Clogged
Exodus 14:19-31; Matthew 18:21-35

September 14, 2008


Jesus and other Biblical authors have a math problem. Where a few moderate estimates would work quite adequately in getting the point across, Jesus, and he is not alone, goes for the big bang. The going rate on forgivenesses is three, suggested often by the rabbis as a reasonable number for a reasonable person. This is not three strikes and you are out, but four strikes and you are out. Peter thought he was really being generous and terribly forgiving by suggesting seven times to forgive someone who had harmed him.

Jesus darts back with not seven, but seventy-seven or seventy times seven. He really wasn’t counting, this was simply an exercise in dynamic rhetoric. If Peter had suggested four, Jesus would have said, nope, forty-four or forty times four. Jesus was just being ridiculous, especially with the possibility of 490 forgivings. How many times have you counted anything up to 490? Jesus was being ridiculous because counting the times you forgive another person misses the point altogether. To forgive someone once for something really hurtful is monumentally hard at that.

Just to prove how ridiculous he was being, how math challenged he had become, Jesus begins a parable with a poor guy who owed ten thousand talents and was being dragged before the king. When you get down to it, he couldn’t have been very poor at all. A talent had nothing to do with how good you were at some task, but a unit of money equally roughly to fifteen years’ wages of a labourer. That is an incredible amount of money, even at minimum wage. Why, accounting for inflation it could even buy you a full tank of gas! That ‘poor fellow’ had somehow gone through 150,000 years of money, and I daresay even the wealthiest among you have not even approached that. Yet, the king forgave him all of it. Besides the money, there had to be criminal charges pending as well, but the king forgave him everything. He was free.

Free enough, it turns out, to turn on the fellow worker who had one of those fancy lattes at Starbucks with him the previous week and he had loaned him the $4.73 his friend realized at the last minute he didn’t have. Our free, once poor fellow went berserk, blue in the face swearing at him when he still didn’t have the $4.73 on him, and had him arrested. The other workers saw this horrifying event take place and reported it to the king who wasted no time in summoning the poor fellow. Maybe this counted as the 491st offence. The king was amazed at how little grace and compassion this guy had after being shown amazing grace indeed, and this time put him into prison until he could pay back the 10,000 talents. Of course, if you are in prison you can’t work to pay anything back, so it was a life sentence, maybe even a death sentence.

Every Sunday we recite the Lord’s Prayer. The most daunting, terrible word in it is “as.” Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us. It really never ends. Forgiveness is an as event, not an occasional spiritual activity. It is the continual theme, the tune running through our head, of being Christian, for even the saints among us need to be forgiven daily more than they have the opportunity to forgive others.

We usually tend to interpret forgiveness as an individual problem, and that can weigh us down depending upon our forgiveness quotient. Reinhold Niebuhr wrote a famous book in the 1930’s entitled, Moral Man and Immoral Society. The title gives it away. People can be very moral, very kind and generous and forgiving on an one to one individual basis, especially with people one knows. Yet something different happens when we gather into groups and organizations, even churches. As a society we can justify behaviour that can embarrass the most callous people if they were accused of doing it to another individual.

Northwest of Edinburgh in the old city of Stirling, Scotland, is the Church of the Holy Rude, an medieval name for the Cross. Established in 1129, it was always in the midst of history, Mary Queen of Scots being crowned in the church in 1543. But the 1600’s were a turbulent time, religion and politics fought hand in hand. The Presbyterian pastor, James Guthrie, was a rather intolerant and bigoted leader who refused to accept his more moderate colleague. The conflict escalated and in those days the town council had to get involved and finally settled upon a logical Solomonic solution. In 1656 the council built a brick wall down the middle of the church, dividing the congregation into east and west congregations. They remained that way until 1936 when the congregations reunited and removed the wall. There is still a line from floor to ceiling down the middle of the church as a marker and reminder of Christians who could not forgive one another for so long it became a way of life. I am sure there were saints in the pews on both sides of the wall, moral men and women, immoral societies.

No doubt it was an immoral society in Egypt and it took the tenth plague of the death of the first-born to break down the hardened heart of the Pharaoh and let Israel go. Except that the Egyptians really didn’t let them go. Like many an oppressor they pursued their slaves at their weakest moment, backed up against the Red Sea. This is one story I don’t need to tell you what happened next.

Well, I will tell you something. When you are sure someone has done you wrong, has hurt you and taken away something that belonged to you, cannot imagine forgiving and letting go, your mind thinks differently. Driven by their furor against the slaves who had done them wrong, they kept pursuing. The charioteers of Pharaoh knew that the Red Sea doesn’t go dry; they knew there was something awesomely unusual afoot here. Speaking of feet, before they started to think again they were into the middle of the Red Sea which wasn’t exactly dry. The wheels of the chariots started to clog up in the Saskatchewan gumbo. It really wasn’t their wheels that had clogged, but their minds and hearts. Again, I don’t need to tell you what happened next. “The Lord routed the Egyptians in the midst of the sea.”

Forgiveness is not a generous spirit when we feel like it. It doesn’t take place every now and then, but continually, every day, as individuals and as the people of God living in a nation of clogged hearts. What has bothered more than a few people is the apparent glee with which Israel remembers the defeat of their oppressors, the Egyptians, in that unbelievable location. Certainly, they were crushed for centuries by the Egyptians who were afraid to let them live freely among them. The Egyptians attempted to break their spirit and to extinguish their culture and sense of identity, and they came pretty close to doing so. In the long run, whose wheels, whose hearts were clogged?

Martin Niemoller, one of the leaders of the Confessing Church in Germany during the Nazi regime, spent the last years during World War II in concentration camps, a prisoner of his own people. Afterwards, he confided, “It took me a long time to learn that God is not the enemy of my enemies. God is not even the enemy of God’s enemies.” A necessary principle behind every clogged and unforgiving heart is that God is the enemy of my enemy.

Instead, there is a Jewish legend of God speaking to an archangel who was celebrating the defeat of the Egyptian army in the sea, an earlier V-E Day, “Why do you celebrate while the work of my hands is being destroyed?” Four hundred and eighty nine to go.

Preached by Robert Kitchen
Knox-Metropolitan United Church
Regina, Saskatchewan