Nothing Succeeds Like Excess

 January 22 2023

Matthew 5:38-42

         One of the phrases that goes around social media is “post turtle”. Just the other week somebody said that the person they were referring to was a “post turtle”.  Have you heard of this before? Well, out west as you’re driving down the road you might look over and there on top of a fence post will be a turtle. Now there are several truths that you can get from this image and the first, and most important is that this turtle did not get up there by himself. Someone had to have put that turtle up there for whatever reason. The second truth is that the turtle doesn’t have a clue what to do up there on the fence post and the third truth is that he will probably remain on top of that fence post until someone else comes along and gets him down from there.

Now it may seem like an odd analogy but the truth is that we are all “post turtles”. The reason I say this is that we are living a life here in this world and what is obvious, as obvious as that turtle up there on that fence post, is that we did not get here without help. I mean, the silliest phrase I ever heard anyone say is that they were a self-made man or woman. Really, just how does that work? No, there is nothing self-made about any of us. We are all alive through some strange wonder and now the only real question we have to figure out is, “Why”? Why are we here on top of this fence post we call life and just who is it that has put us here? These are universally valid questions to ask, everybody is out here living a life which they have to admit was given to them, a gift they really had no say in, but here they are living that life they have been given. You see, its only when people stop long enough to consider their life objectively that they begin to realize that if life is a gift it just figures that somebody was the giver of that gift. Now, if somebody has given us this gift we call our life when we are born then we have to wonder when we die, do we give this gift of life back to the one who gave it to us? Its questions like these that explain why all of us stay pretty busy so that we never have time to think about them.

When we do get around to thinking about our life, how it seems to be a gift, given to us by someone because like that turtle on the fence post, we got up here somehow, these questions are what is behind the strange language found in Matthew’s version of the Lord’s Prayer. I mean, don’t you find it weird that we as the blessed people of God have this common prayer that’s supposed to unite us but every time we pray it together some of us are over here asking for our debts to be forgiven and over there is somebody asking for their trespasses to be forgiven. We just accept that that’s just the way it is yet we really don’t know why Matthew has messed it up like he has. In most translations the word that is supposed to be “debts” is simply changed to “sins” as if they are interchangeable, but are they? What if Matthew had a very good reason for using this word, “debts” when asking God for forgiveness? I do believe that Matthew does have an important reason for using this idea of debts instead of sins and that is that Matthew is speaking to people all over the world not just the people of Israel. When we speak of this idea of sinning, we know that when we sin this is a breaking of a known law of God. But what happens when there are people out there who do not know what those laws are? I mean if you do not see a speed limit sign anywhere can you really get in trouble for speeding? Its like they say, if you know, you know, but what happens to those who simply don’t know? So to speak of the forgiveness of sins is a little more of an involved process than most of us care to admit.  This idea of, “debts”, though is a more universal concept because when people consider themselves and the world they live in a lot of people will conclude that there has to be some higher power, some God who created our world and it is this God who is the one who has given us life. We have been placed here on top of this fence post and therefore someone had to have done this. This God who has given us this life then, is the one who ultimately has fed us, has clothed us, the one who has given everything necessary to sustain us. We can state the that all that we are and all that we have, all of this has been a gift from the God who has created the world.  This is a statement that any honest person can make anywhere around the planet. We can all say that there is no action we have done, no thought that has entered our mind, no word spoken by us that we do not in some way owe to God. This is where we begin in our relationship with God, indebted to him for the sum total of our life. What we owe God for this life he has given us, as Paul writes in the twenty-first verse of the first chapter of Romans, is gratitude and glory. It just makes sense that when someone gives us a gift that we are supposed to say, “Thank you”, and we should honor the person who has given us this gift. I mean, its universally accepted that to bad mouth somebody who has been gracious to you is just really bad manners.

