Ever so slightly the leaves are starting to turn because the shorter days and longer, cooler nights are putting the trees under stress.  We’ll soon see beautiful shades of yellow and red because, in places we can’t see, the connection between stem and leaf is beginning to loosen.  Ever so subtly the trees are starting to draw back into themselves, bracing for survival in the cold winter just ahead.  As they do, the moisture and nutrients that tend to favor the more dominant green pigments of summer are choked off, exposing other colors that have been there all along, just not visible to the naked eye.  It’s not the only place in God’s creation where stress tends to reveal other colors of true character that normally just aren’t visible.

The slave in this parable was under enormous stress and his true colors were about to be revealed, too.  He owed his master “‘ten thousand talents.’”  A talent was a measurement of silver used in trade and commerce in Jesus’ day.  Adjusted for today’s market, that means he owed his master the equivalent of millions of dollars.  How a slave gets in that far over his head in debt to his master is a mystery to me.  He must not have torn up all those unsolicited credit card offers that kept coming in the mail, maxed them out and then borrowed from his boss until even the minimum payments were out of reach.  Who knows?!  What we do know is that he owed a debt it would be impossible to ever repay.  When the loan was called, the slave had no choice but to throw himself on his master’s mercy and promise the impossible, to pay it all back, someday.

That’s kind of how we are, isn’t it?  When we owe someone, like God, more than we can ever pay we try to make installment payments with pitiful promises we know we can’t or won’t ever keep.  “God, please don’t let her be pregnant this time and I promise I won’t ever . . .!”  Haven’t we all tried to buy God off with lies about how good we’d be if he’d just be good to us one more time?  “‘Have patience with me, and I will pay you everything,’” the slave swore, betraying his appreciation of the fact that you don’t get something for nothing.  Even mercy, he believed, was a trade off.  It was worth the try.

In that day, if you owed a debt, your creditor could do more than attach a lien to your mortgage.  He could sell everything including your wife and kids and your sorry hide into slavery and pay himself back with the proceeds.  There was no legal recourse, no bankruptcy courts.  If you owed someone money, you were at their mercy.  Jesus is setting us up here to drive home his bigger point.  The man owed a debt he could never pay. 

Then, for some inexplicable reason, the master took pity on the slave and did more than just work out a new payment plan or reduce his interest rate.  He “‘forgave’” the debt, just forgave it, and wrote off the slave’s debt off as though it never existed and turned him loose to live his life.  How would it change your life right now if everyone you owed money to did the same thing?  Every credit card, your car loan, your mortgage, all of it, just zeroed out.  How stress free would your life be?  It looks like this guy is home free, literally.  Except in Jesus’ story, the real stress is just getting started.

There is the stress of overwhelming debt, of owing more than we can ever pay.  But, this story isn’t really about that.  This story is about how the color of our true character isn’t revealed until we’re under the stress of being the one who needs to do the forgiving.  Until someone owes us a debt they can’t, or just won’t, pay.  If Jesus’ parable teaches anything, it teaches that nothing reveals our true colors more than the stress forgiveness demands.

As soon as the slave had been set free from an impossible debt, one he couldn’t repay in a thousand lifetimes, he ran into another slave, one of his “fellows,” Jesus said, a debtor just like him, someone who lived where he lived, on the edge of survival and just barely making it, too.  This fellow slave owed him the equivalent of about three months wages.  Jesus is making a not-so-subtle reference to the fact that, whatever anyone else owes us pales in comparison to what we owed God.  And, our failure to appreciate that only exposes our insensitivity to the depth of our moral and spiritual bankruptcy that leaves us with no hope except for God’s mercy.  Enraged when the man couldn’t pay him on the spot, he exercised his legal rights and had the man thrown into prison “‘until he would pay the debt.’”

It’s an odd thing, really.  Putting someone in a place where they can’t even work to earn enough to repay what got them in prison in the first place.  Unless that’s one way we make people pay us back, by putting them in a position where, no matter what they do, it will never be enough.  At least that way we can always remind them of how much they owe us.  The people I find it most difficult to forgive are those who won’t accept my apology, or even allow me the opportunity to extend it.  Have you ever had anyone like that in your life?  Someone who always reminds you of the worst thing you ever did, or the worst thing you ever said, even if nothing else by just not even letting you apologize?  Have you noticed where you are most likely to meet people like that?

It shouldn’t escape our attention that Jesus told this parable in response to Peter’s question, “‘Lord, if another member of the church sins against me, how often should I forgive?’”  Someone in the church, Peter asked.  Is Peter asking, “Shouldn’t church people know better than to hurt each other anyway?”  Peter was ahead of himself a little.  The church didn’t even exist yet.  But, already there was a following, a community of believers gathering around Jesus.  Do you think someone in that community had already hurt Peter so badly that he had to ask Jesus’ help in forgiving?  Have you ever been hurt by someone so badly that you had to have Jesus’ help in forgiving them?  Welcome to the church!

