Another Problematic Parable: Do We Have to Forgive Jerks?

Sermon

Our text picks up where we left off last week, so I want to give you additional context for where we were in worship last week, too. You all did an excellent job welcoming me with a thoughtful litany, since my full-time contract started this month; thank you for that. However, if you were here in July and August, you hopefully noticed that I was also here then. I was half-time in those months, so no offense if you half-missed me. But on my first day in the office then, Beth asked if I would like to preach, I think the next week, and I quickly said yes. Because who wants to say no to the Queen of Worship on their first day? But later I went to read the texts and they weren’t great. There were three not-great-first-time-preaching-in-a-new-church texts—and then a problematic parable, and I went with the parable. If you weren’t here or don’t recall, I think we all ended up fine. I would’ve preferred to have talked slower, but we’d just met. I was nervous. And not every story from the Bible is good. Cut to: weeks later, Beth asks me if I want to preach.

And I think, “Ahahaha, you’re not gonna get me this time, Bible.” And I stop and look at the texts before I say “yes” this time, and I see 70 times seven in the Gospel text for the day and I think: Jackpot… I love a seven. Seven is a great number. It has wonderful holy significance, literal wholeness and holiness, like seven days of the week. I also love a three. I like threes, I like sevens; I often base quick decisions on if there is a three or a seven in the scenario. For example, earlier this week, I got to 37 minutes of working out, and said, “Yes, God, this is the right amount of exercise today.”

Now, I’m pretty sure, based on my patented decision-making process, that I saw those sevens in this text and missed the parable, because this is a worse parable than that one I picked before, if I may be so bold to say. But here we are… Not all of Jesus’ parables are great. So, I’ll repeat something I said last time that one of my all-time favorite authors and ministers, Frederick Buechner, has said about parables; he said that “parables are like jokes.” They’re not big codes to be broken down so much as they are things to hold up and look at together, critically. And this reminds me not to take them so seriously. Or it at least helps me to think that maybe I take parables more seriously than Jesus. Either way, this isn’t a great joke.

I wouldn’t tell this joke. I wouldn’t want to hear it, especially from Jesus. All of this thinking about parables as jokes has me wanting to have a come-to-Jesus moment with Jesus about what He sees as the purpose of a joke. Because I understand humor as being important to relationships. Humor at its best brings us together. Good humor should not tear others down. I imagine Jesus would agree with this because in this same chapter is “the parable of the wandering sheep,” where a shepherd leaves 99 sheep to find just one. I don’t have any statistics like that; however, I’m certain that we’re considerably more likely to cry with someone who we have laughed with first. Another one of my favorite authors, Anne Lamott, says, “Laughter is carbonated holiness,” which is to say it is light, and buoyant, and sacred. And at the start, I know that this parable, or really even all those holy sevens before the parable, have been used to isolate and hurt people, to urge people in abusive situations to keep forgiving 77 times. And in some translations, it’s not 77 times, it’s seven times 70 times… and so this story has been used to convince people into forgiving until they’re no longer capable of doing the math.

If you hear me say nothing else, hear me say: I’m not saying that. Jesus is not saying that. Because forgiveness is not an excuse for continued abuse. But forgiveness is often a weight carried by those abused. Likewise, I worry that this joke might encourage some people to say hateful, thoughtless, wrong things like: “See, slavery is Biblical. Jesus told this story about slavery.” Some translations interpret the word slave here as “servant,” and there’s a lot of good scholarship to say that the context Jesus is talking about here is something more like a debtors’ prison, or a feudal system, with lords managing land, and this wouldn’t have been like the slavery that our country perpetuated… and honestly, that’s all validating my concern that this story is not a good joke. I worry this is a slippery slope to justifying treating people like property. Chris gently pointed out in our staff meeting how terrible debt is, and I was reminded how our society’s systems of power have used debt to control people, often children, their families, people of color, certainly people experiencing homelessness. This joke is an illustration of how interlocking systems of oppression tangle all of us in badly. I worry this is a story that supports governors or presidential candidates, any person with privilege, saying things like, “This is just how it was,” trying to convince us there’s nothing we can do to reform oppressive systems we’ve inherited and perpetuated. I know that this wasn’t Jesus’ intent; Jesus came to set us free, Jesus taught us to pray “forgive us our debts” and us our debtors. But I still wish Jesus had skipped this story.

