Sermon for Trinity 22

490 Strikes and You're Still Not Out!
Matthew 18:21-35

On the way home on Wednesday night, I got bitten by a dog. He and another dog were both on leashes, being led south on Sixth Avenue by the women who owned them as I was heading north. They seemed to have some rottweiler and maybe some bulldog and maybe some boxer in them. They were both big and fierce-looking.

“Oh, you’re all right,” the woman holding the leash of the closer dog assured me as we approached each other just the other side of the school. I wasn’t so sure. I went out of my way to stay out of the dog’s way- but not quite far enough. He walked over sniffed my hand- and bit.

My jacket got most of the bite. In fact, I didn’t think he’d actually gotten me at all. There was no pain and not even the sensation of my hand coming into contact with the dog’s mouth. “Well, I never saw that before!” his owner told me. “Don’t worry about it,” I told her, and we went our separate ways.

But as I got to the Brethren church down there at the corner, I glanced at my hand. It was bleeding. I was so surprised that I didn’t turn around and follow the dogs and their owners. Besides, I wasn’t too anxious to deal with that dog again. But I should have been. Without knowing that the dog had had his shots, I would have to get shots myself- rabies shots.

The next two nights I hung around that spot on sixth. The two women and the dogs didn’t come again. Fortunately, rabies shots are no big deal nowadays. The worst is over already, and only four more relatively painless shots in the arm remain.

The whole incident filled me with mixed feelings. Obviously, a biting dog has to be controlled. But part of me sees a bright side in that particular dog not being collared, so to speak. I’m not quite sure how the law reads here in Iowa, but I’m pretty sure that here, like most places, a dog that bites a certain number of times has to be destroyed. Frankly, I’m too fond of dogs to want to see that happen even to the dog that bit me.

We treat people like dogs sometimes. Several states have “three strikes and you’re out” laws, whereby three felonies mean that a person is automatically sentenced to prison for life. And if the truth be told, we tend to operate the same way when it comes to our fellow human beings. Let a person do us dirt once, and perhaps we might be magnanimous enough to find it in our hearts to forgive them, especially if there were extenuating circumstances of some kind. But let that same person maliciously harm us a second time, and forgiveness doesn’t come very readily. As a practical matter, we have to have a great deal invested in a relationship to even allow most people three strikes before they’re out as far as we’re concerned.

Peter wanted to know how often he had to forgive a brother or a sister who sinned against him. Seven seemed a logical number. Seven, after all, is the number of completeness in Jewish numerology. It would have been as natural for Peter to have thought in terms of a person being called ‘out’ after seven ’strikes’ as it is for a baseball fan to think of a person being ‘out’ after three.

But Peter’s question missed the point. Whether it’s the City of Des Moines or Polk County deciding at what point a dog is too much of a menace to have around, or a state deciding at what point a serial offender just can’t be trusted to ever be free again, that sort of thinking presupposes that a person is in a position to stand in judgment on the dog or the criminal in question. Only the righteous get to sit in judgment, and only those who sit in judgment get to decide how many strikes mean that you’re out.

Counties and cities and states get to do that sort of thing. In fact, whether or not one agrees with the specifics of how they undertake their God-given task of protecting the rest of us from harm at the hands- or mouths- of others, it’s their job to do that sort of thing. In the Kingdom of the Left Hand- the realm of rules and laws- the rights of the rest of us have to be protected, and those who are in danger need to be kept out of danger. That’s why God has given us governments and legislatures and policemen and judges.

But there, such matters end. And thank God that they do! Can you imagine what it would be like to go through life fearing that the next sin you commit might be the “strike” that puts you irrevocably beyond the reach of God’s grace? I work with people who- however irrationally – do believe that, and live in constant fear of it. It’s hard to imagine a greater horror.

But that’s not the way God has chosen to deal with those who sin against Him. Instead, He chose to come to earth and to become a human being just like they are- just like we are- and to bear their guilt in order to satisfy His own justice, and enable Him to declare an amnesty for sinners. God doesn’t deal with those who sin against Him the way society quite correctly deals with lawbreakers, or even in the way that our own fallen natures want to deal with those who sin against us.

God doesn’t count the strikes. He Himself has already satisfied the demands of His own justice for every sin human beings will ever commit against Him. And He still forgives as lavishly and as completely after a googleplex of sins as He does after the first.

I’ve mentioned before a rule we had in our household when I was growing up: that we kids would not be punished for anything we did- provided my parents heard about it first from us. But in practice, that didn’t mean that we got off easy. Taking a licking was sometimes easier than going to Mom and Dad and ‘fessing up. The look of disappointment on their faces sometimes hurt more than a spanking would have. But in all the years I was growing up, they never once broke that rule.

And so it is that we have a difficult time imagining that God is as forgiving as He is. We have a hard time lifting up our own eyes, so to speak, to look into His. In our shame, the first reaction we sinners tend to have to the realization that we have sinned is to do what Adam and Eve did, and try to hide from God.

