Receiving Mercy and Being Merciful

Meditation on the Twenty-Second Sunday after Trinity Texts:

“Receiving Mercy and Being Merciful”

St. Matthew 18:21-35 and Philippians 1:3-11

Written by Dan McDonald

 

            In this week’s Gospel account the Apostle Peter asks Jesus, “Lord, how oft shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him?  Till seven times?”  When we see Peter asking these questions we are prone to view Peter as always seeming to insert his foot into his mouth before our Lord.  I am not sure that such a perspective is necessarily how we are to best understand the situation.  Perhaps, St. Peter was already acting as a sort of spokesmen for Jesus’ disciples.  If that were the case he was asking Jesus to clarify his teaching so that the disciples would more completely understand his astonishing teachings on forgiveness.  If Peter was asking Jesus this question about how often to forgive sinners for the other disciples, as well as for himself, then we can imagine him asking that same question for disciples in every time and place wherever there would ever be followers of Jesus Christ.  He was asking this question, in a sense for you and for me: “How oft shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him?”  In our smugness we look at Peter asking Jesus this question and are prone to say to Peter, “That is a tacky question you lout.”  But in our humanity, especially when we have someone that gets on our nerves and gives us a pain in the butt, we really want to ask Jesus “How oft shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him?”

            Jesus tells us a story about a man standing before the king.  This man had a great debt, a debt he could never repay.  The king planned to get at least part of the money back that this debtor owed him.  He announced his plan to sell the man, the man’s wife, and their children into slavery.  This servant, with the great debt fell down before the king, prostrated himself, and asked the king to have mercy on him and he would repay the debt.  The Lord, or the king in this story, was moved to compassion.  He felt for the debtor.  He forgave the debtor all his debts.  The debt was totally cancelled.  The king was moved by his compassion towards the man to forgive all his debts.

            But then a little later this man forgiven a huge debt he could in no way repay discovered a fellow-servant owed him a small amount.  But this one who had been forgiven such a great debt treated this man with a little debt without mercy or compassion.  When the man who owed him money asked for mercy even as he had done before the king, the forgiven debtor refused to be merciful.  He ordered the other man to be sent to prison.  The citizens and fellow-servants then poured out their petitions to the king and asked if such an injustice was going to be allowed to stand?  The King responded this time not with mercy but with wrath and ordered him sent to the tormentors.

            This story has a sharp cutting edge to it.  Jesus warns that if we do not forgive everyone his brother’s trespass against us that our heavenly Father like that king in the story will do so to us.  We sometimes imagine ourselves safe with Jesus because he is viewed always it seems as if the face of mercy.  Yet we do well to remember that Jesus, more than any of the prophets or any of the Apostles, warned of God’s wrath and judgment that was to come upon evil sinners.  Jesus pronounces that this debtor who had been once forgiven a great debt, but was then unwilling to forgive a small debt, was now to be treated as an evil sinner.  Let us beware.  Let us not remove this reality from our Lord Jesus Christ.  Let us learn why Jesus described this man as evil, even though our Lord had come to set the captive sinner free and to grant us a way to know life, abundant life, and eternal life.

            Perhaps we can better understand this matter if we think about how Jesus once spoke to the Samaritan woman at the well.  He was asking her for a drink of water from the well, and when she was surprised that he a Jew was speaking to her, he told her that if she were to ask him he could give her living water, living water that would become in her a spring of flowing water.  We sometimes forget how whenever the Old Testament spoke of a washing it required flowing or living water.  Living water is water that is flowing.  The Jordan River flowed.  The Dead Sea had no outlet and so water flowing into the Dead Sea became stagnant.  Mercy is meant to be something flowing from God into us, taking up residence in us and becoming like a flowing stream to be a source of showing mercy to others.  That is the sort of way we need to think of mercy.  It is not something given to us just so we can have eternal security because even though we were great sinners we asked Jesus into our hearts.  That is not all of what God wants to do in giving us mercy.  God is initiating mercy into us that we may participate in the mercy of God and may in that participation become merciful in our souls and therefore become merciful to others.  Grace is not something which is given to us and then allowed to stagnate in us and then just die.  Grace is something meant to reside in us and live in us, and then be shared with others.  It is for that reason that we pray “Forgive us our trespasses as we have forgiven those who have trespassed against us.”  We are living in a world where Christ in redeeming us, has been calling us to pay our forgiven debts forward by forgiving others their debts against us.  How oft shall we forgive the brother who sins against us?  How much has our Lord forgiven us?  Let that be our standard.  That is Jesus’ answer to Peter, to the disciples, and to you and me.