So, as we come to this point of asking for forgiveness of our debt, what has caused us to utter these words is this realization that we are indebted to God for our entire life and that we have not responded to the receiving of this gift with the necessary gratitude and glory that God deserved. We are asking God to write off all that we owe him that we have not given to him in the past. What is easy to understand when we think through this forgiveness is that even if God decided to be merciful to us and wipe away the debt that we owe to him that this will not end our relationship with God, as is what happens when we pay off a monetary debt. I mean, when I pay off the car loan or my mortgage I no longer am going to be in a relationship with my bank. But with God when our debt is forgiven our relationship the relationship does not end but rather our relationship with God is transformed. Now we realize that we do not have an independence nor a significance apart from God; we are forever bound to him because he is the very one to whom we owe our life. Life then is understood as an obligation to God which destroys any notion that our life is supposed to be about our own selfish pursuit of pleasure. No, our life, we discover, is forever connected to the One who is eternal and beyond our earthly existence.Now this might seem as if our indebtedness to God has bound us so close to God that we have lost our freedom but the truth is that when we are at last, in right standing with God we are free to be who God has created us to be, his very children.

This idea that God has created us to be his children lies right at the heart at God’s reason to forgive our debts in the first place. It is this relationship that God has with us that stands behind God’s decision to forgive us. Our refusal to give God the gratitude and glory that he rightly deserved for giving us our life meant that this indebtedness stood between us and our communion with God, a communion that has now been restored through God’s mercy and willingness to forgive. It is God’s love and mercy which we have come against, the same love and mercy which moved God to wipe away the debt that we owed. God’s love wills the very best for us, the good that God desires to see within those he has communion with, those he calls his children. So, God’s forgiveness is his removal of anything that stands in the way of this goodness on which his family is founded on. God receives us as debtors in need of forgiveness and he removes that which we rightfully owe in order that we might be restored as our rightful selves, children of God, the Almighty King. This is what Paul is speaking about in his second letter to the Corinthians, the eighth chapter, the ninth verse, when he writes, “For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for our sake he became poor, so that you by his poverty might become rich.” Those who know themselves as those whom God has blessed must confess that all of us begin this life of blessedness as those who are poor in spirit as Jesus teaches us in the fifth chapter of Matthew, the third verse. We who come to God as those who are impoverished and debt-ridden people are yet the same people to whom Jesus promises us that ours is the richness of the kingdom of heaven. God understands that what transforms us from being people of debt to being people of duty toward our king, is the excessive riches he pours out upon us, not just paying our debt but welcoming us home as children of the king.