The church is the place where, despite any other differences, what we have in greater common is the confession of our total dependence on the Lord of all mercy and forgiveness.  To do this forgiveness work we have to get close and get to know each other and be together under all kinds of circumstances.  The problem is that it is virtually impossible, with that much at stake and people that close, for someone not to get hurt now and then.  Thomas Long has written that, “We are not called to create forgiveness; that is beyond us.  We are called instead to participate in a forgiveness given to us as a gift (“To Err is Human; To Forgive . . .?” Christian Reflection,  The Center for Christian Ethics, Baylor University, Waco, Texas, 2001).  So it is that the church is one great big forgiveness laboratory, the place where, at one and the same time, we are called to participate in God’s forgiveness by receiving it ourselves and then extending it to others by being exposed to situations in which the people with whom we serve Christ are the very ones most likely to need it from us.

Occasionally, but rarely, we get ambushed by people who live at a distance.  Now and then we’re terrorized by someone who crashes the skyscrapers of our biggest dreams.  But, normally, to really hurt us, someone has to get close to what we value and those we love.  To get that close, we had to had to trust them enough to let them in.

In high school I kept telling my good friend, we’ll call him John, about how wonderful my new girlfriend Debbie was.  Debbie was a drop-dead gorgeous brunet.  I was head over heels.  John was my good church friend.  One night I called Debbie’s house and she told me she couldn’t talk because John was over to see her.  I never got her back.  John never apologized.  Married people sometimes have affairs when they’re off on a business trip, have a little too much to drink and dance too long with the wrong person.  More often, they have affairs with a close, trusted friend.  Even someone they met at church or a prayer meeting or a Bible study when they were stone cold sober.  Julius Caesar was stabbed in the back by someone he trusted enough to watch his back.  That’s the way it happens.  People have to be close, like in the church, to really hurt us with the kind of hurt that only comes with broken trust.  What that says about them is one thing.  What colors of our character it reveals when we’re faced with forgiving them is altogether another.  What it says about God is that one of his greatest gifts to us is not just his forgiveness of us but also the opportunity of participating in his forgiveness by extending it to others.  How many times, Lord, Peter asked.  “How many opportunities to participate in my Father’s forgiveness do you want?” Jesus could have legitimately answered.

The worst thing we sometimes do is just go to church and act as though nothing is wrong.  We bury our anger because we falsely believe that Christians can only be angry as long as they don’t show it.  Though some of the most forgiving people I’ve ever known I’ve met at church, some of the angriest people are, too.  Henri Nouwen writes that anger is a rather “impulsive response to the experience of being deprived.”  Even if we live out much of our public life at church, if we feel that someone has deprived us, we are prone to direct our anger at whomever we feel is responsible.  “(We) are angry at (our) families, who make (us) feel guilty, and angry at (ourselves) for not being who (we) want to be.  This is not open, blatant, roaring anger, but an anger hidden behind the smooth word, the smiling face, and the polite handshake.  It is a frozen anger, an anger which settles into a biting resentment and slowly paralyzes a generous heart.  If there is anything that makes (life) look grim and dull, it is this dark, insidious anger in the servants of Christ. (Henri Nouwen, The Way of the Heart, Ballantine Books, 1981, pp. 11-12).”

Jesus answered Peter’s question by telling this story.  A story about a man who, though forgiven millions, was unwilling to forgive another who owed him much less.  Jesus, refers to the unforgiving man as wicked.  We define wicked in such narrow terms.  We define wickedness as Sadaam Hussein or as a sniper taking six innocent lives with a hunting rifle or as some deviate who kidnaps, rapes and murders a little girl.  Those things and those people are truly wicked.  But, in this parable, Jesus broadens the definition of wickedness to include anyone, especially anyone, who, having experienced God’s mercy for all their wickedness, then willingly chooses not to extend it to others for theirs. 

Jesus ends the story with the unforgiving man facing a torturous end and with a stern warning for us.  “‘So my heavenly Father will also do to every one of you, if you do not forgive your brother or sister from your heart.’”  Those are strong words.  If they were a hurricane, they’d be a Category 5 on the Saffir-Simpson scale.  Yet, they belong to Jesus, the Lord of all forgiveness.  They may confuse our understanding of mercy and grace but they mean at least this much.  It is not our right not to forgive when we have been so mercifully forgiven.  To live forgiving each other as Christ has forgiven us is not a suggestion of scripture; it’s a command to participate in God’s forgiveness of all people, including those who’ve harmed us and haven’t even apologized (Ephesians 4:32). 

When we refuse Christ’s command to forgive, we hijack justice by supplanting it with our need to avenge ourselves of having been deprived of what we believed to be rightly ours.  And, no matter what our vengeance costs anyone else, it costs us dearly, too, because we choke off the very forgiveness of God, of which we were also intended to be benefactors.  Thus, our unforgiveness of others becomes our own torturous end.  The deepest, darkest prison ever built is in the dungeon of our own dark, insidious anger.

Nothing reveals our true colors more than how well we’re handling the stress of forgiving others who have hurt us.  But, by God’s design, it’s a stress meant to reveal how utterly incapable we are to do all the forgiving required of us.  We can only confess our anger and then, by faith, participate with God’s in his forgiveness.  There’s plenty to go around. 

If you need a place to start, I’d suggest these words from Jesus’ prayer, “‘Father . . . forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors (Matthew 6:9, 12).’”  If you can pray that prayer, and mean it, you’re well on the way to becoming the forgiver God, in Christ, has called you, and me, to be.

Can you pray that prayer?  Will you?