesus showed us in last Sunday’s Gospel lesson, there are times when we must lovingly confront those we feel have sinned against us. It’s right that we do so. But God can do so much in the lives of people who surrender everything, even their anger and sorrow over the hurts, insults, slights, and horrible injuries others have inflicted on them.

God will do nothing in the lives of people who block His grace by refusing to forgive others. But God releases us from our sins when we forgive others as He forgives us through Christ. If you’ve come here this morning holding a grudge against anybody, I invite you (I beg you) to attempt to work things out starting now. Release those against whom you have a grudge. Release yourself. Above all, I invite you to lay your grudge at Jesus’ cross right now and to let God set you free to live the life you were made for!

Forgiving As We've Been Forgiven

[This (except for the final paragraph, which I completely neglected to deliver) was shared during worship with the people of Saint Matthew Lutheran Church in Logan, Ohio, earlier today.]

Genesis 50:15-21
In today’s Gospel lesson from Matthew, Jesus was asked by His disciple Peter, how often he should forgive others, “as many as seven times?” Peter thought that he was being very liberal in couching his question in this way. To forgive someone as many as seven times, Peter felt, was the height of patience and kindness.

But Jesus rocks Peter’s world (and ours) when He says that we're to forgive others not seven times, but “Seventy-seven times” or, as some translations put it, “seventy times seven times” or even “seventy times seventy times.”

Whatever the precise phrasing Jesus used, His meaning is clear. Jesus was telling Peter, “Just as there’s no limit to how much I forgive all who repent and believe in me, there should be no limit to your forgiveness of others.”

This isn’t the only time that Jesus said that those who want the forgiveness and new life He came to give to all who repent and believe in Him must forgive others. pull out a pew Bible and turn to page 554 to find Matthew 6:14-15. There, Jesus says,

For if you forgive [people] their trespasses [their sins against you], your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive [others] their trespasses [against you], neither will your Father forgive your trespasses. [New King James Version]

If you’re anything like me (and maybe you’re not), the thought that my unwillingness to forgive others for what they’ve done to me in just the same way Jesus forgives me, is daunting.

And when I consider that Jesus says we actually block His forgiveness and life with Him from our lives by failing to forgive, I feel…uncomfortable.

But Jesus’ command that we forgive is more than a stern dictate. You see, forgiving others is also a gift from God that can set us free for living life to the full.

Our first lesson for this morning, Genesis 50:15-21, shows us how this is so. Please pull out the Celebrate inserts and turn to the first lesson.

You know the story of Joseph well. This Joseph, of course, isn’t the one who, nearly two-thousand years later, would be chosen by God to be the earthly father of God the Son, Jesus of Nazareth. At an early age, this Joseph angered his brothers because their father Jacob so favored Joseph and because Joseph reported dreams God had given to him indicating that one day, he would be an important ruler and his brothers would bow to him.

The brothers’ resentments simmered until it reached a tragic boiling point: They sold Joseph into slavery and convinced Jacob that Joseph had been killed by a wild animal.

Joseph’s circumstances seemed to go from bad to worse. He became the slave and eventually the supervisor of all the holdings of Potiphar, one of Egypt’s most powerful generals, only to be falsely accused of attempting to rape Potiphar’s wife, who had been disappointed when Joseph refused to have an affair with her. Joseph long languished in prison.

Eventually, Joseph was delivered from prison and, gifted by God with both the ability to interpret dreams and lead an organization, he led a massive rationing program that saved millions from death by starvation when a famine hit.

You remember how his brothers, not knowing who Joseph was, came to Egypt seeking to buy food and how eventually, Joseph was reunited with his father and how God used Jacob to save God’s people, the descendants of Abraham and Sarah, the Jewish people, from extinction.

This, of course, was important for all of us because it was through the Jewish people, specifically through Jesus, that salvation would become possible for all who repent and believe in Him.

