11th Sunday After Pentecost

Matthew 18:23-35

In the Gospel reading for today, we hear of a man who was deeply in debt, owing a great fortune to the king. The king wanted to settle his accounts with his servants and therefore demanded the payment of this debt. The poor servant could in no way pay back this great amount and so the king ordered that he and his wife and children should be sold into slavery to repay the debt. The man fell on his knees and begged the king for mercy and patience to give him time to try to pay back what he owed. The king was moved to compassion by the cries of the debtor and, with a loving heart, forgave him everything.

When this man went out, he found one of his fellow servants who happened to owe him some small amount of money. This time, the one who had just been forgiven so much, showed no mercy and threw the debtor into prison. When the king heard about this, he called the first man before him and said, ‘You wicked servant, I forgave you the great debt that you owed and you have turned around and shown no mercy on the one who owed you so little.’ In righteous judgment the king put this man into prison until he was able to pay back all that he had originally owed.

Our Lord Jesus Christ concludes this parable telling us that this is how our Heavenly Father will treat each of us unless we forgive our brother from our heart. The message is very clear – if we expect to be forgiven, if we expect to receive mercy, then we must forgive and show love and mercy toward others.

This parable of the debtor brings out a very important concept about the justice and the mercy of God.

The man who owed the great debt begged the king to show mercy… to not deal with him, as we might say, ‘with justice’, which would dictate giving him what he deserved. The man was delinquent on his debt and he may have deserved to go to the debtors’ prison until his debt could be paid. Instead, the king shows mercy and forgives him everything. Later, when this same man refuses to show mercy on his servant, the king unhesitatingly throws him into the prison where he would stay until all his debts are paid.

I think many of us tend to think that mercy and justice are not really compatible. If we deal with someone with justice, the person gets what they deserve. If we deal with someone with mercy, we override that justice, in favor of forgiveness.

Yet how often do we hear in Scripture and in our Church Services about the justice and mercy of God? Throughout Scripture these two go hand in hand together.

If God is showing mercy, is he not being just? If God is delivering justice, is he not being merciful?

If we think of justice in the way our culture has taught us to think of it, we equate justice with someone getting what they deserve for a given offense. We see justice in a transactional way. We speak of the scales of justice… assuring balance. If you commit the crime, you do the time.

This concept of justice prevailed in much of the development of Western Christianity. Oversimplifying the theology it would state: mankind sinned, God was offended, He was dutybound by justice to punish us for our offense, and Christ’s sacrifice on the cross was the substitutional punishment that saves us from the justice of God. If we follow this line of reasoning – Christ is indeed our Savior – but He’s saving us from the wrath of God the Father. That is Calvinism, or maybe Hindistic Karma… but certainly not Orthodox Christianity!

We always have to check our conceptions of God against what the Church and the Scriptures teach us. The unfolding revelation of God from the beginning of time to the incarnation of Christ to the descent of the Holy Spirit and the testimony of the lives of the saints over these two thousand years has been that God is a God of love.

It is easy to understand mercy in the context of a loving God. But what about justice?

Justice, in the hands of God, is more accurately understood as ‘restoration’ or ‘reconciliation’. It is setting things aright. In this context, we understand our theology as: mankind sinned; in doing so he suffered the consequences of falling away from God; Christ’s incarnation and sacrifice on the cross restores and reconciles humanity by Christ’s voluntary assumption of all our fallenness and healing it by His Divinity.

St Isaac the Syrian says the following: ‘Do not call God just, for His justice is not manifest in the things concerning you… How can you call God just when you come across the Scriptural passage on the wage given to the workers?…How can a man call God just when he comes across the passage on the prodigal son who wasted his wealth with riotous living, how for the compunction alone which he showed, the father ran and fell upon his neck and gave him authority over all his wealth?…Where, then, is God's justice, for while we are sinners Christ died for us!’

The king in today’s parable initially offered his mercy to the debtor. But when the debtor showed no mercy to the one indebted to him, the king sent the ungrateful man to the debtors’ prison in the hope of setting things right – primarily for the wrongdoer! That, in doing so, the gravity of his sin could be known, and he could repent. This is the justice and mercy of a loving God Who will do and allow what is necessary to soften our hearts and to facilitate our salvation.

If we have a God of such generous love and mercy, then we too must join ourselves to that gracious love and mercy in all of our dealings with each other. Our objective in relations with others should not be to even the score, to insist that everything is fair… but rather to seek that things are set aright. It requires a generosity of heart that unselfishly seeks what is best for one another. As Christ said: ‘Judge not, and you shall not be judged. Condemn not, and you shall not be condemned. Forgive, and you will be forgiven.’  May God grant us this justice and mercy!