I don’t see how this joke is a good way to help us with the forgiveness it seems like Jesus wants us to know. Immeasurable grace; sending our sins away as far as the east is from the west, literally impossibly far. Everlasting, which is one of my favorite Hebrew words in the psalm today—olam—it’s forever forward, like you’d imagine, but it’s also forever backward. It’s forever in every direction—there are no numbers or words for God’s grace: it is immeasurable.

I worry that people will think that the king in this joke is supposed to be God. And I don’t want an immeasurably wealthy king, let alone a God, weighing the pros and cons of selling families. We can’t really translate these monetary amounts well, but the best interpretation I’ve found is to say that the king forgave an immeasurable amount, an amount of money that would be hard to grasp at any time in any terms. And then the man the king forgives is so overcome by the joy of his freedom from this absurd amount of debt that he demands a measurable amount from a fellow enslaved person?! He’s doing something wrong. We see that; people stuck in the system see that. What we might not all be able to see is that he’s still doing his job, existing in a system. In a system like this, with people owing money to a king… this guy owed the king a great amount of money and below him others owed him money and it’s everyone’s job toward the top to get the money from below, all while quietly taking enough for themselves to survive or thrive. The king didn’t say: you’re forgiven and now this entire economic system we have is over (and I don’t know how much I’d trust a king who was about to sell my family). All that to say, it’s hard to be forgiven and then go out and live in the world. We don’t live in a forgiving world! How are we supposed to receive unfathomable forgiveness and then morally struggle to order things our kid needs from Amazon… or sit in traffic? It’s difficult to yell: “I forgive you all!” on the 405. Because God’s forgiveness is unfathomable, we can’t easily complete it like 37 minutes of exercise.

Buechner said parables are like jokes in that they are often silly answers to silly questions. But I don’t think Peter’s question is silly here. Jesus gave us some guidelines last week. Three steps when you’ve been wronged: you tell someone they’ve wronged you, you go with someone else to tell someone they’ve wronged you, you tell the church, and then it’s over. There’s a limit. We’re human. We have limits. It seems totally reasonable to me that Peter would ask if seven is enough. It doesn’t seem like he’s trying to be cheeky, and maybe that’s the balance and the boundary between immeasurable grace and knowing that Jesus wouldn’t want any of us to continue in a situation that isn’t freeing. You can forgive someone an immeasurable amount in your heart without continuing to talk to them, without continuing to go to church with them—you can forgive someone in your heart without them. It’s not as simple as three or seven times, of course, but it’s not as painful or as isolating as forgiving 490 times without question.

And so, Eliz, the wisest of our elder millennials, asked the church staff the great philosophical query of this text: “Do we have to forgive jerks?” And I am feeling lately that it’s beyond us to offer immeasurable grace: we aren’t God. But I believe we can forgive in our hearts. We can tap into God’s grace. We can live in a way of abundance, the abundant life that Christ brought us, not torturing ourselves or others. It’s the last line of this parable that bothers me the most, and I looked at it in every translation. Jesus certainly makes it sound like God tortures us, which is very problematic. But that’s not right. God doesn’t torture (I looked at what I said I’d preach on the next time I preach; it’s another parable and there’s “weeping and gnashing of teeth” in it, and maybe that’s the joke—Why am I torturing us?)! But knowing immeasurable grace, knowing God’s love is everlasting to everlasting, that freedom will feel like torture if we can’t live into it. We all know people and have been people who couldn’t let something go. And we have human limits—we can’t get life right every time. We can’t tell the best joke every time. We need waffles and naps. But when we do that, I’m hopeful we’ll remember God’s immeasurable love for us, tap into the unfathomable forgiveness God assures to us, forgive in our hearts, and go out into the world freer and help free others. Amen.