But our lesson takes place after Joseph’s reunion with his father. Jacob and all of his sons and their families had lived in Egypt with Joseph for a while when Jacob died.

There are two scenes recounted in the lesson. Scene #1 comes in verse 15. Jacob has died and Joseph’s brothers are in a panic. Now that Jacob is dead the brothers are sure that, at long last, Joseph would have his revenge for the years of agony he had endured because of their sin against him. The brothers ask each other, “What if Joseph still bears a grudge against us and pays us back in full for all the wrong that we did to him?”

Joseph’s brothers were cynical, self-centered men and they couldn’t imagine that Joseph was any different. They projected their own evil ways of thinking and living onto Joseph. People still spend a lot of time projecting their own faults onto others. It's one of the biggest causes of misunderstandings and alienation between people.

So, afraid for their lives, the brothers concoct a phony story to tell Joseph. We read about it and everything that Joseph said and did in response to it in Scene #2 of our lesson, verses 16 through 21. The brothers tell Joseph that, just before he died, their father Jacob had directed them to tell Joseph not to exact vengeance on them for their sins against him.

Our lesson tells us that when Joseph heard his brothers' story, he wept. It reminds me of the day Jesus wept in Bethany many centuries later. That happened right after the death of Jesus' friend, Lazarus. When Jesus arrived in Lazarus' village, he found everyone weeping with despair. I'm sure that one Jesus wept was from grief over the death of His friend. But I feel equally certain that Jesus wept over the utter hopelessness of the whole village of Bethany. Until Jesus called Lazarus back to life, everybody there seemed to think that resurrection was too good to be true.

In the same way, Joseph's brothers found it hard to believe that Joseph could possibly forgive them for what they had done. That's why they wept. They clearly didn't know nor understand Joseph.

Look at his response to his brothers in verse 19 (read it aloud with me, please): “Do not be afraid! Am I in the place of God? Even though you intended to do harm to me, God intended it for good to preserve a numerous people, as he is doing today.” Though I’ve read them many times, I always find Joseph’s words here breathtaking!

Please notice several things about what he says.

First: Joseph sees his brothers kneeling before him and, even though this was exactly what the dreams he’d had as a boy told him would happen, he didn’t like it. Only God should be treated like God.

Bowing and scraping to human beings is what slaves of human masters do. Only God deserves such submissiveness.

Joseph insisted that he wouldn’t take God’s place.

You know, when someone hurts us, a reflex response goes off in our brains. A part of us seems to think that it’s only our due that the offending party will, in some way, come crawling to us for forgiveness. Joseph remembered that no matter what sins others perpetrate against us, God is really the One most hurt and offended by human sin.

“Vengeance is mine, I will repay” God says in His Word.*

Though Jesus entrusts the Church with the responsibility of declaring God’s forgiveness to the repentant and the opposite to the unrepentant, we aren’t in the vengeance business.

We must trust God to sort things out. That’s what Joseph did.

The second thing to notice is that Joseph could see God at work even in the midst of his pain. It was his connection with God that allowed him to forgive his brothers.

None of us can forgive others and be free of resentments that can destroy our happiness without God’s help and empowerment.

Essayist Alexander Pope famously said, “To err is human, to forgive divine.” In other words, forgiving those who hurt us is foreign to human nature. The ability to forgive others is a divine attribute, something of which only God is capable.

As Christians though, we confess that God works and lives within us. As Paul puts it in Galatians, “it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me.” You can't forgive others their trespasses against you. But Christ in you can!

Christ lives in you because you are a baptized believer in Him. Think of what that means for your everyday life! Even on the cross, Jesus Christ was able to pray for those who were killing Him and crying for His blood, “Father, forgive them; for they do not know what they are doing.” Five years after Jesus’ death and resurrection, a mere human being who followed Jesus and had Christ living within him, Stephen, could pray as he was being stoned to death for his faith in Christ, “Lord, do not hold this sin against them.” Christ lived in him and even as Stephen died, he gave a witness for the one who had changed his life for eternity.