This forgiveness that God has shown to us has to be fully understood and taken to heart in order that we can fulfill the second part of this petition found in the Lord’s Prayer. There we are told that our forgiveness of our debt that we desire that God provide for us, is the very same forgiveness with which we must forgive those who owe us. You see, only as we grasp the magnitude of God’s forgiveness of us can we realize just what God expects will be our response of forgiveness that we offer to those indebted to us. It is not just that God has forgiven us but it is also the manner in which God has forgiven us that matters. You see, God has forgiven us with lavish excess, and God therefore expects us to be forgiving of others with lavish excess. Now, just so that we do not go looking for loopholes to ease this expectation that God has for us, Matthew has given us a few examples of what such forgiveness is supposed to look like. In our scripture for today, Jesus teaches us first what we should not do. He states, “You have heard that it was said, “An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.” But I say to you, “Do not resist the one who is evil.” In other words we are not to come against evil using evil methods but instead we are to use the ways shown to us by our good God. Jesus continues. “If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn and let him have the left one also. And if anyone would sue you and take your outer coat let him have your shirt as well. If one forces you to go one mile, go with him two miles. Give to the one who begs from you, and do not refuse the one who would borrow from you.” You see, if you read this teaching of Jesus without knowing that what he is describing is how the forgiveness God has shown to us is translated into our every day life then you might just think that Jesus had gone a bit too far. Yet, if we fully understand that we were the one who begged God to give us whatever it would take to pay what we owed him then it just makes sense that when someone comes to us and asks the same of us how can we not oblige. In being forgiven by God, we have in essence, borrowed from God to pay off a debt that we owed to God, and this is a loan us who are poor in spirit have no chance of ever paying back. God did not just forgive our debt as we had asked him to do but instead went further and restored us to be who he created us to be children of the Almighty King. So, when someone asks us to do something like carry their pack one mile, how can we not but go on and go further than we have been asked to do. We have asked God for freedom from what we owed and God went further and gave us all that he had, opening up to us a life lived in communion with him. So, when someone demands that we give him our coat to pay our debt how can we not think that we might as well go ahead and give them all that we have, a gift of our inner shirt. That slap on our right cheek was a public display that we were not worthy of any honor by the one who hit us. How is this any different than our indebtedness toward God? What we owed God is a life lived with gratitude to God and honor of God yet through our life we publicly never gave God the thankfulness nor the honor that God so rightfully deserved. Just as that right hand upon our cheek dishonored us, so too our life which did not give God glory, dishonored him. Even so, God never retaliated against us but he instead paid our debt and honored us as he brought us back home to live in communion with him once again. Are you beginning to see the difficulty that is presented to us when we are commanded to forgive what others owe to us, just like, in the same manner as, the forgiveness the God has shown to us. What must not be forgotten when faced with what God expects of us is that the reason God has been so lavish in his wiping away of what we owed him is that God loves us and out of this love flows the mercy which forgives us. God forgives us because his relationship with us is always more valuable to him than any debt that we might have racked up. This is the way that love works, always treasuring the relationship above anything else. In our dealings with the people in our life then what God is saying to us is that our relationship with the people we meet is what is most important because every person we meet is someone who is important to God. God, in his mercy, is not only willing to forgive the debt that we owe but God is willing to pay off every person’s debt. This is what must be held onto when we deal with the evil that people do against us as we live out this life that God has given to us. We need to see that this person who confronts us is more important that the honor that they are attempting to take from us. This person who ruthlessly would take all that we have to pay off a debt that we owe to him is still more important than everything that they might take from us. We need to see that those times when someone forces us to serve them, even if against our will, this is yet another time to look at them, and to see them as someone who is important to God. The person who asks for something from us is far more valuable and precious than anything that they might take from us. This is why we are to give the other a loan that they may never repay because in doing so we at last stand where God once stood with us.

Yet, even so, what Jesus asks of us is extremely difficult, some might even say that what he asks us to do is impossible. This is why this plea for forgiveness is asked for in a prayer to God. Just as the forgiving of our debt that we owed to God seemed impossible, a situation which crushed us with the weight of the fear of having to come to the end of our life uncertain as to what the outcome might be for us who owed so much. Yet, what seems so impossible for us is, thankfully, possible for God. God in his mercy has done the impossible for us, not only forgiving our debt but restoring us to be who he created us to be, his children. When God then states that we must forgive just like he has forgiven us, forgive in the same manner as he has done for us, then we again are faced with an impossibility that can only be made possible by and through the power of God. When we pray that we desire to not only be forgiven of our debts but also that we might be people who forgive in the same manner that God has forgiven us, God honors that prayer and in those time when such forgiveness is called for, there God will be seen working in us and through us.

The reason I believe that this to be true, that God not only forgives us but that he works in us so that we might forgive as God forgives is that this is witnessed in the life of Jesus upon the cross. We are told in the ninth chapter of the book of Hebrews, the fourteenth verse, that it was through the eternal Spirit that Jesus offered himself without blemish upon the cross. The Holy Spirit was working in Jesus, as he was slapped upon the cheek; as his coat and his shirt were taken from him; as he carried his cross all the way to Calvary. There upon the cross Jesus cried out, “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.”It was here, that Jesus who was rich became poor for us so that we who are poor might become rich. Through the blood shed by Jesus, our sins were cleansed, our debt erased, so that now we are able to experience the richness of communion with God through the Holy Spirit. It is the Spirit, working in us, who empowers us to not only love as God first loved us but also to forgive as God has forgiven us. Let us then give to God the life we owe him, a life of gratitude and glory to the one who has called us his own. Amen!