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In the name of Jesus, amen.
Dear Elizabeth, in your baptism, the Lord Jesus has clothed you into his own righteousness, adopted you as his own dear child, welcomed you into his family, and given you all the gifts of life eternal for you and for all the baptized. The Lord Jesus loves you. The Lord Jesus delights in you. The Lord Jesus longs for your salvation. The Lord Jesus has made a way for you to come through all the troubles of this life and reach at last the glory of the life to come. This is his work and his promises and his grace. He forgives all of your sins. And we live in that forgiveness.
Now, it’s that promise of forgiveness that is at the heart of the texts that is before us today. It’s a difficult one. Because in this text, Jesus is not talking about his forgiving our sins, but in fact, he’s talking about how we forgive those who sin against us. But this is important. It’s important for a couple of reasons. One of them is because… And this might be my own fault, because I’m the one preaching most of the time. But we mostly, when preaching, are talking about the sins that we’re committing. The sins that we’re accomplishing, the commandments that we’re breaking, the things that we’re neglecting, the love that we fail to do. Normally, when we talk about sins in the church, it’s our sin and our guilt and the need that we have for the forgiveness of sins.
But there’s another side to sin that the Lord is addressing in today’s text. And that’s not the sins that we commit against others, but the sins that other people commit against us. Jesus actually is talking about both of them. He starts by addressing sins. He says, “Woe to you who caused one of these little ones to stumble. It’d be better for you to have a millstone tied around your neck and thrown into the depth of the sea than to cause one of these little ones to stumble.” But then Jesus says, “If someone sins against you and then they repent, you are to forgive them.”
Now I think, it doesn’t say this in the text, but I think that the disciples’ faces must have had a funny look on them. Like, “Forget, we’re supposed to, when someone sins against us, we’re supposed to forgive them.” They must have looked funny at Jesus, and then Jesus doubles down. In fact, he doesn’t double down. He, whatever it is, times seven down. He says, “I tell you, I tell you if someone sins against you, seven times in one day, and seven times they come to you and repent, then you forgive them seven times.” In fact, Jesus uses the strongest language here. “You must forgive them.”
The disciples are astonished at this, and we see it in the text because they say immediately, “Lord, increase our faith.” In other words, that seems impossible. How could we possibly… If someone—forget, can you imagine, you know, when you were growing up and there’s your brother? That’s who it always was, right? Right. And he sins against you and then says, “Could you forgive me?” Okay. And then again, okay. And then again, you’re getting to the limit. And again, and again, and again, and again. Forgiveness is abounding in the Lord’s church. And this is how Jesus is teaching us to handle the sins that are committed against us, that we forgive them.
So the disciples pray, “Lord, increase our faith. We can’t do it without you,” which is true. In fact, they may be onto something even more than they know. Luther, when he’s talking about the Lord’s Prayer, “forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us,” he says that this is one of the ways that we know that the Holy Spirit is working in our own hearts and in our own lives. Because we do this thing that our flesh could never do, and that is that we forgive people when they sin against us. It’s one of the marks of the Christian.
But they pray, “Increase our faith,” and Jesus says, “No, you don’t need more faith to do this. You just need the right faith.” Jesus, in fact, tells this little parable or gives this little teaching. He says, “If you had faith the size of a mustard seed, which is small, if you had faith the size of a mustard seed, you could say to this mulberry tree,”—there must have been a tree there—”you could say this mulberry tree, go and be planted into the sea,” and the tree would obey you.
Jesus is saying with those words, and this is important for us to remember, that it’s not the intensity of our faith or the fervor of our faith or the size or greatness of our faith that matters, it’s simply the object of our faith. If you have the smallest faith in Christ, then you have salvation that cannot be assailed. Faith has its strength then, not in its fervor but in its object. It’s important because we often will describe someone to say, “Oh, they have faith,” or “Oh, that person is a believer.” The question is, in what? A believer in what? Because I suppose all people are believers, but it is only faith in Christ, even the smallest, but only faith in Christ that brings us through all the troubles of this world into the life to come.
So Jesus says first, “Don’t worry about the size of your faith, just worry about the object, just trust in me.” And then he goes on to tell this parable. It’s a parable of a man who has a servant who’s working in the field. And he says they’re out working in the field, planting or harvesting or plowing or watching the sheep or whatever’s happening. And then the day’s over and they come into the house and Jesus says, “Does the master say to the servant, ‘Hey, sit down with me, let’s have dinner?'” The answer is no. He says, “Okay, now it’s time for you to cook. Okay, and make your dinner, and then get dressed up in the serving clothes, and then serve dinner to me, and then I’ll eat, and then when that’s all over, then you can eat.” And then Jesus says, “Does the master say to the servant, thank you for doing what he ought to do?” The answer is no.
“So you too, when you’ve done everything that you ought to have done, should simply say, ‘We’re unworthy servants. We’ve just done what we should.'”
Now Jesus is addressing the twofold temptation that comes to each of us with this command of his to forgive the sins committed against us. There is, on the one hand, the danger that we simply refuse to do it, that we say, “No, I can’t. I can’t forgive that sin. I can’t let it go. I can’t do anything but hold the person to account. I can’t be, I can only be angry. It’s just the way it goes. It has to be that way.” Jesus says, “Don’t you know that you don’t belong to yourself? You are under the charge of another. And your Lord Jesus has given you this command as his child, as his servant, as a member of his kingdom to forgive the sins committed against you.”
