Justice and Mercy (A Sermon)

Text: Matthew 18:21-35

God had a pretty good idea when he decided to have the church be more than just one person. 

At first blush, this may not seem like much of an observation. Of course the church is more than one person. There has to at least be “two or more” gathered in Jesus’ name to have a church, right? And church in the big “C” sense has millions of people in it, stretched across time and space and denomination and tradition. And also, the center of the church is Jesus himself, so to have a church you’d at least need both Jesus and then at least one other person to believe in him. So, of course the church is more than just one person!

But think about it. Any one of us who has been a Christian for any substantial length of time undoubtedly has some strong opinions about church. Each one of us has a pretty good idea of how we think people at church should act. We also probably have a pretty good sense of how Sunday worship should go. And sermons? Well, we all know what we like and do not like in a sermon. 

The only problem with all this is that no two of us are likely to have the same ideal in our head, especially not in a small community church such as this one. Perhaps in the city—where everyone can (and does) drive past fifty churches on their way to the church they prefer, to the church that “does it right”—perhaps those folks are able to find churches where everybody has the same ideas about church that they do. 

But I doubt it. 

Left to ourselves, we would all probably prefer a church that was just us—or maybe, just us and those who see things exactly the way we do. God, however, has decided to make church a group project—a rather diverse and messy group project at that. And this, we have to at some point admit, is probably actually for the best.

The reason I’m thinking about all this in the first place is because of our text this morning. It continues the topic of forgiveness from last week, which seems simple enough, but all the commentaries I read this week took surprisingly different approaches to the text. 

Not to the basic facts of the passage, exactly. I mean, the text is the text. There’s not much you can do about that. 

But the emphases. The emphases were, in many cases, surprisingly different. 

Some took the approach that I tend to take—the approach, for example, that I took last week—emphasizing mercy and the need to be gracious toward one another. 

But others took a very different approach. They pointed how how toxic mercy can sometimes be in the church, where we are quick to encourage mistreated people to forgive those who mistreat them without necessarily taking those who mistreat them to task at the same time. We can forgive and forgive and forgive to the point that we wind up doing the person sinning as much of a disservice as those they sin against. 

We can lock sinners into their misbehavior by always telling them, “It’s ok, it’s ok, it’s ok” when instead we should be getting angry with them—for their own sake as much as for ours. 

Those who took this other approach tended to point out the role of the community—the “fellow servants” in Jesus’ parable. A parable to which we now turn.

In our text this morning, Peter asks Jesus how many times a believer should extend forgiveness to a person who has sinned against him. Peter is responding to the words of Jesus in verses 15-20, and he’s leaning into the emphasis on mercy. To ask if he should forgive a repentant sinner “seven times” (verse 21) doesn’t mean Peter is being stingy. Seven is the number of perfection, after all, and to ask if he should forgive seven times is basically to ask, “Should I always forgive?” 

Jesus’ response to Peter, that he should forgive “seventy-seven times” (or “seventy times seven”) is basically to say, “Yes, you should always forgive…and then some, and then some, and then some even more and more.” 

It takes Peter’s suggestion, which has length and breadth, and adds depth. 

Each act of forgiveness should be a forgiveness that goes eleven times deep. 

Jesus then goes on to give his parable…

A servant has been called before his king. This servant somehow owes his king the equivalent of two hundred thousand years’ worth of the average man’s daily wages. How he got in this mess, we don’t know. The exaggerated size of the debt, we can assume, is deliberate on Jesus’ part. Jesus is going for shock. 

The king in Jesus’s story acts against both Jewish law and Greco-Roman custom and decides to sell the man and his family into slavery to pay the debt. It’s an extreme reaction, also designed to bring out shock in Jesus’ hearers. 

The man understandably cries out for mercy, promising to pay back what he owes. Which, of course, would be impossible for a man of his social stature. But he’s desperate. 

The king, we are told, takes pity on the man and lets him go (verse 27). 

Having just had his whole life flash before his eyes, the man in our story wanders out into the public square and sees a fellow servant who owes him a hundred day’s worth of wages. This is also a pretty big debt to owe somebody, we can admit, but it pales in comparison to the two hundred thousand years’ worth of debt this man has just been forgiven. Nevertheless, upon seeing his fellow servant who owes him the cash, our main character grabs him by the neck and begins to choke him. 

