In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

The main point of the parable of the unforgiving servant is that we should forgive other people because God has forgiven us. When Jesus told Saint Peter that he should forgive his repentant brother not seven times, but seventy times seven, obviously our Lord was not just picking a new limit that was higher than Saint Peter’s limit. He was showing us that our forgiveness is supposed to have no limits. Whatever amount we might think is too many times to forgive someone when they come to us asking for it, we should multiply it again. In other words, just as God does not stop forgiving us, we should never stop forgiving other people.

Now, even though this is very clear from our text today, and from the rest of the Bible for that matter, our sinful nature constantly fights against it and always tries to come up with different reasons why we don’t have to do it. So, in this morning’s sermon, in light of what Jesus tells us in Matthew chapter 18, I’m simply going to respond to some of the most common objections that we hear against forgiving other people. And to clarify things before we get started, because every time this topic comes up I always get the same kind of questions, this text is not about how governments should stop punishing criminals or how there shouldn’t be any boundaries put in place for things like abuse or adultery. Sometimes there are temporal consequences for sins, even though the eternal consequences have been completely removed by Christ. For example, an individual can be forgiven before God in heaven for committing literal murder, but that doesn’t mean that he shouldn’t have to go to jail. A bank robber can be forgiven for robbing banks, but that doesn’t mean we should make him the treasurer of the church. It’s possible for forgiveness to be given at the same time that other steps are put in place in order to guard against temptation and to teach others who may be watching to take sin seriously. The issue that Jesus is dealing with in our text has to do with things like holding grudges, harboring hatred toward others in our hearts, or trying to even with them for doing us wrong. That’s the kind of forgiveness that He’s talking about. 

And so, here are the most common objections there are against forgiving others. The first one is “I don’t have to forgive them because they don’t deserve my forgiveness.” But statements like that completely miss the point. Not deserving forgiveness is the exact thing that makes it forgiveness in the first place. If we deserved forgiveness, then it wouldn’t be forgiveness at all. It would be restitution. The man in the parable that Jesus told obviously did not deserve to have his debt taken away.  He couldn’t do anything to get out of his debt and what he did was the exact thing that put him into all of that debt to begin with. The master had to forgive him out of his own pity.

And the same is true for us. When we ask God for the forgiveness of our sins, we are not asking Him for something that we deserve. We are asking Him for the exact opposite of what we deserve.  And when we receive God’s forgiveness, we are not getting something that we earned, we are getting something that we could never earn. Remember how Saint Paul describes it in Romans chapter 5. He says, “the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.” That’s how God’s forgiveness come to us. It’s a gift, and as Saint Paul adds for emphasis, a free gift at that.

And so, if God’s forgiveness comes to us freely for Christ’s sake, then how can we turn around and act as if other people need to deserve forgiveness from us when we don’t deserve it from God? How can we say that our brothers and sisters in Christ need to earn our forgiveness before we can give it to them, when the very forgiveness we have from the Lord isn’t something that we earned, but something that was given to us by grace? The reason why the unforgiving servant in the parable was condemned by Jesus at the end of the story was because in refusing to forgive others, he showed that he did not really believe in God’s forgiveness at all. In acting as if forgiveness needed to be deserved, he not only showed that he did not understand how forgiveness works, but he was rejecting the undeserved forgiveness of God. We never deserve forgiveness! Forgiveness is always for the underserving. And that’s why we should still give it to other people even if they don’t deserve it from us either.

Another objection that we often hear to forgiving people is that “what they did is too sinful to be forgiven.” But again, the parable that Jesus tells us shows us very clearly why that is never a valid reason to withhold forgiveness. Consider again the details of the story. One conservative estimate is that in ancient times a single talent could have been valued at more than a year’s worth of wages. The man in the parable owed ten thousand talents. He owed ten thousand years’ worth of wages. In our day and age, that would be the equivalent of someone owing something like 500 million dollars. It was a preposterous sum. It went well beyond carelessness and into the realm of purposeful evil. How on earth does a person even go about racking up that kind of debt? You almost have to be trying to do it. But Jesus uses this large sum of money to drive home the point that the servant obviously could never repay what he owed. It was too much. He didn’t have the means, nor did he have the time. In fact, more time would have probably made things even worse. His plea to the master to “have patience with me, and I will pay you everything,” was just as ridiculous as the amount of money that he owed.

And yet, the master forgave him. The master forgave the man’s debt by paying the debt himself. We all know that despite how some people often act these days, debt doesn’t just go away. Eventually someone always has to pay for it. Whether that is you, or your children, or your children’s children, or the people who lent you the money, somebody is still on the hook for it. And while it is certainly possible to argue that other people who have sinned against us have done things so bad that they cannot pay for them themselves, it is impossible to argue that they have done things so bad that not even God can pay for it Himself. The Bible tells us that Jesus Christ is the “Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.” It tells us in 1 John chapter 2 that Jesus is the “propitiation [or the payment] for our sins; and not for ours only but also for the sins of the whole world.” When Jesus died on the cross, He really did pay for all of the sins of all of the sinners who ever lived. His life was given as a ransom not just for some, but as He Himself says elsewhere, for many, as in, for everyone. Therefore, since there is no sin that Jesus did not take upon Himself and bear as His own when He died for all of our sins on the cross, there is no sin that is too bad to be forgiven. Whenever we are tempted to think that someone else has done something that is too sinful to be forgiven, we shouldn’t just look at them and what they did, we should look at Jesus and what He did for us all.

