How Many Times?

Is there some irony here on the part of the lectionary preparers that they paired Exodus 14, the recounting of the Egyptian army being swallowed up by the sea in retribution for enslaving the Hebrews (or Exodus 15, the song of celebration for the victory over the Egyptian army), with Matthew 18, which is an account of Jesus’ call upon us to unlimited forgiveness? What in the world are we supposed to do with that? What we usually do is pick one and run with it. Mixing them together is difficult, to say the least. So, let’s look at the one that is in our wheelhouse.

Jesus had been talking about reconciliation and then about how he abides with those who agree, who live in community with one another. So, Peter saunters up, eager to show that he’d been listening. “Hey, Jesus,” Peter says, “suppose someone in the family does something really bad to me, how often should I forgive?” OK, he really said, “sins against me,” but sin in this case is a breach of covenant, an offense against a brother or sister. Then Peter plays his ace, “as many as seven times?” Most teachers would have said that you have to forgive three times to follow the law. So, Peter goes way out on a limb and says seven times. I can’t help but think that he expected Jesus to say something like, “Hold on there, Sparky. Forgiveness is a good thing, but let’s not get carried away. I mean three is pretty good. Four is out of the park. Seven? Don’t be ridiculous!”

But, as we know, that isn’t what Jesus said. He did math right there in Peter’s face. Seventy-seven times, or seventy times seven. Which is it? Doesn’t matter, it wasn’t math; it was and is grace. Jesus wasn’t giving us a checklist, a counter so that whatever high number we get to there is a limit, and once we reach it, then pow. No, he was trying to talk in terms of infinite grace. He was stepping into eternity for a moment and describing a new reality. There is a different way of keeping score. Instead of measuring slights against us, we begin living by grace offered. Instead of counting the points of division, we measure out the ways we can come together. It is a different scale, or more appropriately, a different way of living.

Then Jesus takes the time to explain why. And he does it through a story, as you might expect. Or should have expected, anyway. And this one is a doozy. If you want to have a debate as to whether Jesus had a sense of humor, this parable is prime evidence. As the story goes, a king wanted to settle accounts with his slaves. So, he calls one of them who owes ten thousand talents. I’ll pause here. Ten thousand talents. A slave who owed ten thousand talents. OK, those online sports betting apps are really getting out of hand. Depending on which historian you read, this was either the gross domestic product of a relatively large nation or the equivalent of 150,000 years of average wages. In other words, there is no way that a slave could have amassed such a debt. It’s hyperbole, to say the least. But the debtor slave’s response is, “Be patient with me, and I will pay you everything.” One hundred fifty thousand years would take an inordinate amount of patience. But for some reason, the king decided to just wipe away the entire debt. I guess he didn’t want to wait 150,000 years for his money.

But then the plot thickens, and the man who was forgiven the enormous debt stumbles across a fellow slave who owed him one hundred denarii. OK, if a denarius was a day’s wage, that was one hundred days’ worth of cash—not insignificant, to be sure. But Jesus says, "Do the math; 150,000 years equals 54,750,000 days of owing." More than 54 million to 100, seems outrageous, to say the least. No wonder everyone got their noses out of joint. Now the first guy is going to jail to be tortured until he can pay the entire debt. Ow. So, fun story; Jesus left them rolling in the aisles with this one.

Besides the bad behavior or bad decision-making on the part of the first slave, what’s the point here? That we’re all in debt? Or that we’ve all been set free from a debt that we couldn’t pay in 150,000 years? Salvation is being set free to live as though we were already a part of the kin-dom of God, because we are. In which case, our default ought to be forgiveness. We ought to lead with grace. That’s the invitation that Jesus issues to us here. not that we count how many times we should forgive someone until we reach some magic number that then allows us to walk away or, worse yet, wreak some vengeance on them for being so mean to us.

As an aside, Jesus doesn’t say we’ve got to sit there and take it. He doesn’t say that we’ve got to put ourselves in harm’s way in order to be the forgiving types that he wants us to be. We can be forgiving from a distance; we can protect ourselves and others in our care by removing ourselves from a toxic situation. We can be set free from suffering and from oppression. We can escape from Egypt.

Certainly, the liberation of a people from bondage in Egypt is a powerful witness to the justice and care of God. Yet it is hard not to be a little squeamish over the accounting of even an enemy force being wiped out in the crashing of waters as the Red Sea returned to its rightful place. Or the account of the enemy force getting stuck in the mud of the Sea of Reeds as the new-fangled sign of the arms-race superiority Egyptian chariots proved too heavy for the marshy ground. But then, as noted above, the lectionary preparers gave us a choice this week and allowed us to skip over this detail and instead go to chapter 15 and join the party of celebration over this mass death. The rabbis struggled with this story from the very beginning, and indeed the witness in the Hebrew scripture as a whole is very divided over this harsh and all too prevalent reality. On the one hand, we should celebrate the end of wickedness. On the other hand, can we celebrate such killing? Should we sing with such exuberance of “the horse and rider he has thrown into the sea”?

The Jewish Chronicle had a fascinating article about this very dilemma: https://www.thejc.com/judaism/features/why-did-we-sing-when-the-egyptians-drowned-1.54039. I am especially intrigued by the rabbinic teaching that Pharaoh didn’t die in Egypt but fled to become king of Nineveh, which explains that when Jonah rolls into town, he was so willing to repent and beg forgiveness. It is worth wrestling with these issues, particularly in a time of rampant Christian nationalism that is often quick to pick up the language of violence and war. Our own consciences have been stirred by reflection on the glorification of violence by such writing as Mark Twain’s “The War Prayer”: https://www.americanyawp.com/reader/19-american-empire/mark-twain-the-war-prayer-ca-1904-5/.

This might explain why even the lectionary gives us alternate readings here. Initially, we have Exodus 14 or 15, but then we have a new layer of alternate texts which goes back to Genesis 50 and the story of Joseph’s brothers coming to the realization that they did great harm to their brother, as annoying as he was, and might suffer as a consequence. A troubling story, but one that ends a little more happily than that of the Egyptian army.

One approach the preacher might take, should she or he decide to preach from this text, would be to place the emphasis – whether in the account or the aftermath – on God as the primary actor in this event. This is not an act of vengeance by the people, whether the oppressed or the liberators. The danger here, of course, is presenting God as a warmonger and a harsh judge, for which there is ample scriptural evidence. It would be important to lay alongside the counter argument of the God we see in Jesus, who is also evident in the Hebrew scriptures.

Both Hebrew scripture stories give us a real-world setting in which to wrestle with the call to unlimited grace and forgiveness outlined in Matthew 18. In the face of enemies across the aisle or across the sea, how many times should we be willing to forgive?