But when He finds us, we discover that what we have such a difficult time bringing ourselves to believe is true: for Jesus’ sake, God forgives totally and lavishly no matter how serious the sin, and no matter how we may have abused His grace in the past. A broken and a contrite heart, as David writes, God simply will not despise. No one who comes to Jesus will He ever cast out. No one. As I point out in The Scrupe Group, in Greek that statement is even stronger than it is in English. In English, the rules of algebra apply, and a double negative is a positive. But in Greek, a doubled negative is an intensified negative. And the inspired text has Jesus using a double negative in that statement. It’s as if He had said, “Whoever comes to me, no way will I ever cast out!”

It’s an entirely different set of rules we live with, we who live in God’s Kingdom of the Right Hand- His Kingdom of grace and mercy. Here, our sins cannot accuse us. Here, even the malicious and hateful things we have intentionally done are not allowed to stand between us and God- or between us, and one another.

And that is the point of the parable Jesus tells in our text. We are all of us citizens of God’s Kingdom of the Left. All of us- believer and unbeliever alike- live in a reality in which justice has its claim- a claim which will not be denied. In such a world, there can be such things as “three strikes” laws. In such a world, the proper response to injustice is retribution.

But if we are also citizens of God’s Kingdom of the Right Hand- as only Christians are- then while others may uphold the laws of the Kingdom of the Left on our behalf- policemen, for example, and judges, and soldiers- we ourselves dare not try. In the Kingdom of the Right hand, sinners are not punished, but forgiven; Christ Himself has already borne their punishment. In the Kingdom of the Right Hand, sins are not allowed to separate the sinner from the sinned-against, because the Kingdom of the Right Hand is a community of forgiven sinners.

We who are citizens of God’s Kingdom confess our citizenship in that Kingdom by living under its own, peculiar laws, which differ from those of the Kingdom of the Left Hand. We confess our citizenship in the Kingdom of Grace by refusing to despise a broken and a contrite heart and to never- no, never- turn away even the one who has done us dirt when he or she comes to us in repentant sorrow.

But it gets even worse. What about those who are not sorry? What about those who don’t want to be reconciled to us? Forgiving those who sin against us can be a lifelong struggle, even when they do repent. But when they refuse- when they persist in their malice- it can be all but impossible. In fact, only through God, with Whom all things are possible, can such a thing often be done.

But even here, we are called to live by the rules of the Kingdom of the Right Hand, and to live like its King, who does not desire the death of the wicked, but that they should turn from their ways, and live.

I have friends to whom things have been done so horrible that to ask them to forgive seems almost inhuman. You may know such people, too. But forgiveness is not so much an achievement as a decision. It may take a lifetime to implement that decision. But if so, citizens of the Kingdom of the Right Hand spend their lives the struggle to implement it.

We are saved by God’s refusal to let His own righteous anger have the last word. In this life, the struggle to implement the decision to forgive- the struggle against the Old Adam, that wants vengeance and justice and wants no part of reconciliation- is a lifelong struggle. But in those who are citizens of the Kingdom of the Right Hand, the struggle continues. They know that they, who do not deserve it, live by forgiveness. And knowing that, they, too, strive to forgive. And if the process is painful and long and hard, they do not struggle alone. God struggles by their side, and lends His strength to theirs, and works within them in the fullness of time what they could never have imagined, and what they could never have worked in themselves.

Forgiveness does that. Forgiveness cleanses. Forgiveness frees. Forgiveness liberates- sometimes the one who forgives, as much as the one who is forgiven. And we who belong to Jesus Christ are not given the option of not forgiving. Like the Unjust Steward, we live with the constant knowledge that we have been forgiven far more than we will ever be asked to forgive.

Jesus does not ask that we not be angry when we are sinned against. He expressed anger more than once against the Pharisees and against the money changers in the Temple and against the teachers of the Law who burdened men and women with loads too heavy for them to bear. His death was required to satisfy the anger of a righteous God against sin, and His satisfaction of that anger on the cross is the presupposition of God’s forgiveness of us. Jesus does not demand that we call what is evil good, or to act as if it had never happened.

But He does require that we respond when others injure us the same way He responded when our own sins nailed Him to that cross, and He said of us as much as of the Roman soldiers, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” He requires that not hold onto our anger, and let the forgiveness won for us on the cross pour out from our hearts to cover the sins others commit against us- as it always will overflow the heart of anyone who realizes just how much he or she has been forgiven.

But never think that it’s a question of earning or meriting forgiveness for ourselves by the good work of forgiving others. Rather, it’s a matter of the presence or the absence of justifying faith.There are those who do not forgive those who sin against them. And by their refusal to forgive, they show that they either do not realize how much they need to be forgiven or do not believe that they have received the forgiveness they need. What condemns them is their unbelief.

When all is said and done, it’s really very simple: no one who lives by forgiveness himself, and knows it, can do other than forgive those who stand in need of his own forgiveness. He who forgives is, in the last analysis, very simply he who believes.

May the peace of God, which passes all understanding, keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.