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Forgiveness by the Numbers
a sermon based on
Matthew 18:21-35
by Richard Gehring
Over the
past number of years, the prison population in the United States has
skyrocketed. According to the U.S. Department of Justice Bureau of
Justice Statistics, the number of people being held in prison or local
jails increased from just over half a million individuals in 1980 to
more than 2.2 million in 2006–more than quadrupling over that 26-year
period. When you add the number who were under parole or probation, the
number jumps to more than 7.2 million. That's one out of every 31
adults in this country that were under some sort of correctional
supervision in 2006. With this burgeoning population, it is little
wonder that expenditures on corrections have ballooned from about $10
billion in 1982 to more than $60 billion in 2005.
Probably
the most obvious example of our nation’s desire to get rid of criminals
is the growing number of prisoners on death row. There are now more
than 3200 inmates living on death row in this country—and have been at
least that many every year since 1996. And while the number of actual
executions has decreased steadily over the past few years, the U.S. in
2007 was still one of the top five nations in the world in carrying out
the death sentence—five nations that are responsible for nearly 90
percent of all instances of capital punishment worldwide.
Now, I
don’t expect you to remember all these numbers. But you clearly get a
picture of a nation that is not in a very forgiving mood. If someone
does something illegal, we expect them to be punished for it. We want
them locked up where they can’t do any harm to the general population;
and we want them kept there for a long time. We want the really serious
offenders put to death so they can never repeat their crimes. And, even
though we complain loudly about how high taxes are, we are willing to
spend big bucks to make sure that these things happen.
In our New
Testament text for today, however, Jesus has a few other numbers that he
throws around in regard to dealing with those who may have done us
wrong. This passage, which follows immediately on the heels of Jesus’
words regarding church discipline and conflict resolution, opens with
Peter asking Jesus, “Lord, if another member of the church sins against
me, how often should I forgive? As many as seven times?”
Actually,
Peter is being quite generous here. The rabbis of the time had
determined that forgiveness should be extended to a person for three
transgressions. But the fourth time someone committed the same sin
against you, you were free to take revenge on them. Peter is offering
to more do than double what the law would require him to do.
But Jesus
still finds Peter's answer very inadequate. He responds that seven is
not nearly a high enough number. Jesus tells his disciples to forgive
not just seven times, but either 77 or 70 times seven times, depending
on the translation. The exact number, of course, is irrelevant. For
Jesus isn't concerned here with establishing a new, rigid standard. He
isn't worried about actually counting the number of times a person sins
against him at all. His whole point is that forgiveness is not about
keeping track of somebody's wrongs. It's about going beyond the law,
way beyond the law, and responding in love and mercy rather than
according to a set of rules.
Then, to
illustrate his point, Jesus tells the story of the unforgiving servant.
Here, a servant has somehow fallen into a debt of an absolutely
unimaginable size: 10,000 talents. Now, a talent was the largest unit
of money in use at the time. The average worker back then would have had
to work more than 15 years in order to earn the equivalent of a single
talent. Thus, 10,000 talents in Jesus' time would equate to literally
billions of dollars by today's standards. [contiune]
