4.8 BILLION Dollars

The Holy Gospel According to St. Matthew, the 18^th Chapter

Then Peter came and said to him, “Lord, if another member of the church sins against me, how often should I forgive? As many as seven times?” Jesus said to him, “Not seven times, but, I tell you, seventy-seven times. “For this reason the kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who wished to settle accounts with his slaves. When he began the reckoning, one who owed him ten thousand talents

was brought to him; and, as he could not pay, his lord ordered him to be sold, together with his wife and children and all his possessions, and payment to be made. So the slave fell on his knees before him, saying, ‘Have patience with me, and I will pay you everything.’ And out of pity for him, the lord of that slave released him and forgave him the debt. But that same slave, as he went out, came upon one of his fellow slaves who owed him a hundred denarii; and seizing him by the throat, he said, ‘Pay what you owe.’ Then his fellow slave fell down and pleaded with him, ‘Have patience with me, and I will pay you.’ But he refused; then he went and threw him into prison until he would pay the debt. When his fellow slaves saw what had happened, they were greatly distressed, and they went and reported to their lord all that had taken place. Then his lord summoned him and said to him, ‘You wicked slave! I forgave you all that debt because you pleaded with me. Should you not have had mercy on your fellow slave, as I had mercy on you?’ And in anger his lord handed him over to be tortured until he would pay his entire debt. So my heavenly Father will also do to every one of you, if you do not forgive your brother or sister from your heart.”

Way back in the day, my dad would go to the Delft Theater in Escanaba, Michigan for a quarter!  For that quarter he’d get to watch the cartoon, the serial AND the feature!  Back in my day, we’d go to the Palm Theater in Shalimar, Florida and it cost $2.50 and the cartoon and serial were gone.  NOW, when we go to the movies it’s $8.50 a piece and that doesn’t include the mortgage you need to take out for popcorn and a soda!  What you can buy for a buck has sure changed over the years and even though Jesus didn’t have movies, we can still translate the money from Jesus’ day into what that money would buy in dollars for us today.  In this parable the guy owed the King 10,000 Talents.  Now, you probably haven’t exchanged Talents for dollars lately but earlier this week, I plugged in the calculator and did the math for you! 

From the Bible we know a denarius was worth a day’s work for a field worker.  So, to keep the math easy, let’s say that’s ten bucks an hour, for eight hours… so a denarius is worth about 80 bucks today.  Now, it takes 6,000 denarii to make one Talent.  So, translated into US dollars, the guy in this story owed the king... 4.8 BILLION dollars!.  That’s billion with a “B”. That amount of cash could buy you about 50 new Airbus A320 airplanes like JetBlue flies.  With that amount of money you could buy yourself one Nimitz class aircraft carrier or you could buy the New England Patriots AND the Red Sox AND the Bruins AND the Celtics… all of them together!  In short, this guy owed not just a lot of money, and not just a huge amount of money, but this guy owed literally an impossibly, ridiculously, gigantically huge, bankrupt-an-entire-country, amount of money!  The point that Jesus was trying to make by using this ridiculously gigantic amount of debt was to remind us that what we owe God is also a ridiculously, gigantically huge amount and just like that man, we can never, ever, EVER, E-V-E-R hope to pay it off.  

So what did this guy spend the biblical equivalent of 4.8 billion dollars on?  Did he blow it on something crazy?  I found a picture of Saudi Prince Waleed’s Mercedes on the internet which said it was covered in diamonds.  The internet said the car is worth 4.8 billion dollars (it's really covered with crystals not diamonds and it's not really worth that much but it's still crazy expensive), so maybe he bought something even crazier than that car!  Maybe he did something horrible with it, like finance terrorist groups.  But maybe he did something amazing with it!  Maybe he set up orphanages all over the world or fed every hungry person in a whole country or maybe he pledged it in the ALS ice bucket challenge.  

Don't you want to know?  It’s a CRAZY amount of money, so I just want to know what a person would spend that money on, but did you notice... the king in the story DIDN’T want to know... he didn’t even seem to care!  There’s no third degree, no wagging of fingers, no required credit counseling…NOTHING.  The king didn’t care about anything except for the man.  That’s just incredible to me!  If someone borrowed a hundred bucks from me and told me they couldn’t pay it back, the first thing I’d ask is “what did you do with it?” but the king didn’t care... and that’s EXACTLY how God is with you and with me.  What we’ve done or what we haven’t done, never comes up.  

What happened in this story is that the King had compassion.  The King loved the person more than the King loved balancing the books.  So the King chose to die to the idea that he would ever see that money again and that is what God has done for us.  Through God’s unconditional love, compassion and unlimited generosity, God died in Christ to the idea of getting us to pay back what we owe and set us free.  God simply sends us on our way, out into the world no questions asked.  To God, our debt completely died with Jesus on the cross.  To the king, the servant’s debt is dead to him, even a 4.8 billion dollar sized debt.  

It is amazing that we have been forgiven SO MUCH.  But Jesus knew we’d have trouble turning around and passing on that complete level of forgiveness to others.  We’re just like that forgiven servant… even though the King died to our unimaginable debt, we have trouble dying to the idea of getting even for what we are owed.  We put limits and rules on how much grace, compassion or generosity we feel that WE can afford to measure out to our neighbors.  After all, if we gave that completely, then they wouldn’t learn their lesson.  They wouldn’t be personally responsible and pay their debts and pull themselves up by their boot straps.  That’s how we do it, isn’t it?  We’re happy and thankful to have received God’s unlimited, unconditional, 4.8 billion dollars worth of forgiveness, love and compassion but we have trouble passing it on in the same, unlimited and unconditional way.  We’re compassionate, but we’re compassionate with conditions.  We forgive, but we forgive with footnotes.   We give abundantly, but with an asterisk.  

We justify it by saying its good stewardship or it’s what the other person really needs.  But what Jesus is telling us here is that if we only give partial forgiveness or if we give compassion with conditions then WE will never be completely free.  That’s right, our freedom is linked directly with how much we are willing to give away.  Only Jesus’ complete death led to full freedom and life for the world.  Only complete forgiveness and compassion led to complete freedom both for the King and the servant.  When the servant later on was unforgiving, and not compassionate he became a captive again, never free and even tortured for the rest of his life.    

Now, I know what you’re thinking.  That’s all well and good for church stuff like sins, but it isn’t the way the world works.  If that’s what you’re thinking, then you’re right.  The world doesn’t work that way (and to be honest the Church doesn’t work that way either) and that’s because the world (and the Church) are broken.  They are not as God wants them to be.  But as Christians, our call is to work with God to make the world work in God’s way and we do that by each of us working towards giving generously without an asterisk, being compassionate without conditions, and showing the world what it's like to live in the true freedom that only comes when we die to ourselves and live first for God and our neighbor.  

The truth Jesus is telling us is absolutely backwards from the way the world works.  But, one look at the news will remind you that the way the world currently works is horrible.  Our job as Christians is nothing less than to change the way the world works... to pass on the outrageous love, grace and generosity we have already received from God because God knows, that only when we decide to die to our need to balance the books and "get even" will we be able to rise to the new, real, abundant and eternal life God created us all to have.  Amen.