If you have a credit card you probably try your hardest to pay it off in full or at least pay as much as you can to limit the amount of interest charged. There are 3 options when you receive your statement. You can pay it off in full and accrue no interest charge. You can pay part of it as long as it’s more than the minimum amount due and pay interest on the balance. Or, if you’re having an expensive month, you can pay the amount they call the minimum amount payable.
What you may notice on your monthly bill, and it’s required by law, is a notice to let you know how long it will take to pay your account in full if you only pay the minimum amount each month and it can be quite staggering. We always pay our credit card off in full but on our last statement which was around $1,500, it had in the notice that if we only paid the minimum amount each month and made no extra purchases it would take us just over 4 years to pay off this debt and around half of that would be interest.
So, in today’s Gospel reading we have a servant who has accrued much more than what I accrued last month. He owed 10,000 talents which in today’s estimates is estimated at 200,000 years of labor! It is 60,000,000 working days. In modern money, it is approximately $3 and a half billion dollars.
Many questions are raised in this parable told by Jesus. How did he accrue such a massive debt? He begged for mercy promising to pay it off. How could he ever pay off that amount, is the question we ask, Then we are told that the king imprisoned him, his wife and children and took all his possessions until the debt was paid – but how would he pay it if he was imprisoned. It sounds absurd – ridiculous – unimaginable – but the point Jesus is making is that this is the reality of our debt to God. Not a monetary debt – but a debt of holiness for our sinfulness. And we can make the same claims. It’s absurd – ridiculous – how on earth could we accumulate such a debt to God? I’m not such a bad person. Are we that evil?
The point Jesus is trying to make is that it’s not that we have accumulated such a large debt but that our debt is unpayable because of our sinful nature. You may ask, how is that possible. People say it’s unfair. What choice did I have as we confess that we are born sinful. In fact, Psalm 51 says just that: Surely I was sinful at birth, sinful from the time my mother conceived me. And it’s even more unfair when the good we do doesn’t account for anything. It’s because the good that we do does not pay for the sin we have committed.
The good we do is what we should be doing nonetheless.
Now, hear me out on this. But the fact that our debt is unpayable, as unfair and as unreasonable as it sounds, is actually Good News. It’s good news on 2 fronts.
Firstly. The fact that our debt is unpayable means that we have to do what the servant did. Fall on our knees and seek God’s mercy. God loves us and wants us to spend eternity with him in heaven – and if that is not possible because of our unpayable debt then it’s not our problem – it’s God’s problem. God tried to deal with sin in so many ways in the Old Testament. He sent a world-wide flood because he could no longer contend with humanity and decided to eradicate all human beings. But his love for us could not fulfil that so he preserved one family – Noah and his wife – his 3 sons and their wives. Despite this cleansing, sin returned. So God devised a Priesthood and a system of sacrifices to cleanse his people from sin. But they kept on sinning in particular worshiping gods that our Lord had forbidden them to do. He had warned them that if they did that he would cast them out of the Promised Land – literally it says the land would vomit them out. He did so sending Israel to exile in Assyria and Judah into Babylon.
But again, God’s heart was broken and after 70 years he brought them home and rebuilt their temple. And he decided that the only way to deal with our sin was to take our sin upon himself. And God recognized that our destination into heaven could only be assured if he did not seek to punish the sinner but to take our sin upon himself. And so, as Paul so eloquently puts it – God made him (Jesus) who had no sin to become our sin so that we could become the righteousness of God. The wages of sin is death, as Paul states, so God satisfied sin’s demands by the death of his own sinless Son. And as Jesus had no sin to pay by his death, his death paid our sin. That’s the good news. Our unpayable debt paid in full by God’s own son.
The 2nd part to this is the comfort it brings to us NOW – and not as we stand before the Judgment Seat that Paul talks about in our 2nd reading: For we will all stand before the judgment seat of God. For it is written, “As I live, says the Lord, every knee shall bow to me, and every tongue shall give praise to God.” So then, each of us will be accountable to God.
As Christians, we don’t have to wait until Judgment Day to know what the outcome of our judgment will be. Our sin was forgiven on the cross when Jesus died. What we would never want would be to have our eternity worked out like a school exam. Where you work all year – sit a final exam – and then you have to wait for the examiners to correct your work and let you know whether you’ve passed or not. That’s not how we want to live our lives – wondering how we will fair before the judgment seat.
And that’s why we don’t take into account good works for comfort. Because we would never know if we’ve done enough. And the pass mark for God is not 50%, 80% or even 99.9% It’s 100% with no exceptions. As James says in his letter: For whoever keeps the whole law and yet stumbles at just one point is guilty of breaking all of it. But the good news is – God has had mercy on us and for the sake of Jesus Christ our Lord HAS forgiven us all our sins.
But what about the last part of that parable. Where the forgiven servant goes out and demands restitution from one of his own servants. And when the servant begs for the same mercy, he refuses. And as a result the first servant has had his forgiveness revoked and is thrown into prison. And those harsh and stark words by Jesus to us: So my heavenly Father will also do to every one of you, if you do not forgive your brother or sister from your heart.
Let’s fully understand what Jesus is saying – because this is also what we pray in the Lord’s Prayer; Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us. What was the problem? The problem was that the first servant didn’t grasp the enormity of his debt. And as a result he did not feel or understand the enormity of the mercy he had been given. He experienced only the extent of the forgiveness he was prepared to offer.
And that’s the message Jesus is sending to us. Do we really want to feel the mercy God has extended to us? Do we really want to feel the peace of God that the world cannot give? Then it is only limited by the limits we ourselves place on our experience. God has forgiven you all your sins. But if we cannot extend the same grace to others then we will not know just how much Christ’s death for us means. Let us remember that we are saved by God grace. So we are not saved by our actions which is how this warning can often be misinterpreted. If you don’t forgive then God won’t forgive you.
Compare that to Zaccheaus who when he received Jesus into his home felt the full extent of God’s mercy and reciprocated: “Look, Lord! Here and now I give half of my possessions to the poor, and if I have cheated anybody out of anything, I will pay back four times the amount.” Jesus said to him, “Today salvation has come to this house. Today salvation has come to you by the grace and mercy of God.
So may that Good News of the mercy of God free you to experience that mercy by sharing it with others and know and experience the peace of God that surpasses all our understanding and will guard and watch over your hearts, now and forever.