By the way, Christ living within us can also help us to forgive ourselves. Much of my counseling through the years has been with people who suspect that their sins are too terrible for God to forgive. Remember Jesus’ words to Nicodemus? “For God so loved the world that He gave His only Son [Jesus] so that everyone who believes in Him may not perish but may have eternal life.” Everyone includes you.

The Bible says, “if you confess with your lips and believe with your heart that God has raised [Jesus] from the dead, you will be saved.”

When you believe in the God revealed in Jesus—the God of the Old and New Testaments, you can forgive others because you know that in Jesus, nothing can separate you from God and His love for you. And you can forgive yourself too, for this very same reason.

The most New Testament Greek work for forgive literally means, release. Forgiveness is releasing, letting go of all pretense of being God and instead, trusting God to deal with whatever punishments need to meted out against those who sin against us.

When we forgive others, God releases us to live with Him always.

Holding a grudge is like holding your breath for an extended period of time. As long as you do it, you can’t expel the toxins of bitterness and anxiety and you can’t breathe in the fresh air of God’s Holy Spirit.

If Joseph hadn’t trusted in God to release His grudges and hold onto God through bad and good times, there is no way he could fulfill the good purposes He wanted to fulfill in Joseph’s life.

God can do so much in the lives of people who surrender everything, even their anger and sorrow over the hurts, insults, slights, and horrible injuries others have inflicted on them.

God will do nothing in the lives of people who block His grace by refusing to forgive others.

If you’ve come here this morning holding a grudge against anybody, I invite you to lay it at the foot of Jesus’ cross right now and let God set you free to live the life you were made for!

*In Romans 12:19, Paul paraphrases several different passages of the Old Testament, including Deuteronomy 32:35, Leviticus 19:18, and Psalm 34:1.

Learning to Pray (Fourth Midweek Lenten Devotion)

[This was shared during midweek Lenten worship with the people of Saint Matthew Lutheran Church in Logan, Ohio, earlier this evening.]

Matthew 6:12
Matthew 18:21-35
To help us think about the fifth petition of the Lord’s Prayer tonight, here’s a literal translation of Jesus’ words from Matthew 6:12, where He teaches it: “And forgive us the debts of us, as indeed we forgave the debtors of us.”

Now, I’ll grant that this literal rendering of Jesus’ words is awkward, as almost any literal translation from one language into another will be. But I do think that it helps us to understand more clearly what Jesus is saying should be part of our praying and our living as Christians.

In his book on the Lord’s Prayer, Anglican scholar N.T. Wright observes, rightly I think, that if you ask the average person today what is meant by the word “forgiveness” today, you’ll hear some version of “tolerance,” not forgiveness.

Rare is the person who actually asks for forgiveness and if they do, we suspect that they’re doing so as a formality designed to induce us to put up with their bad behavior and move on.

“I’m sorry,” the teenager says sullenly with about as much sincerity as the world-famous athlete apologizing for letting his fans down…and incidentally, saving his 7-figure tennis shoe endorsement deal. “Tolerate—or put up with—me,” these apologizers seem to say, with little hint of repentance or of intending to live differently in the future.

But before we scale too far up on our high horses in condemnation of phony forgiveness-seekers, we should say that often, the forgiveness we seek is of the fake variety as well. “Forgive me,” we may say, more as a stratagem for getting people off our backs than anything else. “Look, I did something wrong,” we say, in effect, “Deal with it. Tolerate it.”

But Jesus sees things differently. Both in the way Matthew says that Jesus taught the fifth petition of the Lord’s Prayer—forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us—and in the parable I read a few moments ago, we understand that Jesus views our sins as something more than little flaws in our personalities that we must accept in ourselves and tolerate in one another.