The other temptation on the other side, though, is to say, well, when we do manage to forgive a sin committed against us, then we get really proud of ourselves. I don’t know if you’ve done it before, but you think to yourself, “Man, I put aside my sinful flesh, I put aside my anger, I put aside my pride, and that person who hurt me so profoundly, I actually did forgive them. Wow, now I’m a super-Christian.” And Jesus says, “Is that what you’re going to say? No. Does the servant, does the master thank the servant for doing his duty? When you forgive the person who sins against you, you should just say, ‘I’ve done what I was supposed to. I’m a man under orders. I’m a woman under orders. I have a Lord Jesus who forgives the sins of all, and he’s set me in this world not to hold people to account for their sins but also to forgive them so that the forgiveness that he gives to me is bound, is captured in my own heart so that I’m sharing it with everybody else. I’ve just done what I ought to do. It was nothing special.'”
We’ve seen examples of this. We saw a profound example, maybe even a generation-shaping example, a couple of weeks ago at the funeral of Charlie Kirk, when Erica Kirk offered that forgiveness to the assassin of her husband. It’s an amazing thing. It’s almost jaw-droppingly beautiful to see that faith in action. And I think this is true. She would say, “I’ve just done what I ought to do.”
Someone was telling me after the first service that there was a similar thing that happened after a church shooting where a man came and he shot up the church, and the people who survived and the parents and the friends of the victims were in court. And I don’t know if you’ve seen this happen in court, but the victims are able to make a statement. And in this particular case, the Christians who were afflicted in such profound ways and who lost loved ones stood up one after another to face the man who did the shooting, and one after another, they forgave him.
I remember in this story—I’m sure I have the details wrong; I’m just going to tell you how the story is in my own memory. I was 19 years old. I spent a couple of weeks in this little Palestinian village called Iblen, where there was a priest there, a Coptic priest who was building a school, and I was volunteering to help. And I was sitting at dinner with this couple from Ohio. It’s kind of a weird place to have dinner with a couple from Ohio, but anyway, they were there also volunteering. Yeah. And we were just talking about ourselves and our history and our life, and they were telling me this astonishing story that their daughter was murdered. And I couldn’t believe this. And I’m listening to the story, and they’re telling the story, and I asked them, “What did you do? How did you react to that? Well, how did you face the man who killed her?” And they looked at me with such a kind of innocence on their face, and almost like, “Why are you—?” They said, “We forgave him.”
And my face must have shown the incredulity of the same as the disciples when Jesus is talking about forgiving the people that sin against you. And I must have looked at them with such astonishment. “How could you do that? How could you forgive them?” And they looked at me with, I think, an equal incredulity. Like, “Why are you even asking the question?” And they said to me, “We’re Christian. We’re Christian. That’s what we do. We forgive sins. We belong to Jesus who gave himself on the cross to suffer for all that we’ve done wrong, unimaginable, all the offense that we’ve given. He suffered all of that for us. And he has invited us into his kingdom and his life and his joy and his peace, which is the forgiveness of sins. We are forgiven, so we extend that mercy to others. And it doesn’t even really compare. The amount that the Lord—you can never, you’ll never be able to forgive someone as much as the Lord has already forgiven you. It just doesn’t even compare.”
Now it doesn’t mean it’s not hard. It doesn’t mean that the Christian doesn’t pursue justice in this life. But we have to remember, dear saints, as much as we pursue justice, that justice does not lead to peace or joy. You’ve seen it before. I have too, where the family of someone who was abused or murdered or something and they’re outside the courthouse, and the death sentence has been given to the person who killed them. And then the family comes out and they’ve been fighting and fighting for this justice for so long. And then they come out and they’re being interviewed, and they say, “Well, how do you feel now?” And they’ll say, “Well, we’re glad that there’s justice, but it doesn’t bring… It doesn’t bring our son back. It doesn’t bring our daughter back. It doesn’t bring our loved one back. It doesn’t fix the problem. It doesn’t make peace. It doesn’t make wholeness. It doesn’t make joy.”
We pursue justice, but we know that a clean conscience and a joyful heart and a free heart come only from living in the Lord’s mercy.
Now this is a hard teaching. I mean, the disciples are probably astonished at what Jesus is saying, and we’re astonished too. But when we consider it, it starts to reveal itself in more and more ways, in more and more beautiful ways, because the Lord Jesus is not asking you to do something that He has not already done. He knows your sin. In fact, He knows your sin much better than you do. He knows your rebellion. He knows the evil in your heart. He knows the corruption of your flesh. He knows your wicked intentions. He knows all of that. And still He says to you, “All your sins are forgiven.”
Still He comes to you with His love and His mercy and His kindness. And dear friends, that sets us free to pray, “Lord, give us your spirit so that we might begin to forgive as you have forgiven us.” And in this way, Jesus gives us the wisdom not only to know what to do with the sins that we commit, but also what to do with the sins committed against us. May God grant us this wisdom and this peace through Christ our Lord. Amen.
And the peace of God which passes all understanding, guard your hearts and minds through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.