The next objection that we often hear to forgiving others is that “I don’t have to forgive them because they aren’t actually sorry for what they did.” Now, it’s true that no one who is not sorry for their sins receives forgiveness for them. The Bible teaches us all over the place that forgiveness is only received by those who regret their sins and want to do better. As King David says in Psalm 51, “For when I was silent, my bones wasted away…” and, “I said, I will confess my transgressions to the Lord and you forgave the iniquity of my sin.” Or as it says in 1 John 1, “If we say we have no sin we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us, but if we confess our sins, God, who is faithful and just, will forgive our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness.” And as we read in the book of Acts, “Repent, therefore, and turn back, that your sins may be blotted out.” It’s impossible for a person to receive forgiveness who isn’t sorry for his or her sins and won’t stop doing them.

However, we should be very careful not to give the impression that our repentance is what causes God to forgive us, or that the repentance of others is what should cause us to forgive them either. Repentance does not cause forgiveness. Repentance receives forgiveness. Repentance does not remove sin for our souls. God removes sin for our souls. His forgiveness comes not from the suffering of our guilty conscience, but from the suffering of Jesus’ on the cross. Our guilty conscience does not bring God’s forgiveness to us, our guiltily conscience receives the forgiveness that God gives to us on His own. Did the master in the parable forgive the man’s debts because of how sorry he was, or did he do it because of how gracious he himself was? It was the second one. God does not forgive us because of how sorry we are, but because of how merciful He is.

And besides all that, we don’t always know how sorry a person even is. Yes, sometimes we can see their outward actions, which can be revealing, but only God can see what is going on on the inside. It’s entirely possible that the reason why someone hasn’t said sorry to us is not because they aren’t sorry, but because they’re too embarrassed to say it. What if they haven’t apologized for what they’ve done because they are afraid of us? What if it’s not because they aren’t sorry, but because they’re worried about what we’ll say to them, or how we’ll treat them? If we cannot even examine our own hearts well enough to gage the level of our own sincerity and contrition, why would we think we can do that for someone else? Even when we confess our sins, we confess along with them that not even our confession is completely perfect. And yet, we trust that God forgives us not because of the merits of our confession, but because of the merits of His Son. And that’s why we don’t refuse to forgive other people just because we suspect that they might secretively be not sorry for what they’ve done. We stand ready to forgive. We reach out to them for the purpose of forgiving, and we do our best to bring them the forgiveness that they need even if they end up rejecting it. We forgive as Jesus forgave us. We pray for others, as Jesus Himself prayed for us on the cross, “Father forgive them, for they know not what they do.” 

Now the last and the most dangerous objection that we often to hear to why we shouldn’t have to forgive other people is because “forgiving them will only encourage them to do it again.” This is the most dangerous objection that there is because it isn’t just an argument against our forgiving of others, but worst of all, it’s an argument against God’s forgiving of us. It’s an argument against the Christian Gospel. Some churches teach that if we tell repentant individuals, that is, those who are already sorry for their sins and want to do better, that their sins are freely forgiven for Christ’s sake and that it’s unnecessary and impossible for them to do any kind of special penance to make up for them to God, that we are encouraging them to sin even more in the future. They maintain that if we offer God’s forgiveness for free that it will only make people take advantage of it. But that’s not true.  The Gospel does not encourage people to sin. The Gospel is the exact thing that frees us from our sins and give us the strength to fight it. It is the rejection of the Gospel leads to more sin. It is the neglect of the Gospel, and a misapplication and misrepresentation of the Gospel, that leads to more sin. The problem, though, is never with the actual Gospel. The problem is with those who do not believe the Gospel. Remember what Saint Paul tells us in Romans chapter 1 that our attitude should be toward the Gospel. He writes, “For I am not ashamed of the Gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation for everyone who believes.”

No one who actually believes the Gospel despises it. Nobody who has actually received the forgiveness of their sins in faith abuses it on purpose. No one who actually trusts that God has really taken away their sins in Christ sees it as an encouragement to keep on sinning. Yes, there are those who pretend to believe the Gospel, and twist it in order to defend their own sinful behavior, but they prove by their actions that they don’t really believe the Gospel at all. And yet, none of that means that we should stop preaching the Gospel.

There is nothing in this world that is capable of making us fight off our sin like the knowledge that Christ has already removed the punishment for our sin when He suffered for it on the cross. When we forgive others for their sins, because Jesus has forgiven us for ours, we are doing the best thing that can be done about sin.  We are pointing people to where sin has lost its power. It’s not true that forgiving other people who are sorry for what they’ve done and tell us that they want to do better will only encourage them to do it again. In fact, it is the very thing that will help them stop doing it more in future.

Jesus teaches us in the parable of the unforgiving servant that we should forgive other people just as God has forgiven us. We should forgive them freely, and we should forgive them without any limits. Just because someone doesn’t deserve our forgiveness, that is not a reason not to forgive them. We didn’t deserve forgiveness either, but God still gave it to us by His grace. Just because someone’s sin is really bad, and maybe it is, that doesn’t mean that we should not forgive them either. Our sins are bad too. And Jesus died for every sin on the cross, even the bad ones. Just because we suspect that someone might not be actually sorry, that is not a reason to withhold forgiveness from them either. We can’t always tell if someone is sorry, and our sorrow isn’t the cause of our forgiveness anyway, our sorrowful heart receives it. And just because it’s possible that someone might have trouble with sinning against us again later on, that is not a reason not to forgive them either. It is one of main reasons why we should forgive them. Our forgiveness will help them look to Christ, and learn from Him how to love their neighbor. It will give them the strength to fight their sin in the future.

Not only does our neighbor need ongoing forgiveness, but we need it too. And Jesus gives it to us by grace. To quote again the words of Saint Paul, “And you, who were dead in your trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made alive together with him, having forgiven us all our trespasses, by canceling the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands. This he set aside, nailing it to the cross.” Jesus set aside our sin by nailing it to cross. May we see our neighbors sin their too, and may we forgive them just as Jesus has forgiven us. In Jesus’ Name. Amen.