“Pay back what you owe me!,” the man screams. 

“Be patient with me and I will pay it back!,” the fellow servant replies, echoing the very words our main character cried out to the king. 

“But he refused,” Jesus says in verse 30. “Instead he went off and had the man thrown into prison until he could pay the debt.”

And it is here that the community steps in, as some of the commentators I read pointed out. The fellow servants get angry. They see what this man did and they bring the matter to the king. The king also rightly gets mad. He scolds the man and sends him off to prison to be tortured “until he should pay back the debt” (verse 34)—which we know means he will be tortured forever, because how could someone laboring away as an imprisoned slave ever earn back two hundred thousand years’ worth of wages? 

The man’s punishment is eternal.

Those commentators who insisted that the church must be just, and not merely merciful, all pointed out that when the servants saw evil in their midst they did something about it. They saw one servant treating another servant poorly and stepped in. They brought the matter to the king. They made sure that justice was brought down on the man’s head. This is a detail I honestly didn’t think much about on my own reading, having read this story myself hundreds of times over the years. I was glad to have it pointed out.

Those commentators who read the story as being primarily about mercy, as I tend to do,  pointed out how our passage shows us the relationship between the law and the gospel. We all sin, these commentators said. And we all struggle at times to forgive. As law, this story condemns us—and that’s the point. Before the justice of God we stand condemned. That’s why we must live by mercy. This mercy will naturally flow out of us to others as the fruit of God’s grace in the gospel. But as a simple, “Do this or you’ll go to hell” story, Jesus’ parable is law. It is there to drive us to the cross, not to tell us how to be saved.

This difference in the emphases between the commentators is why, as I pointed out at the beginning, I’m glad there is more than one person in the church. Because when we gather around God’s word, one thing jumps out to one and another jumps out to another. We see what others perhaps don’t see, and they often see what we miss. We learn more together than alone. 

Our passage does indeed show us how complicated the topic of mercy can be. 

We, like the servant in Jesus’ story, owe God a debt that we could never pay. To even offer to pay it back is ridiculous. We stand before God utterly dependent on his mercy. 

By extension, this mercy must go beyond us to others. As forgiven people, we must be forgiving people as well. We must forgive those who sin against us “seven times,” as Peter suggests. Complete and total forgiveness. 

And we should, knowing how unfathomably deep our debt is to God, extend that forgiveness to “seventy-seven times,” as Jesus commands—having a mercy that goes deeper and wider and further than the sin we’re forgiving. 

We forgive beyond what is even asked. 

We forgive not only the act, but we forgive them for being the kind of person who would do such a thing in the first place. Isn’t that the problem we really have with them, after all?

We forgiven them for what they’ve done. And we forgive them for who they’ve shown themselves to be. 

Because that’s the way God is with us.

Yet this doesn’t mean we are called to be a church that ignores evil for the sake of mercy, or that enables harmful living so we can pat ourselves on the back. 

We are called to be servants who name sin when we see it, and who bring the matter to the attention of both the sinner (our sister or brother in Christ, by talking to them about it) and the king (our Lord Jesus, in prayer). 

We are to be a church which does everything it can to bring about reconciliation between people, as Jesus taught us last week. But are also to be a church that draws a line in the face of evil—for Jesus’ sake, for each other’s sake, and for our own. 

And yet, even as we name sin for what it is in our own and each other’s lives and call one another to repentance, we do so with an awareness of how great God’s forgiveness of us has been for Jesus’ sake. 

He paid a debt he didn’t owe and we owed a debt we could not pay, as the song goes. 

Our desire should still be that all receive mercy. 

Our posture should always be one that favors healing, even when seeking justice.

And if that isn’ true of us for some reason—if we turn out to be like that servant in our story who begged forgiveness from his king, and yet attacked and imprisoned his neighbor for a weighty but smaller offense—we have to wonder if we really are a people of mercy, if we really live by God’s grace even for ourselves. 

Let’s Pray