When preaching on today’s gospel reading, my friend, Bill Uetricht, has shared a story which addresses a practice all of us are so very good at executing – scorekeeping. And, with his permission, I want to share that story:
In the beginning, God didn’t make just two people; he made a bunch of us. Because he wanted us to have a lot of fun, and he said you couldn’t really have fun unless there’s a whole gang of you. At first, we did have fun just like he expected. We rolled down the hills, waded in the streams, ran in the meadows, frolicked in the woods, and acted silly. We laughed a lot.
Then one day this snake told us that we weren’t having real fun because we weren’t keeping score. Back then, we didn’t know what score was. When he explained it, we couldn’t see the fun. But he said we should give an apple to the person who was best at all the games and we’d never know who was best without keeping score. We could see the fun of that, of course, because we were all sure that we were the best.
It was different after that. We yelled a lot. We had to make up new scoring rules for most of the games. Others, like frolicking, we stopped playing because they were too hard to score.
By the time God found out what had happened we were spending 45 minutes a day actually playing and the rest of the time working out scoring. God was angry about that – very, very wroth. He said we couldn’t use his garden anymore because we weren’t having fun. We told him we were having lots of fun. He was just narrow-minded because it wasn’t exactly the kind of fun he originally thought of.
He wouldn’t listen. He kicked us out, and said we couldn’t come back until we stopped keeping score. To rub it in, he told us we were all going to die and our scores wouldn’t mean anything anyway.
He was wrong. My cumulative, all-game score is 16,548. And if I can raise it to 20,000 before I die, I’ll know I’ve accomplished something. Even if I can’t my life has a great deal of meaning because I have taught my children to score high and they’ll be able to reach 20,000 or even 30,000.
Really, it was life in the garden that didn’t mean anything. Fun is great in its place but without scoring there’s no reason for it. God actually has a very superficial view of life, and I’m certainly glad my children are being raised away from his influence. We were lucky. We’re all very grateful to the snake. (Ann Herbert)
Yes, friends, we really are in bondage to the mathematical practice of scorekeeping. We keep score in just about everything we do. Education is built around scorekeeping. Sports are built around scorekeeping. Our finances and financial systems require bookkeeping, a form of scorekeeping, as we constantly focus on credits and debits. If we look at today’s political climate and our political leaders, scorekeeping is the name of the game. After all, you must keep score so you can get even with others, get retribution, and win. Quite honestly, I think we would be hard pressed to find an aspect of life in which scorekeeping was not present in some shape or form. Our passion for scorekeeping influences just about every facet of the way we live in relationship to others. It even influences our ability to live into the forgiveness we have been given in Christ.
In today’s gospel reading, Jesus is teaching about forgiveness, and we discover that even Peter was into mathematical scorekeeping. We find him asking Jesus how many times he should forgive a sister or brother who mistreats or takes advantage of him, and he almost seems magnanimous as he asks, “Seven times?” Well, Jesus was not impressed with such a generous offer of forgiving a person seven times, and he gives Peter a different mathematical formula for his scorekeeping efforts: seventy-seven times. In other words, so many times that you need to stop counting! Don’t keep score! You can never forgive enough!
The issue is not how much or how often we are asked to forgive or should forgive. For people of faith, the act of forgiveness is already a limitless, measureless act. Forgiveness is never not present in our lives and in our relationships. That’s the issue. Forgiveness is part and parcel of the Kingdom of Heaven and, as Christians, it is an aspect of our identity. It’s a constant. It’s not optional. It’s not a choice. However, far too often we want it to be a choice — and that is what is at the heart of Peter’s question.
Anyway, to help Peter and all of us better understand, Jesus again shares a story to emphasize what he is saying. Now, we need to remember that Jesus’ stories often contain a lot of hyperbole and exaggeration. This story is no different. Jesus tells about a king who ponders his own scorekeeping when looking at his accounts receivable. This king discovers that a certain slave owes him about a gazillion dollars. Jesus said the amount was 10,000 talents which was the equivalent of 150,000 years of labor. It is such an outrageous amount we might as well say it was more than the combined national economies of all the G7 nations! Well, the slave is summoned to appear before him. The slave falls to his knees and begs for mercy, for time to do something that would be utterly impossible, for time to repay what is owed. Inexplicably and without so much as a word, the king relents. The king as much as shrugs and says, “Okay. I forgive the debt.”
And just like that, the slave is free. His utterly unpayable debt is vaporized, whoosh, like the sound of thousands of e-mails being deleted and sent to the trash bin. His unpayable debt has been totally deleted and wiped from the books.
Well, we might imagine this slave’s response. Just picture him, walking away from the castle, standing a little taller, shoulders back, whistling a merry tune. If this were a musical, we might see him do a little jig. As he struts along, he then sees a fellow slave, one who owes him a measly sum, so the slave stops in his tracks. And, he lapses back into bondage, back into the bondage of scorekeeping and spreadsheets and accounts receivable and into a blind allegiance to what he sees as fair.
So, he says to his fellow slave, “Hey man. You owe me five bucks. Pay up now. Right now.” The fellow slave falls to his knees. “Patience, man, patience! Friday’s coming. I will get right with you.” But no. That is not good enough. The slave whose enormous, unpayable debt has just been forgiven is then extremely hard and cruel and mean to the other guy, his fellow slave. Immediately, he throws the fellow slave in prison. Really? Set free from an impossible debt, this man cannot look past a debt that would equal the cost of a cup of Biggby coffee and a doughnut? The guy who had been forgiven a debt the size of the combined national economies of all the G7 nations could not find it in his heart to forgive the guy who owed him five bucks!?!
The difference between what was owed by the first slave and the fellow slave was astronomical! When hearing this aspect of Jesus’ story, Peter and all the others had to have been stunned! Everyone listening would have been shocked by Jesus’ words, shocked to even imagine such forgiveness. And, we should also be stunned!
Friends, the scorekeeping job is not ours. Revenge and vengeance after being wronged is not our job. Evening the score is not our job. Our job is to forgive. Jesus shocked his listeners with the use of these absurd amounts regarding scorekeeping to show them that God’s forgiveness is limitless. And so, again, when talking about the life Jesus calls us to live, Jesus turns our “normal” expectations upside down and inside out.
Jesus ends his story by saying that when the king found out what the first slave had done, he handed him over to be tortured until he would pay his entire debt. I like how Richard Rohr describes the end of this story. He says:
The greedy and selfish debtor, who is owed a mere five dollars, throttles his fellow servant, ignores his attempts and promises, and throws him into prison (as if that is going to help). And in his attempt to imprison the other, he ends up being “tortured” and imprisoned himself. This is a classic Middle Eastern wisdom story. It is both a gracious statement about what we can always expect from God and an honest warning about how any refusal to forgive actually destroys and imprisons the very one who refuses to forgive!
The parable ends with the invitational one-liner: “Each of you must forgive your brother [or sister] from the heart!” This is what the Master/God has just done. Jesus invites all of us in this rather easy-to-understand story into God’s nonsensical loving “from the heart” which is the final staccato phrase.
Friends, we follow the one whose nonsensical loving heart is most fully seen in the cross. On the cross, God does away with scorekeeping! On that cross, Jesus said, “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.” And, as Nadia Bolz Weber says,
God’s forgiveness is like giant bolt-cutters, setting us free. And then God says go and do likewise. Forgive as you have been forgiven. Cut others loose too. Jesus commands it. It’s not actually a suggestion. He commands us to forgive just as he commands us to love.”
