Sermon 17th September 2023 – 16th Sunday after Pentecost
Text: Matthew
18:21-35 – An unpayable debt
If you have a
credit card you probably try your hardest to pay it off in full or at least pay
as much as you can to limit the amount of interest charged. There are 3 options
when you receive your statement. You can pay it off in full and accrue no
interest charge. You can pay part of it as long as it’s more than the minimum
amount due and pay interest on the
balance. Or, if you’re having an expensive month, you can pay the amount they
call the minimum amount payable.
What you may
notice on your monthly bill, and it’s required by law, is a notice to let you
know how long it will take to pay your account in full if you only pay the
minimum amount each month and it can be quite staggering. We always pay our
credit card off in full but on our last statement which was around $1,500, it
had in the notice that if we only paid the minimum amount each month and made
no extra purchases it would take us just over 4 years to pay off this debt and
around half of that would be interest.
So, in today’s
Gospel reading we have a servant who has accrued much more than what I accrued
last month. He owed 10,000 talents which in today’s estimates is estimated at
200,000 years of labor! It is 60,000,000 working days. In modern money, it is
approximately $3 and a half billion dollars.
Many questions
are raised in this parable told by Jesus. How did he accrue such a massive
debt? He begged for mercy promising to pay it off. How could he ever pay off
that amount, is the question we ask, Then we are told that the king imprisoned
him, his wife and children and took all his possessions until the debt was paid
– but how would he pay it if he was imprisoned. It sounds absurd – ridiculous –
unimaginable – but the point Jesus is making is that this is the reality of our
debt to God. Not a monetary debt – but a debt of holiness for our sinfulness. And
we can make the same claims. It’s absurd – ridiculous – how on earth could we
accumulate such a debt to God? I’m not such a bad person. Are we that evil?
The point Jesus
is trying to make is that it’s not that we have accumulated such a large debt
but that our debt is unpayable because of our sinful nature. You may ask, how
is that possible. People say it’s unfair. What choice did I have as we confess
that we are born sinful. In fact, Psalm 51 says just that: Surely I was sinful
at birth, sinful from the time my mother conceived me. And it’s even more
unfair when the good we do doesn’t account for anything. It’s because the good
that we do does not pay for the sin we have committed.
The good we do
is what we should be doing nonetheless.
Now, hear me out
on this. But the fact that our debt is unpayable, as unfair and as unreasonable
as it sounds, is actually Good News. It’s good news on 2 fronts.
Firstly. The
fact that our debt is unpayable means that we have to do what the servant did. Fall
on our knees and seek God’s mercy. God loves us and wants us to spend eternity
with him in heaven – and if that is not possible because of our unpayable debt
then it’s not our problem – it’s God’s problem. God tried to deal with sin in
so many ways in the Old Testament. He sent a world-wide flood because he could
no longer contend with humanity and decided to eradicate all human beings. But
his love for us could not fulfil that so he preserved one family – Noah and his
wife – his 3 sons and their wives. Despite this cleansing, sin returned. So God
devised a Priesthood and a system of sacrifices to cleanse his people from sin.
But they kept on sinning in particular worshiping gods that our Lord had
forbidden them to do. He had warned them that if they did that he would cast
them out of the Promised Land – literally it says the land would vomit them
out. He did so sending Israel to exile in Assyria and Judah into Babylon.
But again, God’s
heart was broken and after 70 years he brought them home and rebuilt their
temple. And he decided that the only way to deal with our sin was to take our
sin upon himself. And God recognized that our destination into heaven could
only be assured if he did not seek to punish the sinner but to take our sin
upon himself. And so, as Paul so eloquently puts it – God made him (Jesus) who
had no sin to become our sin so that we could become the righteousness of God. The
wages of sin is death, as Paul states, so God satisfied sin’s demands by the
death of his own sinless Son. And as Jesus had no sin to pay by his death, his
death paid our sin. That’s the good news. Our unpayable debt paid in full by
God’s own son.
The 2nd part to
this is the comfort it brings to us NOW – and not as we stand before the
Judgment Seat that Paul talks about in our 2nd reading: For we will all stand
before the judgment seat of God. For it is written, "As I live, says the
Lord, every knee shall bow to me, and every tongue shall give praise to
God." So then, each of us will be accountable to God.
As Christians,
we don’t have to wait until Judgment Day to know what the outcome of our
judgment will be. Our sin was forgiven on the cross when Jesus died. What we
would never want would be to have our eternity worked out like a school exam. Where
you work all year – sit a final exam – and then you have to wait for the
examiners to correct your work and let you know whether you’ve passed or not. That’s
not how we want to live our lives – wondering how we will fair before the
judgment seat.
And that’s why
we don’t take into account good works for comfort. Because we would never know
if we’ve done enough. And the pass mark for God is not 50%, 80% or even 99.9% It’s
100% with no exceptions. As James says in his letter: For whoever keeps the
whole law and yet stumbles at just one point is guilty of breaking all of it. But
the good news is – God has had mercy on us and for the sake of Jesus Christ our
Lord HAS forgiven us all our sins.
But what about
the last part of that parable. Where the forgiven servant goes out and demands
restitution from one of his own servants. And when the servant begs for the
same mercy, he refuses. And as a result the first servant has had his
forgiveness revoked and is thrown into prison. And those harsh and stark words
by Jesus to us: So my heavenly Father will also do to every one of you, if you
do not forgive your brother or sister from your heart.
Let’s fully
understand what Jesus is saying – because this is also what we pray in the
Lord’s Prayer; Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us. What
was the problem? The problem was that the first servant didn’t grasp the
enormity of his debt. And as a result he did not feel or understand the
enormity of the mercy he had been given.
He experienced only the extent of the forgiveness he was prepared to offer.
And that’s the
message Jesus is sending to us. Do we really want to feel the mercy God has
extended to us? Do we really want to feel the peace of God that the world
cannot give? Then it is only limited by the limits we ourselves place on our
experience. God has forgiven you all your sins. But if we cannot extend the
same grace to others then we will not know just how much Christ’s death for us
means. Let us remember that we are saved by God grace. So we are not saved by
our actions which is how this warning can often be misinterpreted. If you don’t
forgive then God won’t forgive you.
Compare that to
Zaccheaus who when he received Jesus into his home felt the full extent of
God’s mercy and reciprocated: “Look, Lord! Here and now I give half of my
possessions to the poor, and if I have cheated anybody out of anything, I will
pay back four times the amount.” Jesus said to him, “Today salvation has come
to this house. Today salvation has come to you by the grace and mercy of God.
So may that Good
News of the mercy of God free you to experience that mercy by sharing it with
others and know and experience the peace of God that surpasses all our
understanding and will guard and watch over your hearts, now and forever.
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