In Debt to God’s Grace

How do you explain the idea of sin as being in debt to someone, perhaps in debt to God?  This is how Jesus explains it in the parable from the Gospel lesson, about an unforgiving servant.   

Apparently sin has some kind of value, such that debt can be accrued by sinning repeatedly against someone.  This is a difficult statement, because you could imagine that sin is just one person’s opinion against another person’s opinion of what is right or wrong.  That only God can judge, so our opinions about sin are of little importance, maybe it doesn’t even matter.  Except when one person sins against another person; now, there are consequences.  Maybe humans are lining up against each other in defense of their beliefs about what constitutes a sin.   

And what is God up to, while all this is going on?   

The idea that God is keeping track of all sins, accounting for sins and, presumably, collecting on debts owed by sinners, was in the discussion among Jewish rabbis during the time of the Second Temple, before Jesus was born.  In today’s Gospel text, we see the discussion is still going on during Jesus’s lifetime.  So Jesus’s disciple Peter is asking, how many times do I gotta forgive someone?  When do I get to stop giving them more chances?   

In a commentary on this Gospel text, Nicholas J. Schaser, Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Macalester College, notes that the Second Temple teacher Jesus ben Sira, who would have been part of this conversation among rabbis, wrote this about sin in the apocryphal text Sirach:  

“The vengeful will face the Lord’s vengeance, for he keeps a strict account of their sins. Forgive your neighbor the wrong he has done, and then your sins will be pardoned when you pray. Does anyone harbor anger against another and expect healing from the Lord? If people have no mercy toward those like themselves, can they then seek pardon for their own sins?” (Sirach 28:1–4). 

Professor Schaser explains it this way: “Ben Sira’s words summarize the logic of Jesus’s parable: Since God keeps an “account” of human sins—notice the financial language—humans should be open to offering forgiveness if they hope for God to overlook their own debts.”¹ 

In Jesus’s parable, there’s a servant with a huge debt to his king, a comedically large debt.  Since the terms of money came up, here’s what they mean.  In the ancient world, a denarius is a day’s wages for a soldier or a day laborer.  So 100 denarii would be 100 days’ wages, so something like three or four months of wages, who knows, this was before weekends were invented.  So it’s not nothing, but it’s a debt that’s possible to repay.  However one talent is about 20 years’ worth of these wages.  So ten thousand talents is an incredibly huge number, more than someone could pay off in their own lifetime.  This is a debt that would last generations.  As much as you wonder how anyone could pay that off, I also wonder: how did you even get into that much debt?   

But Jesus isn’t talking about how the debt came about, just that it needs to be repaid.  So the servant begs forgiveness, and surprisingly, the king grants that forgiveness.  This is life-changing.  Have you ever paid off a loan, how good that feels to not be in debt anymore?  Well for this servant, the feeling doesn’t last long, because he immediately tries to collect on another, much smaller debt—the 100 denarii, 100 days’ wages.  And instead of having mercy, or forgiving that debt, the servant throws his own debtor into prison—what’s that even going to do?   

Can you see why people care about this, and tattle on the servant, telling the king what the servant did?  This is where Jesus is giving us a viewpoint from God, how silly it looks to be forgiven a massive amount of debt, then go around trying to unmercifully collect on other much smaller debts.   

How does this relate to sin?  The point is that you can never get yourself out of it.  This is why some of our common words for confession of sins include the words “we confess that we are captive to sin and we cannot free ourselves.”  Only God can set us free.   

And yes, God will forgive our sins.  We confess, we ask God’s forgiveness, and God gives us freedom and a fresh start and also love and support to move forward in a better way.  But God’s love is so huge that it’s easy to take for granted.  The Godly Play tradition of telling the creation story, the story begins with the question: what is the biggest gift you have ever been given?  Some gifts are so big, you forget they’re even gifts.   

Sure, God will forgive your sins, so does that mean you take God’s grace for granted?  Are you brushing off your sins and your wrongs as inconsequential, thinking maybe that makes God look good, to be so powerful?  Are you creating a trail of destruction that you’re expecting God to clean up after you?  Are you the greedy restaurant patron ordering everything on the menu expecting someone else to pay for it?  Are you pleased with your behavior?   

Jesus’s point is not the threat at the end of the parable about “so my heavenly father will also” torture you in prison until your full debt is paid.  The point is the forgiveness, the mercy extended from God to you, and the mercy that you are called to extend to others.  If you’re counting how many times you’re forgiving someone, you’re already doing it wrong.  Forgiveness is not a math problem.  The point is the restoration of relationship.   

Did it ever occur to you that perhaps God is not terribly interested in policing humanity, looking out for who is sinning and how bad is it and how to punish people?  God is more interested in a loving relationship with humanity—merciful and caring, open to delight—and God is more interested in our human relationships with each other, that we are caring for each other rather than tattling or keeping score of wrongs committed.   

It’s this challenge of human relationships that Paul is addressing in the letter to the Romans, specifically the church in Rome, which Paul never visited.  Paul is using words like strong and weak and referencing meat and vegetables with weird value judgments—there’s a reason for this.  Rome was the site of sacrifices to many gods, and what was sacrificed was meat.  For ordinary people without a lot of money, the only way they’d get meat to eat is if it had been sacrificed to some other Roman god.  For Christians, this created a problem, because eating meat could look like they’re fine with Roman gods, but some Christians thought, well, it’s not the god I worship, and it’s delicious, so who cares?   

Paul’s point is not to get caught up in this debate, but to be supportive of how people live their faith in Jesus because we’re all in this together.  We do not live to ourselves, and we do not die to ourselves.   

So how do we live together?  We have one earth to share, and no one gets to win the whole thing.  How does it change your life to know you are loved by God, that your sins are forgiven and your debt is erased?  Can that filter into your relationships, giving other people the benefit of the doubt?  Or how can you apply Martin Luther’s teaching regarding the 8^th commandment against bearing false witness: go a step further and interpret your neighbor’s actions in the best possible light?   

For this, we absolutely need help from God, and the good news for us is that help has already arrived.  May God’s mercy empower you to radical love. 

Amen.   

Pastor Cheryl