Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
September 14, 2008

Scripture:

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

We don’t get it. We Christians don’t get it. Almost no one gets it. The Gospel truth is that God is a God who forgives. Period. No ifs, ands, or buts. God forgives. Everyone. Always. No matter what. That’s a big part of what it means to say that God is a God of grace. Forgiveness is a part of grace, and if grace is in any way conditional, it isn’t grace. So there are and can be no conditions on God’s forgiveness. And we don’t get it. We keep insisting on making God’s forgiveness depend on something, often repentance. We keep insisting that people, ourselves included, have to do something before God can forgive us. Many, actually I suspect most, Christians think God forgives only Christians, that having the “correct” faith is a condition to receiving forgiveness. People balk at the idea that God’s forgiveness is free and for everyone.

As you can certainly tell, I am convinced that this understanding of God’s forgiveness is incorrect; but I have to admit that it’s not surprising that we don’t get it that God’s forgiveness comes without conditions attached. Most of the authors of the writings that ended up in the Bible didn’t get it either. Take our reading from Genesis this morning, for example. It is the very end of the long story of Joseph and his brothers. Joseph’s brothers hated him because, although he was the youngest of them, he was the favorite of their father Jacob. There is also a hint in the Genesis stories about Joseph that his brothers hated him because he was insufferably arrogant—a real boor. Be that as it may, they hated him. So they sold him into slavery to some Arab traders who took him to Egypt. There, the story goes, he rose to a position of great power in Pharaoh’s household and years later saved his brothers and all the Israelites when they fled to Egypt to escape a famine back home. In the part of the story we heard this morning, Joseph forgives his brothers after they tell him, truthfully or not, that their father Jacob’s dying wish was that he do so.

Joseph forgives his brothers, but he doesn’t really get it about forgiveness any more than we do. He didn’t really forgive them so much as he convinced himself that they hadn’t really done anything wrong, that they didn’t really need forgiving. Joseph says in effect: Yes, you intended to harm me; but really it wasn’t you acting here at all. It was God. What you did wasn’t the evil, sinful thing that it appeared to be. It was really a good thing that God was doing. God used you and your evil intent to do a good thing, namely, to put me in a position to save you and all the people from famine. So yes, I forgive you. You were merely God’s pawns, so I don’t hold what you did against you.

But we have to ask: What if the famine had never struck back home in Canaan? Or what if Joseph hadn’t become the de facto ruler of all Egypt? What if Joseph hadn’t found a way to see what his brothers did as God’s doing and not theirs at all? Would he have forgiven them then? We have no reason to think that he would have. Forgiveness in this story is conditional. It isn’t free. It is the result of a rationalization. The author of the Joseph saga really didn’t get it about forgiveness.

Then there’s Matthew’s parable of the wicked tenants. Here we’re talking in a parable about God’s forgiveness, and Matthew paints a picture of divine forgiveness that makes that forgiveness radically conditional. In this parable, God forgives only if people act the way God wants them to act. The parable tells of a king, clearly meant to represent God, who forgives an enormous debt owned to him by a slave. Matthew says the debt was 10,000 talents, and a talent was about fifteen years’ wages for a laborer. So the amount of this debt is 150,000 years worth of a laborer’s wages, a debt no slave could ever have incurred, much less pay back. Matthew is using hyperbole here to say that the king is forgiving a truly enormous debt. When the king forgives the slave’s debt, the slave turns around and demands that another slave pay im a debt of only 100 denarii, or 100 days worth of wages for a laborer, a debt infinitesimally smaller than the one the king had just forgiven the first slave. When the second slave begs the first slave to give him time, just as the first slave had begged the king, the first slave refuses and throws the second slave into debtor’s prison. When the king hears of it he demands that the first slave repay his impossible debt and has him tortured until he does. Matthew’s Jesus tells us that God will do the same to us if we don’t forgive our brothers and sisters.

Let us put aside for the moment Matthew’s belief that God tortures people who don’t do what God wants. That’s Matthew speaking. It’s an idea that appears throughout the Gospel of Matthew but only rarely elsewhere in the New Testament. Look at what the parable says about the nature of God’s forgiveness. That forgiveness is totally conditional. It is extended to those who do what God wants, but there is no forgiveness at all for those who don’t. In Matthew’s view, God’s forgiveness is a reward for our own forgiving of others. It is not free. It is not unmerited. It is not grace. The author of the Gospel of Matthew didn’t get it about the nature of God’s forgiveness.

So is there no Biblical warrant for my contention that God’s forgiveness is free and unconditional? Actually, there is. Lots of it. We have a good example of it in the third lectionary reading we heard this morning, some lines from Psalm 103 that we read as the Call to Worship. There the Psalmist tells us of a God very different from the one in Matthew’s parable. He talks not of what we have to do to earn God’s forgiveness but of divine forgiveness simply being part of who God is. He says:

“The Lord is merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love….He does not deal with us according to our sins, nor repay us according to our iniquities. For as the heavens are high above the earth, so great is his steadfast love toward those who fear him; as far as the east is from the west, so far he removes our transgressions from us….”

True, there is that phrase “toward those who fear him,” but I don’t think that really changes the point. The Psalmist is talking about who God is in God’s very nature. God here is a God of forgiveness, and the Psalmist doesn’t really make God’s forgiveness conditional. He makes it part of who God is. God is merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love. The God of Matthew’s parable was very quick to anger and had a very limited supply of steadfast love. The Psalm says that God simply does not deal with us according to our sins, nor repay us according to our iniquities. The God of Matthew’s parable dealt with the unforgiving slave exactly according to his sins and repaid him exactly according to his iniquities. The Psalmist, writing perhaps hundreds of years before Matthew, had a much better grasp of who God is and how God relates to us. And by the way: So much for the New Testament God being a God of love, mercy, and grace and the Old Testament God being a God of wrath and judgment. Here it’s exactly the other way around. We find the God of love, mercy, and grace in an ancient Jewish prayer and the God of wrath and judgment in a Christian Gospel.

So, know that God forgives you. Know that God loves you. Absolutely. Unconditionally. Know that God loves everyone. Absolutely. Unconditionally. I don’t know about you, but I know that if God really is the way Matthew portrays God, torturing those who don’t measure up to God’s ways and God’s desires, I’m in big trouble. I’m not a Lutheran per se, but I get it when I read that it was Martin Luther’s profound sense of his own sinfulness and his inability to find reconciliation with God through anything he could do himself that drove him to his understanding of God as a God of grace and not a God who demands good works. I know that I’m not perfect and that I never will be. I know that, as Paul says, I will always sin and fall short of the glory of God. So Psalm 103 speaks to me in a way that Matthew’s parable of the wicked slave does not. It speaks a truth about God to me in a way that Matthew’s Gospel as a whole does not. The Psalm is good news for me in a way that Matthew’s judgmental, vengeful God is not.

And it helps me when I remember that God forgives everyone the same way God forgives me. It helps me to curb my anger. It helps me to unload my hatred. I don’t do either of those things all that well, as some of you can attest; but in my better moments I try to remember that God also loves and forgives those whom I have so much trouble loving and forgiving, and it helps calm me down. It helps make me a more living and forgiving person—more loving and forgiving, not perfectly loving and forgiving. That’s who God is. It’s not who I am. It is probably not who you are. The great good news of Psalm 103 is that we don’t have to be. God does not deal with us according to our hatred and our anger but according to God’s steadfast love, mercy, and grace. And that, my friends, is very good news indeed. Amen.