Sermon of 13 March 2007, Tuesday of Lent III
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Readings: Song of the Three Young Men 2-4 and 11-20 (also known as the Prayer of Azariah, Song of the Three Jews, Apocryphal Daniel, insertion between Daniel 3:23 and 3:24, or as addition after Daniel 12:13), Psalm 25:3-10, Matthew 18:21-35


Forgiveness is a strong theme in today’s readings. Coming in the third week of Lent, this serves as a powerful reminder of the themes of repentance and forgiveness that characterize much of this season.

The song of the three young men comes from Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego as they walk unharmed through the fires of King Nebuchadnezzar’s furnace after refusing to bow down and worship the golden statue he has erected. Azariah is the Hebrew name of Abednego before his Babylonian exile where the king renames him and his companions. This prayer is particularly powerful as Azariah, in the midst of a profound miracle of God’s protection and favor, takes the opportunity to pray for all of Israel, that God might forgive them and restore them from captivity to their former glory. He repents for all of Israel, offering in place of burnt offerings and sacrifices, contrite hearts and humble spirits, and offering himself and his rescued companions as a symbolic sacrifice, having been cast into the furnace for their faith and loyalty to God. As the story continues, they are called out of the furnace by Nebuchadnezzar, who repents of his own act and honors God, offering protection to Shadrach Meshach and Abednego and promoting them to positions of honor in Babylon.

Our Psalm today give us another splendid example of a prayer of repentance. Modeling the humble and contrite heart that Azariah offers in repentance in the Song of the Three Young Men, the Psalm concludes with the simple and honest prayer: For your Name’s sake, O Lord, * forgive my sin, for it is great.

Taking the theme one step further, Jesus tells the parable of the wicked servant in today’s gospel. The parable sets up an absurd contrast to demonstrate God’s forgiveness for us and our relatively pitiful failure of compassion and forgiveness for one another. The first servant owed his master ten thousand talents, which was forgiven him. Yet he refused to forgive the hundred denarii his fellow servant owed him. To put this in perspective, it’s important to note that a denarius is the day’s wage of a laborer in the field. So to be fair, the second slave did owe the first about three and a half month’s wages. A talent, on the other hand is worth a year’s wages. So what was forgiven the first slave by his master would have been ten-thousand years worth of a day laborer’s wages. It is absurd in the first place that any master would loan his servant more money than he could repay in a hundred lifetimes, and it is even more absurd that after having experienced the awesome forgiveness of so crippling a debt that this servant would jail a fellow servant for owing him an infinitesimally insignificant debt by comparison.

The message of course, is that we are to forgive one another as God forgives us. The warning, however, that comes with this parable seems to me to be more than simply that God will withhold forgiveness if we fail to forgive our brothers and sisters. I don’t believe that God works that way.

God’s love for us is unconditional, and as such there is nothing that can separate us from God’s love and forgiveness. We, however can separate ourselves from God, and when we hold resentment, anger, fear, and hate for another in our heart, we distance ourselves from God until we have become estranged from God’s presence and alienate ourselves from God’s love and forgiveness. It is in this light that we must come to understand repentance.

I very much believe that Repentance is for us. God does not need it in order to forgive us – indeed God has already forgiven us and continues loving us no matter what. We, however, who have alienated ourselves from God through our own self-centeredness and through our unwillingness to forgive, need repentance in order to turn around and see that God has not moved away from us, but that we have turned our backs on and moved away from God.

Jesus' exhortation at the end of this parable is a message speaking to the necessity of the human heart to forgive in order to heal and to fully accept God’s love and forgiveness for us.

Just as the first servant could not fully appreciate and experience the forgiveness shown to him because of his own callous heart, we cannot fully appreciate and experience God’s love and forgiveness for us when we hold onto resentment of others.

I had an abuser when I was a child. It was a family member who will go unnamed, but it was frequent and it was crushing. I was terrified of this person and yet I had to live with them practically every day. The rest of my family and I finally escaped this person when I was about ten years old, and I resented both that person and the time we were still forced to spend together. Although the abuse stopped, I continued being a victim both through my own resentment and through the trauma I had experienced in the daily verbal abuse and frequent physical punishment that would be considered physical abuse by any modern standard. I was twenty years old when I finally found forgiveness for this person. There was no repentance, nor any seeking of forgiveness by this individual, but through God’s grace, I experienced forgiveness for this person in my heart and it has made a world of difference in who I was and who I am today. For me the forgiveness and love came within a couple of years of experiencing the profound love and forgiveness of God for the first time at the Happening retreat I speak of frequently. Having been forgiven the debt of a hundred lifetimes by God, I found the forgiveness necessary to begin building a healthy and reconciled relationship with my relative.

Until I gave up the resentment and anger I held in my heart, I continued to be the victim in that relationship and I continued to separate myself from God’s forgiveness of my own shameful actions and thoughts. In this way, what Christ teaches us in today’s parable is profoundly and deeply true for any of us who have experienced the awesome power of forgiveness in our own hearts. It isn’t because of any lack of forgiveness on God’s part, but it is entirely because of our ability to forgive that we can become open to receive forgiveness.

Thus it is through true repentance and through our own willingness to forgive that we come to accept God’s forgiveness and reopen ourselves to God’s love.

God give us the strength this Lent to forgive those who have hurt or angered us, give us the wisdom to seek your forgiveness when we have separated ourselves from you, and give us the grace to recognize in our hearts when we have turned our backs on you. We thank you for your gift of love.

Amen.