            Our Epistle reading found in Philippians 1:3-11 is a word of encouragement from the Apostle Paul regarding this same phenomenon.  He describes how because God through Christ had begun a good work in them, that the Apostle was confident that God would complete this good work in them even unto the day of Christ Jesus.  The Philippians had participated in the Gospel, had believed in Christ, had suffered with the Apostle Paul in his sufferings, and all Paul now wanted for them was for them to continue to grow in the grace of God; that their love, their knowledge, their understanding of God; and their ability to show discernment in their Christian lives might continue to grow and increase.

            There is a mindset that imagines an expectation of spiritual growth to be some sort of a requirement forced upon a Christian and therefore it must be rejected as if it is a salvation by works.  But the truth is different.  God’s grace to us is spiritual life in the place of spiritual death and stagnation.  Grace is grace.  Mercy is mercy.  The grace and mercy of God that extends forgiveness to us grants life to us, and life as long as it is alive causes growth in accord with the nature of the life that is given.  What God begins he is able to complete; that is grace, and nothing but grace.  For this gift to cease being grace this grace would have to cease from continuing.  Martin Luther taught regarding the Word of God in the Gospel, that it is the nature of the Gospel to save and redeem and to create faith in the hearts and souls of those who hear the Gospel.  But there is a battle for our souls, and there is a tendency in the soul of sinful men and women to resist the good news of our forgiveness, to resist mercy, and to misuse grace.  But the Apostle saw the Philippians as being men and women who being moved by grace responded to grace by desiring it to take up residence in their souls, and to have their behavior unto others guided by that same influence of grace.

            Indeed, that is why this man who had owed such a great debt and was forgiven, only to withhold forgiveness to a lesser debtor, was judged to be such an evil man.  Jesus saw this man as an evil man to rightfully be handed over to the torturers.  He had received mercy, but he then built a dam around himself so that the mercy given him would not be permitted to be given to anyone else.  He wanted to have mercy for himself but had no true desire to want to become mercy for another.  He turned mercy from God into selfishness for himself.  This surely is not the way of grace.  Instead of wishing to see grace grow in him, he resisted its place in his inner being.

            I want to give an example of a man who may have been very near the point where he might have been judged an evil man, but may have been saved from such destruction by seeing amazing events unfold before his eyes.  This is a story I heard in my church when Father Moses Berry, an Orthodox priest visiting our church described how the land where the church is located, in which he is a priest had become his family’s property prior to our Civil War.  Father Moses Berry is an African-American, and like many African-Americans his ancestors were at one time slaves in America.  One day, an ancestor of Father Moses Berry was being punished by his white slave-owner.  The slave-owner was a church going man but it did not keep from using the whip on Moses Berry’s ancestor.  I do not know the offense for which his ancestor was being whipped, but as the slave-owner whipped the ancestor the ancestor began crying out.  The slave-owner kept whipping upon the man until he realized what Moses Berry’s ancestor was crying out.  He was crying out over and over again in his pain and misery, “Lord, be merciful to me, the sinner.”  The white slave-owner was shocked when he heard those words.  He quit whipping the slave.  The slave-owner was grieved at his actions.  He set Moses Berry’s ancestor free.  He gave the new freed man and his family forty acres for his family.  He signed the deed over to the former slave.  He helped him get established on his new homestead.

            I would dare say that the slave-owner had probably sung hymns in church much of his life with a sense of joy in being forgiven of his sins.  But a far clearer understanding of God’s mercy penetrated his soul when he realized what a terrible sin he had committed against this man that was crying out, “Lord, be merciful, to me the sinner.  At least for that day, the slave-owner understood that God’s mercy to him was meant to be shared, not to be treated as one’s own private property.  I do not know any more of the details of what happened with the slave-owner, but I tell the story because some of us may be in danger of judgment for our lack of mercy.  Yet if we will but seek God’s mercy, and seek especially that his mercy might take up residence within us, and flow forth from us, there is yet hope even for a selfish person to be granted to participate and flourish in the grace and mercy of God, until that mercy takes up residence in our souls and spills over into the lives of those around us.

            In conclusion, let us pray this week’s collect:  “Lord, we beseech thee to keep thy household the Church in continual godliness; that through thy protection it may be free from all adversities, and devoutly given to serve thee in good works, to the glory of thy Name; through Jesus Christ our Lord.  Amen.