Text: Matthew 18:21-35                                                                                    W 17^th Sunday after Pentecost

Pay Back

            In the name of him who loved us and gave himself for us, dear friends in Christ: The Count of Monte Cristo, the classic novel by Alexandre Dumas, has been a perpetual favorite ever since it was first written some 160 years ago.  I expect some of you have read it, but that even more of you have seen it in film – and probably more than once because in the ninety or so years of the cinema industry, the story has been made in film no less than thirty times. Certainly Hollywood seems to think it’s a story that will always sell tickets.  And for good reason:  The Count of Monte Cristo it is the essential tale of retribution and revenge. It’s the story of Edmund Dantès, who is a French ship captain in that tumultuous period of France’s history immediately following Napoleon Bonaparte’s first fall from power. Edmund becomes the victim of a secret conspiracy hatched by three men.  Two of them, he thinks, are his friends.  But one of them wants his job and the other one wants his girlfriend; so, to get rid of him, they falsely accuse Edmund of being part of a plot to put the Emperor Napoleon back in power.  The third party to the conspiracy is the corrupt magistrate who hears the case against Edmund.  He can easily see that Edmund is innocent of the charges against him; but he also sees that the true evidence in the case implicates his own father, who has long been an ardent supporter of Napoleon.  So to bury the evidence against his dad and thus protect his family name and with it his own upwardly mobile future, he convicts Edmund of high treason and sentences him to the infamous Chateau d’If, a horrible island prison off the southern coast of France.

            There in “chateau’s” dank dungeons, poor Edmund nearly goes insane.  He knows he is innocent and simply can’t understand how his fortune suddenly turned so sour.  The last thing he suspects is the treachery that brought him down.  So he languishes in utter despair for several years. He comes close to suicide; but he finds some hope when he encounters a fellow prisoner who is working on an escape tunnel.  This prisoner is an old and scholarly priest who befriends Edmund, teaches him many things, and helps him unravel the mystery of his imprisonment as together they work on the escape tunnel for several years more.  Before they can make their getaway, however, the old priest dies; but before he does, he tells Edmund of an immense fortune in gold and jewels hidden in a cave on the island of Monte Cristo, which, significant to the story, means “the Mountain of Christ”.  With his dying breath, the old priest commits the treasure to Edmund in the hope that when he finally escapes he will use it wisely.

            Edmund does escape; but not by the tunnel.  He finds a quicker and easier way out.  You see, when the guards discover the old priest’s dead body, they sew it up in a weighted canvas bag.  It’s meant to be his coffin, of sorts, and carry his corpse to the bottom of the sea when the guards hurl it from the cliff.  But while they wait for the right tide conditions that will carry the body away from the shore, Edmund removes the body of his old friend and sews himself up in the bag.  So when the guards come to do their duty, they unknowingly carry Edmund to freedom when they cast him into the sea.  Once free, Edmund eventually finds the treasure of Monte Cristo, and sets about a complicated plan to bring judgment and ruin on those who had betrayed him. Concealing his true identity under various disguises and personalities, Edmund cleverly uses the predictable greed and dishonesty of his enemies that were once used against him to lure them into the traps by which he destroys them.  And this is the part of the story that everybody likes so much, because there’s nothing we relish more than seeing evil schemers such as these getting their just desserts at the hands of an “avenging angel”.  That’s a formula guaranteed to appeal to audiences; and like I said before, Hollywood is well aware of it.

            That’s why we see this same theme repeated so often.  A good example of a modern version of more or less the same story is the film Pay Back starring Mel Gibson.  I expect most of you have seen it; but for those who haven’t, it’s the story of a career criminal who is betrayed by his longtime partner in crime and his own wife.  Instead of equally splitting the proceeds of a successful heist, the partner and the wife lure Gibson’s character into an ambush.  They shoot him several times and leave him for dead. But of course, though he comes awful close, he doesn’t die (wouldn’t be much of a story if he did).  At length, he rises from what everyone thought was his death to begin a campaign to recover his share of the money his partner took from him.  And that’s what gives the title of the movie its double meaning.  On one hand Gibson wants his pay back, that is, the money he feels belongs to him (never mind that he stole it in the first place). And on the other hand, while getting this money, he extracts his murderous revenge, or pay back, on his partner and everyone else who stands in the way.  In the process he single-handedly takes on a small army of petty thugs and drug dealers, corrupt cops, a major organized crime syndicate, and a Chinese mafia.  Though he’s very clever, to say that Gibson’s character in Pay Back lacks the finesse of Monte Cristo’s Edmund Dantès would be an extreme understatement.  Rather, driven by blind fury, he bulls his way through all obstacles, visiting swift and severe justice on his foes with a large caliber handgun. Like I said, it ain’t Monte Cristo; but still it’s the kind of story that gratifies the audience because people really want to see the evil doers getting their rightful pay back.