In the eyes of heaven, sin is intolerable. Failure to love God and failure to love others is not something that God tolerates. Sin does not exist in heaven. And when, for our sake, Jesus bore our sins—the sin of the whole world—on His burdened, bloody shoulders on the cross, Jesus sensed a vast chasm between God the Father and Himself.* The magnitude of the sin which the sinless Savior bore was so immense that, at His death, all creation convulsed with grief. God grieves over our sin because, as Paul puts it, “the wages of sin is death.” If you and I are to live with God for eternity, we dare not see our sin as something that God, the world, and we must tolerate.

Jesus says that our sin is a debt we owe to God. God gives us life and we overdraw our accounts by misusing that gift. That’s what sin is: A misuse of the free gift of life.

When we do that—whether by using God’s Name for something other than prayer, praise, and thanksgiving; or, taking or craving things that don’t belong to us; or, engaging in shady practices with money; or, withholding help from the poor; or, failing to work for justice; or, in any other way, failing to love God and love neighbor, we add to what one of our Lenten hymns calls, “the debt of love I owe.”

And this is why the cross is the most important event in all of human history…why it can be the most important event for our personal histories--past, present, and future.

On the cross, Jesus pays our debt. But, as the Lord’s Prayer reminds us, this side of the grave, we still live on earth and not in heaven. Our habits and our inclinations or, as Luther phrases it in The Small Catechism, “the devil, the world, and our sinful selves,” all pull us toward racking up more debt, toward letting sin once more have control of us and thereby losing our connection to the Savor Who gives forgiveness, life, and eternity to those who believe in Him.

This is why confession of sin, asking for God’s forgiveness, should be a regular part of our praying. But the way in which Jesus phrases this petition for the forgiveness of sin is really instructive: “And forgive [present tense, now] us the debts of us, as indeed we forgave [past tense, already done it] the debtors of us.” “Lord,” Jesus teaches us to pray, “Please forgive the debt of love I owe, just as I have already forgiven the debt owed to me by others.”

Last May, in one of my sermons, I shared one of my favorite stories. I’m going to tell it again. It involves Clara Barton, the founder of the Red Cross. Once, a friend of Barton's reminded Barton of another woman’s vicious misdeed toward her. Barton seemed not to recall it. “Don’t you remember?” the woman asked Barton in disbelief. “No,” she replied, “I specifically remember forgetting it.”

Now, we know that we human beings aren’t equipped with the divine attribute of totally forgetting the wrongs done to us. That may be a blessing from God, helping us to avoid being hurt by the same person more than once.

But even when we don’t forget, we can forgive. We can release people from the debts of love they owe to us and so, free ourselves to live. We can forgive and when we do, a wall that would otherwise block God’s forgiveness of us is torn down.

That’s really a key point in the parable of Jesus we read a moment before. The king in Jesus’ parable was perfectly willing to forgive the massive debt of the slave, just as God is willing to forgive our sin. God is the one most offended and hurt by human sin; it’s the lives He gives us that are being misused when we sin.

Imagine the cumulative debt each of us owes to God. Yet, for the sake of Jesus, God is willing to forgive our debts. But, as with the king in the parable, God will not forgive our massive debts unless we are willing to forgive those who have hurt us, offended us, crossed us, demeaned us, or hated us.

This is the hardest of all the petitions in the Lord’s Prayer to pray…and to mean. Withholding forgiveness, keeping track of the ways others have sinned against us, makes us feel powerful, important, and better than others. (I know, I wrestle with whether to give or withhold forgiveness all the time, often toward people who have no idea that they have offended me in some way.)

But God doesn’t want us to settle for being better than others; God wants us to be children of God, citizens of His eternal kingdom. He wants us to lay aside anything that might prevent His forgiveness and life from penetrating into the core of our beings!

It boils down to this: Jesus says that we can’t grab hold of God’s grace if we insist on keeping hold of our grudges. Grace or grudges, forgiveness or separation from God. Those are our choices.

May we learn to truly pray, “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.”

*This is how sin functions in our lives, alienating us from God, even though the Father is always willing to hear and stand beside us.