Bible Text: St Matthew 18:21-35 | Preacher: Rev. Dr. Christian Preus
The word “forgive” in the Greek means “send away.” When God forgives you your sins, He sends them away. The question is where does He send them? And you know the answer. He sends them to His Son. He lays them on Jesus and Jesus bears them. God requires an account from Him for your sins and He pays it. And He pays it with His anguish and suffering and death. Because He loves you.
God loves you. God so loved the world that He gave His only Son. It does not say, God so hated the world that He was forced to kill His Son so He could love the world. No. God loves the world. Father, Son, Holy Spirit, One God. Loves the world. When the Son bears your sins, God is bearing your sins, because the Son is God from eternity. God could not stand that your sin separated you from Him, so He sent it away from you and He sent it to Himself.
This is what you see with the king who pays his servant’s enormous debt. It’s 10,000 talents, which is a ridiculous number, it’s absurd, it’s hundreds of millions of dollars in today’s money. He forgives the debt. He sends it away. Where? Where does that debt go? Cause it has to go somewhere. The master has to take it. He has to eat it. It hurts him to forgive it. And that’s what God has done for you. When He sends your sins away, He sends them to Himself. And He pays for them with His love and that love consumes the darkness, destroys the devil’s power, and removes the barrier that you set up between yourself and God.
When you hear those words, “I forgive you all your sins,” you are hearing God say, I sent them away. Look at Jesus, look at God on that cross, hear His groaning and sighing, hear His cry, My God, My God, why have you forsaken Me, and know for certain your sins are gone and they are gone because God so loved the world that He gave His only Son.
When God forgives you He is sending your sins away, placing them on Himself, and that also means that He is sending them away from you. Where were they? These sins? Where were they before God took them and sent them away and put them on Jesus? They were in your heart and on your mind and weighing on your conscience and dividing you from people in your lives.
This slave, this servant, had a load on his mind before his king called him to pay his debt. You know this. You know what it is to have debt hanging over you, owing money and not knowing how you can pay; it’s a constant burden. But you can forget it for a time. You can just keep putting things on your credit card, keep delaying making payments on the loan, and you can put the worry off till a later time. Until the debt collectors come, or they turn off your electricity, or the bank threatens to take your house, then there is the reckoning.
This is the picture of our guilt, our debt of sin. We can push it to the back of our mind, but we know deep down there is something wrong, with us, with this world. But it isn’t till God comes with the preaching of His Law, that the reckoning comes. Where He says, You owe, pay up, and you can’t. And we need to listen to that Law. Allow it to humble you so that you realize the enormous debt of your sin and beg for mercy. Let me just go back to the fact that this guy owes ten thousand talents. It’s an impossible amount of money debt. Even the Greek editors of the New Testament, fifteen hundred years ago, had a hard time with this. Some tried to replace the word “ten thousand” with “many” or with “a hundred,” to try and make the debt somewhat manageable. But they missed the point and we would miss the point too, unless we look at that debt and see how unmanageable it is. You cannot make it up in a million lifetimes. The Law shows you your sin. You owed God everything. And what have you given Him in return? He has made you and loved you and cared for you and given you all that you have. And so the first and greatest commandment is Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. And you have placed your love in worthless things, especially in yourself, in your own desires and your own pride and your own advancement.
The way God solves your problem is by taking the debt Himself. The translation has “and out of pity,” He forgave, which is the translation of a Greek word that means literally to have heart-wrenching compassion. Splangnizomai. He feels it and He takes it and He pays for it. Because He loves you. He must demand the reckoning. You’ve sinned. He is holy. There must be a reckoning. But His love for you is so great that He demands the reckoning of Himself.
That is why you are forgiven. Notice how the parable does NOT go. It doesn’t start with an unforgiving servant or a forgiving servant for that matter. Never in all of Jesus’ sayings and parables does it ever start with you forgiving and so God forgives you. Or in you not forgiving and so God doesn’t forgive you. That’s not how it starts. It starts with God having compassion, with God forgiving. Every single time.
It used to trouble me horribly whether we were getting this wrong as Lutherans. Because everything depends on it. Our salvation depends on it. Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. Does God forgive me because I first forgive? And this is the devil’s great lie. It is the most prideful wickedness we could ever allow the devil to put in our heart. God’s forgiveness is not activated by yours. Imagine that! We forgive those who sin against us and God is so impressed that we forgave a measly debt of a hundred denarii that He is moved by our love to stop being angry and start showing love. What kind of a god is that? Not the Holy Trinity. Not the God of love. We don’t worship a God who has to be moved to love us by our love. Then He would never love. No, it’s exactly the opposite. He takes our unpayable debt on Himself moved by His love alone. He suffers it because He loves you. He takes it all away.
And that is why you forgive those who sin against you. Again, forgiving means sending away. Where do you send the sins of those who sin against you? Where God has sent yours. You throw them on Jesus. When someone does you wrong, gossips about you, betrays you, says unkind words, ignores you, hurts someone you love, hurts you, you send those sins away from your heart, and your mind, where they fester and make you bitter and angry and hurt, and you send them to Jesus. You remember where all your sins have gone, why they’re not on you, why the awful load doesn’t weigh on you anymore, why you can lift your head up and look God in the face and see Him smiling on you, because He placed all your sin and guilt and fear and death on Himself, and swallowed it up in the suffering of God on the cross. Send every sin there. That’s where it belongs. That’s where God put it. Your sin, the sin of those who hurt you. That’s where it all belongs. Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. That’s what it means to forgive. It doesn’t mean to excuse, to pretend the sins against us weren’t that bad. It means to send the sins to where God Himself insists they belong, on Jesus Christ, the Savior of the world, the God-Man, who loves us all.
Jesus’ parable ends with the warning that our Father in heaven will not forgive us if we don’t forgive others. That’s again NOT because our forgiveness triggers His. It’s because those who are forgiven forgive. When you find yourself not forgiving, when you find yourself bitter and wanting vengeance, when you feel like Peter that forgiving seven times is more than enough, then you need to return to the source of all forgiveness. You want that forgiveness for everyone. It’s what it means to love your neighbor as yourself, this more than anything, to want them to know and trust the forgiveness that comes from our King. Believe the truth yourself. Take it into your inmost soul. Cleanse your mind and heart by dwelling on God taking all your guilt and placing it on Himself, on the love of the God who died for you. And that will form you and you will forgive; you will send it all away, your sin, your neighbor’s sin, all of it, to Jesus, to whom be glory with the Father and the Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.