Forgiveness for Bitter Days [continued from page 1]

Forgiveness for Bitter Days ...Continued from page 1

But then Jesus curtails our calibrated grace by relating a two-act play:

Act 1: God forgives the unforgivable.

Therefore, the Kingdom of Heaven can be compared to a king who decided to bring his accounts up to date with ser­vants who had borrowed money from him. In the process, one of his debtors was brought in who owed him millions of dollars. He couldn’t pay, so his mas­ter ordered that he be sold ? along with his wife, his children and every­thing he owned ? to pay the debt (Matt. 18:23-25 NLT).

Such an immense debt. More literal translations say the servant owed 10,000 tal­ents. One talent equaled 6,000 denarii. One denarius equaled one day’s wage (Matt. 20:2). One talent, then, would equate to 6,000 days’ worth of work. Ten thousand talents would represent 60 million days or 240,000 years of labor. A person earning $100 a day would owe $6 billion.

Whoa! What an astronomical sum. Jesus employs hyperbole, right? He’s exag­gerating to make a point. Or is He? One person would never owe such an amount to another. But might Jesus be referring to the debt we owe to God?

Let’s calculate our indebtedness to him. How often do you sin, hmm, in an hour? To sin is to “fall short” (Rom. 3:23 NIV).

Worry is falling short on faith. Impatience is falling short on kindness. The critical spirit falls short on love. How often do you come up short with God? For the sake of discussion, let’s say 10 times an hour and tally the results. Ten sins an hour, times 16 waking hours (assuming we don’t sin in our sleep), times 365 days a year, times the average male life span of 74 years. I’m rounding the total off at 4,300,000 sins per person.

Tell me, how do you plan to pay God for your 4.3 million sin increments? Your payout is unachievable. Unreachable. You’re swimming in a Pacific Ocean of debt. Jesus’ point precisely. The debtor in the story? You and me. The king? God. Look at what God does.

He [the servant] couldn’t pay, so his master ordered that he be sold ? along with his wife, his children, and every­thing he owned ? to pay the debt. But the man fell down before his master and begged him, “Please be patient with me, and I will pay it all.” Then his master was filled with pity for him, and he released him and forgave his debt (Matt. 18:25-27 NLT). God pardons the zillion sins of selfish humanity. Forgives 60 million sin-filled days. “Out of sheer generosity he put us in right standing with himself. A pure gift. He got us out of the mess we’re in and restored us to where he always wanted us to be. And he did it by means of Jesus Christ” (Rom. 3:24).

God forgives the unforgivable. Were this the only point of the story, we’d have ample points to ponder. But this is only Act 1 of the two-act play. The punch line is yet to come.

Act 2: We do the unthinkable.

The forgiven refuse to forgive. But when the man left the king, he went to a fellow servant who owed him a few thousand dollars. He grabbed him by the throat and demanded instant pay­ment. His fellow servant fell down before him and begged for a little more time. “Be patient with me, and I will pay it,” he pleaded. But his creditor wouldn’t wait. He had the man arrested and put in prison until the debt could be paid in full (Matt. 18:28-30 NLT). Incomprehensible behavior. Multimil­lion-dollar forgiveness should produce a multimillion-dollar forgiver, shouldn’t it? The forgiven servant can forgive a petty debt, can’t he? This one doesn’t. Note, he won’t wait (18:30). He refuses to forgive. He could have. He should have. The forgiv­en should forgive. Which makes us won­der, did this servant truly accept the king’s forgiveness?

Something is missing from this story. Gratitude. Notably absent from the parable is the joy of the forgiven servant. Like the nine ungrateful lepers we read about in the last chapter, this man never tells the king “thank you.” He offers no words of appre­ciation, sings no song of celebration. His life has been spared, family liberated, sen­tence lifted, Titanic debt forgiven ? and he says nothing. He should be hosting a Thanksgiving Day parade. He begs for mercy like a student on the brink of flunk­ing out of college. But once he receives it, he acts as if he never scored less than a B.

Could his silence make the loudest point of the parable? “He who is forgiven little, loves little” (Luke 7:47 RSV). This man loves little apparently because he had received little grace.

You know who I think this guy is? A grace rejecter. He never accepts the grace of the king. He leaves the throne room with a sly smirk, as one who dodged a bullet, found a loophole, worked the system, pulled a fast one. He talked his way out of a jam. He bears the mark of the unforgiven ? he refuses to forgive.

