Let's Do The Numbers Proper 19A

 Let’s Do The Numbers!   Proper 19A

In the 18^th chapter of Matthew’s story of Jesus, Jesus offers a parable after the discussion of reconciliation. Leading into the parable, Peter has a question: How many times must we forgive someone? Seven times? (Matthew 18:15-20) Peter, no doubt, feels as if he is being generous by going beyond the community’s standard of three times. But still, thinks Peter, there must be a limit to forgiving. Jesus, however, feels even seven is not enough: No, not seven, says he, but seventy-seven times. As they say on Marketplace Report every morning, “Let’s do the numbers!” 

Once again, translation is tricky, especially when it comes to numbers in the first century. Many, if not most, scholars would translate Jesus’s reply as seven times seventy. That would be 490 times. Which from anyone’s perspective may as well be infinity! Why? Because throughout the Hebrew Bible that Jesus and Peter are familiar with, God is understood to be “a gracious and merciful God, slow to anger, abounding in steadfast love, and relents from punishment.” (Jonah 4:2, Exodus 34:6-7, Psalms 86:15 & 103:8) Jesus’s logic seems to reflect an understanding that as those creatures whom God creates in God’s own image, male and female he creates us as icons of the living God, it only follows that we ought to be as merciful, gracious, slow to anger, abounding in steadfast love and relent from punishment. Being merciful, Kurt Vonnegut once said, was the one good idea we have been given so far! 

To bolster this notion of forgiving anywhere from 490 times to infinity and beyond, Matthew reports Jesus telling a story about a king and a number of his high and mid-level bureaucratic servants. Again, let’s to the numbers. A servant is in debt to the king for ten thousand talents. To get some sense of the size of the servant’s debt, a talent was worth fifteen years of a laborer’s wages; times ten thousand, rounds up to a total of 150,000 years of labor. The king, seeing that he is unlikely to ever get that amount orders the servant, his wife and children all to be sold into slavery to get whatever he can get out of them. Even should the servant have worked every day for the past 2,000 years since the story was told, he would still have 148,00 years to go! Another way to look at it: humans are believed to have been here approximately 195,000 years, so he would have had to begin when hominid life as we know it began. Those listening to the story would recognize the servant’s predicament and would know paying off such a debt represents what is known in some business circles today as a BHAG – A Big Hairy Audacious Goal! 

Since this is one servant of many from whom the king seeks to settle accounts, this is one very wealthy king! How does one run up such a debt? The servant is a high-level retainer whose job is to collect tribute monies from both direct and indirect taxes on behalf of the king – the king who when he assumed his kingship understood the resources of the state were his possession to plunder for his personal gain. He believes he stands at the very top of an authoritarian system above the law and all restraints! The servant says he will collect the tributes of ten thousand talents if he and his family can go free. Surprisingly to everyone in Jesus’s audience, the king not only lets him go, but forgives him the debt! Such an act of debt forgiveness has never ever been imagined let alone heard of. What an unbelievably fortunate and lucky retainer! 

But does he feel grateful in this astonishing turn of events? No. He immediately runs into a mid-level retainer who owes him one hundred denarii. This is about half of a Roman Centurion’s annual salary, and much more than the annual salary of the average day laborer. It’s a sum most of the farmers and trades people listening to this story will never see in their lifetime. The second man makes the very same plea as our first retainer, but alas, he is not feeling the mercy and forgiveness he has been granted at all and has this man put in jail to be a slave. Mind you, his one hundred denarii could barely make a dent toward the ten thousand talents. A group of mid-level servants then go to the king and let him know what has happened. Why? Because they could be next to feel the high-level retainer’s wrath as he tries to round up the tribute he owes to the king. 

The king is very disappointed. It seems he wished the high-level servant to forgive as he had been forgiven. People had heard about it. Now the king feels publicly shamed. So shamed that he now has him thrown in jail to be “tortured until he can pay the debt.” To which Jesus is said to have added, “And so my Father will do to anyone who does not forgive a sister or brother from the heart.” That last part should cause us pause. How can the God who is merciful and gracious, abounding in steadfast love, slow to anger and relents from punishing be imagined to do such a thing? The answer, of course, such a God would not torture anyone. This is believed to be a later addition to the story by those in the church who had assumed the standard role of ruthless authoritarian kings and their bureaucratic retainers, and is a proper subject for another day. 

This story no doubt had everyone surrounding Jesus waiting to see what astonishing thing would happen next. But it turns out to be a rather mixed message. The king was moved to do something radically new – forgive debts. Matthew’s Jesus had earlier taught his audience that they are to pray, “forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors” in his Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 6:12). Perhaps this was a new king who was hoping the servant would do the same, and the next servant would do the same, on and on down the line, until the entire kingdom was debt free. Earlier in Matthew’s story the people wanted to make Jesus a kind of new king. It was written on the cross upon which he was hung by the Romans. And for good reason: all these thousands of talents were to eventually make their way back to Caesar in Rome! Can’t have debts being forgiven now, can we? 

But just for a moment that day, a crowd of people could imagine what Jesus was saying could be the promised Sabbath Year, the Jubilee Year, the forgiveness of debts God had ordered in Torah to happen every 50 years. Perhaps it really was possible to reset the entire nation! If only. If only we would be those people who forgive others as we would like to be forgiven. It is a glorious vision of how we could live with one another. And Jesus seems to think it is how we should live with one another. A world of infinity and beyond awash with forgiveness. 

Still there is that last line – which seems to say, beware. You know and I know, says Jesus, unless we can live like the icons of God we are created to be, this system of consolidated wealth, authoritarian elites and their bureaucratic functionaries will continue. Until. Until we try, really try, something astonishingly, incredibly new. My Father does not need to torture anyone. Until we can all forgive as we are forgiven, we do a pretty good job of torturing one another ourselves. 

Jesus says, my Father is merciful and gracious, slow to anger, abounding in steadfast love, and relents from punishing. I am his Beloved Son. You who follow me are my kin, my beloved sisters and brothers, my true family. You are God’s Beloved. God forgives you 490 times to infinity and beyond. Go, and do likewise. And all shall be well; all shall be well; all manner of thing shall be well.