Matthew 18: 21-35.
When Peter thinks he needs to forgive someone only seven times, Jesus tells him it’s seventy-seven times. Jesus then says the kingdom of heaven is like a king who wants to settle accounts with his servants. When one is rightfully told he and his family will be sold to pay his debt, the man begs for mercy and the king cancels his debt.
The servant does not show similar mercy to someone who owes him money. When the king finds out, he has the unforgiving servant tortured until he pays all his debt. Jesus says we will be treated like this unless we forgive from our heart.
The lesson of Jesus’ parable in today’s passage is a line in The Lord’s Prayer: “Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors.”
If I don’t forgive others from my heart, I’m going to have to keep giving my half-hearted mouth-forgiveness until I’m exhausted and fall down.
That’s what forgiving someone seventy-seven times means#8212;doing it and doing it until I get it right.
When I was doing taekwondo training, my instructor told me I had to punch a punch and kick a kick one thousand times before I could really do it.
I didn’t focus one day. I just went through the motions so I could say I was doing it. Kick the bag, kick the bag, kick the bag. I broke my toe that day.
It was my fault because I hadn’t put my heart into the kick.
I was careless about what part of my foot should have been hitting the bag.
As to forgiveness, my heart does that, not my mouth.
But most of the time my heart wants to get revenge not give forgiveness.
I want my money, I want my pound of flesh, I want justice.
When I was thirteen, my parents forced me to befriend a boy who had just moved into the neighborhood.
His dad worked with my dad, gave him a sob story about how lonely his son was and how much he needed a friend to help him adjust. So I made friends with him.
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A few months later he betrayed me to the group of kids that smoked and made fun of everyone and gave themselves superior airs.
He wanted to be part of that group, the “in group”.
Betraying his first and only friend was his ticket into that society.
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I hated him for his betrayal and wished he would die.
A year later he was killed in a car accident.
Because everyone around me was shocked and saddened by this death of a boy, I had to pretend to be shocked and sad too.
But I wasn’t. I was glad. I felt justice had been done.
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The fat, insecure, nasty piece of social climbing got what he deserved.
He never asked for forgiveness because he was a jerk.
And I never forgave him in my heart. It’s been fifty years.
Ironically, his name is the same as the ex-husband of my first wife.
When I asked for forgiveness from my first wife’s ex-husband for taking his wife, he forgave me.
It seems that today God is asking me to forgive my boyhood betrayer.
Heavenly Father!! forgive me for holding a grudge against this boy for 50 years.
Let me grieve for his early death. Search my heart and find the truth of my sincere forgiveness of a boy so weak he needed to step on me to look strong.
I hope he found you, Jesus, before he died.
Let me hold to the hope that he was on his way to me to ask for forgiveness.
Lord, give me your heart to truly forgive Bruce.