When the king hears about the servant’s stingy heart, he blows his crown. He goes cyclonic: “You wicked servant! I forgave you all that debt because you begged me. Should you not also have had compas­sion on your fellow servant, just as I had pity on you?” And his master was angry, and delivered him to the torturers until he should pay all that was due to him. So My heavenly Father also will do to you if each of you, from his heart, does not forgive his brother his trespasses (Matt. 18:32-35 NKJV).

The curtain falls on Act 2, and we are left to ponder the principles of the story. The big one comes quickly. The grace-given give grace. Forgiven people forgive people. The mercy-marinated drip mercy. “God is kind to you so you will change your hearts and lives” (Rom. 2:4 NCV).

We are not like the unchanged wife. Before her conversion to Christ, she end­lessly nagged, picked on and berated her husband. When she became a Christian, nothing changed. She kept nagging. Finally he told her, “I don’t mind that you were born again. I just wish you hadn’t been born again as yourself.”

One questions if the wife was born again to start with. Apple trees bear apples, wheat stalks produce wheat and forgiven people forgive people. Grace is the natural outgrowth of grace.

The forgiven who won’t forgive can expect a sad fate ? a life full of many bad and bitter days. The “master...delivered him to the torturers until he should pay all that was due to him” (Matt. 18:34 NKJV).

Hoard hurts in your heart and expects the joy level of a Siberian death camp. A friend shared with me the fate of a hoard­ing grandmother. Like the Collyer brothers, she refused to part with anything. Her fam­ily witnessed two terrible consequences: she lost sleep and treasures. She couldn’t rest because junk covered her bed. She lost treasures because they were obscured by mountains of trash. Jewelry, photographs, favorite books ? all were hidden.

No rest. No treasures. Squirrel away your hurts and expect the same.

Or clean your house and give the day a fresh chance! “But, Max, the hurt is so deep.”

I know. They took much. Your inno­cence, your youth, your retirement. But why let them keep taking from you? Haven’t they stolen enough? Refusing to forgive keeps them loitering, taking still.

“But, Max, what they did was so bad.”

You bet it was. Forgiveness does not mean approval. You aren’t endorsing misbehavior. You are entrusting your offender to Him who judges righteously (1 Pet. 2:23 NKJV).

“But, Max, I’ve been so angry for so long.”

And forgiveness won’t come overnight. But you can take baby steps in the direction of grace. Forgive in phases. Quit cursing the perpetrator’s name. Start praying for him. Try to understand her situation.

Let Antwone Fisher inspire you. He had ample reason to live with a cluttered heart. For the first 33 years of his life, he knew neither of his parents. His father had died before Antwone was born. And his moth­er, for reasons that he longed to know, abandoned him as a boy. He grew up as a foster child in Cleveland, abused, neglect­ed and desperate to find a single member of his family.

Equipped with the name of his father and a Cleveland phone book, he began calling people of the same last name. His life changed the day an aunt answered the phone. He told her his date of birth and his father’s identity. He described the difficult turns his life had taken: being kicked out by his foster mom, serving a stint in the Navy, now holding his own as a security guard in Los Angeles.

Her voice was warm. “You have a big family.” Before long another aunt invited him to Cleveland for a Thanksgiving reunion and filled the week with a lifetime of belated love.

And then, after days of calls and attempts, his family found his mother’s brother. He offered to take Antwone to the housing project where she lived. On the drive Antwone rehearsed the questions he’d longed to ask for the last three decades:

Why didn’t you come for me? Didn’t you ever wonder about me? Didn’t you miss me at all?

But the questions were never uttered. The door opened, and Antwone walked into a dimly lit apartment with shabby fur­niture. Turning, he saw a frail woman who looked too old to be his mother. Her hair was uncombed. She wore her night-clothes.

Antwone’s uncle said to her, “This is Antwone Quenton Fisher.” Antwone’s mother made the connection and started to moan, losing her footing, holding on to a chair. “Oh, God, please...Oh, God.” She turned her face away in shame and hurried out of the room, crying.

Antwone learned that his mother had tried to get a man to marry her so she could raise her son, but couldn’t. She had gone on to bear four other children, also raised as wards of the state. Over the years she’d been hospitalized, incarcerated and put on probation. And when he realized how painful her years had been, he chose to forgive.

He writes, “Though my road had been long and hard, I finally understood that my mother’s had been longer and harder... Where the hurt of abandonment had lived inside me, now there was only compassion.”2

In the end, we all choose what lives inside us. May you choose forgiveness.