HOW MANY TIMES?
INTRODUCTION
The title of my homily is, “How Many Times?”
I want to preach on the theme of forgiveness – the obvious theme from today’s gospel.
PETER’S QUESTION
As you know from listening to the New Testament Peter had at least one brother – and his name was Andrew. So when Matthew tells us this story about Peter mentioning his brother, I’m going to listen two times more to this story than other stories.
Peter comes up to Jesus and asks him, “Lord, by the way, when my brother wrongs me, how often must I forgive him? Seven times?”
What? If the brother was Andrew, what did he do to bug Peter? Andrew – such a quiet, background type of guy in the gospels. The only time you hear about him, it’s good stuff.
Andrew should have been the one who asked Jesus that question.
But nope, it was Peter, and once more he puts his foot in his mouth.
Trying to impress Jesus, it seems he wants to appear the really good guy. The Rabbis said, “Forgive 3 times. That’s how many times you need to forgive your brother before you let him have it.” So big hearted Peter makes it 7 times.
Jesus laughs and says, “77 times.”
Others translate what Matthew has by saying Jesus said, 70 times 7 times. That’s 490 times. That calls for a lot of patience and good counting.
Either way, the Greek text can be – 77 or 490. Either way it’s a lot.
Some think Matthew is connecting this to an ancient text in Genesis – 4:24 – where if you think Cain was bad in killing his brother Abel –Cain’s only going to get 7 times vengeance for what he did. Worse, there is this descendent of Cain, a guy name Lamech – who was a really bad guy – he’s going to get 77 times vengeance for the blood he’s spilled.
Whatever, 77 or 490, that’s a lot of patience and forgiving being called for.
And in case Peter doesn’t get the message of forgiveness, Jesus tells this fascinating parable about the man who is asked to pay back a huge amount of debt. He whines and cries. He begs for mercy. He gets it. Then he goes out – meets someone who owes him peanuts – and he won’t forgive him. In fact, he has that servant put in jail – till he gets his money back.
Well, word got out. It always does. These kinds of unfairness always come back to haunt us. So when the master hears about this – he has the unforgiving servant brought back in and he says, “You wicked servant! I forgave you your entire debt because you begged me for forgiveness, shouldn’t you have had pity on your fellow servant, as I had pity on you?”
And the unforgiving servant is handed over to the torturers till he pays back all the owes.
CONCLUSION
I like to think that Peter got the message – because when he denied Jesus 3 times – when he ran away from Jesus – he didn’t do what Judas did. When Jesus appeared to him, Peter experienced forgiveness big time.
And I hope he went out and forgave his brother Andrew the next time he was ticked off about him – and the next time after that – and the next time after that – and I hope Peter kept a tab on how many times he forgave Andrew.
I say that because Andrew’s are always perfect, so I’m sure he never got anywhere near 77 times – or 7 times for that matter. Amen.