            There’s a reason for that.  We all have an innate sense of justice.  We want to see good deeds rewarded and despicable behavior punished.  It seriously disturbs us when we perceive that the bad guys are getting away with it.  And what especially upsets us is when the bad guy who seems to be getting away with it is someone who has committed a crime against us.  That’s what makes these revenge stories so appealing. We all know what it’s like to be an “innocent” victim of someone else’s treachery, and stories such as these allow us to cast ourselves in the role of the avenger, the one who was wronged; and then when we get to the revenge scenes we get to vicariously experience the thrill of paying back the people who have harmed us like the person in the story does. Such revenge, we think, would be so very sweet.

            And that is a big problem for those of us who claim the name of Christ.  For the past couple of weeks we have been considering what are for us the costs of discipleship.  We’ve seen that though salvation is God’s free gift in his Son who died for us, there are nevertheless costs to be born as a result of receiving and remaining in that salvation.  We’ve seen that we can expect to suffer persecution for speaking God’s truth. Last week we considered the debt we owe to each other; particularly the debt we owe to a brother or sister who has fallen into unrepentant sin.  And in this week’s Gospel we hear how that we who have freely received God’s complete forgiveness from all of our sins in Christ Jesus are expected to just as freely forgive those who sin against us.  With the same infinite patience that Christ our Lord bore the sins of all people, we too are to bear the insults, the injuries, the offenses, the backstabbing betrayals, and whatever other sins there might be that are offered against us. Christ’s teachings on such matters are crystal clear:  as his disciples we are to turn the other cheek to those who would strike, give to those who would take, serve those who would take advantage, and all the while pray for God’s blessing and forgiveness for those who are so abusing us.  And that’s not just some lofty ideal.  No, that’s the standard for discipleship.

            The natural response at hearing this is to think, “Well, surely there must be some limits.  I mean, just how much abuse am I expected to take before I come to the point when it’s okay to stop taking it on the chin and being so forgiving?”  That’s essentially the question Peter asked.  He had listened to what Jesus had to say about such things.  He’d thought it through some, and he came up with what he thought would be an acceptable application of Jesus teachings.  “How many times shall I forgive my brother when he sins against me?  Would seven times be enough?”

            Now think about it.  Someone you know does something really rotten to you.  Something that really gets you steamed.  And it costs you something.  There’s damage done to your pride or your reputation or maybe your pocketbook or even your physical body.  The person comes back later and says, “Gee, I’m sorry.  I shouldn’t have done that.”  And you forgive them outright and freely.  “We’re all sinners.  We all make mistakes”, you say.  “So, I’m not going to let this stand between us.  We’ll forget this ever happened.”  A week later, the same person pulls the exact same stunt.  And a little later, he comes back and says, “You know, I’m feeling pretty bad that I hurt you again.  Will you forgive me?”  And again, you let it go.  “Love keeps no record of wrongs”, you say, “and I love you as my brother in Christ. We’ll forget all about it.”  Five more times the same cycle repeats.  And never are you saying, “Hey, no harm done” because there is harm being done. No, you’re forgiving the person.  You’re absorbing the cost of the sin, and you’re not holding it against the offender in any way.  Surely, Peter thinks – and we along with him – seven cycles of this should be more than enough.  It’s more than any person should be expected to bear.  In fact anyone who goes this far should be a candidate for instant sainthood.  They should be whisked up to heaven in a fiery chariot without having to experience death.  That would only be fair.

            Or so we might think; but Jesus makes it clear that the cost of discipleship is much higher.  “Not seven times, but seventy-seven times.”  And you probably know that some translations say, “seven times seventy”, which would be 490 times.  It depends on how you translate the Greek.  But it really doesn’t make any difference, because Jesus does not expect you to keep count and call off the forgiveness when you reach 78 or 491.  His point is that you are never to stop forgiving. Following Jesus means you are never justified in holding a grudge or withholding your forgiveness.  You simply cannot come to the point where you can properly say, “It’s too late now” or “I’ve suffered too much.”  And please understand:  having this sort of a freely forgiving heart is not what distinguishes a good disciple from a bad disciple.  It’s what distinguishes even the most minimal disciple of Jesus from someone who is an unbeliever on the road to Hell.

            That’s made abundantly clear in the parable that Jesus tells to illustrate his point.  A servant is brought before his master to whom he owes 10,000 talents.  And to give you an idea, a single talent represents the equivalent of two years worth of total compensation for the average working man. If you conservatively estimate a year’s wages and benefits at say $50,000, then in today’s terms this guy owes his master a cool billion (that’s billion with a “B”).  The point is that it’s an impossible debt.  There’s no way he could ever pay it off.  But he begs his master to give him more time (as if that would help). Instead of accepting his servant’s offer, the master simply says, “Forget it.  Your debt is cancelled.  No need to pay me back.  You’re free.” The spiritual significance of this, of course, is that you and I are that servant. With each and every sin we commit, we run up the same impossible-to-pay debt to God.  For each sin, an eternity of suffering in Hell would not pay back the Master what is owed to him.  But when we come to him in Christ Jesus pleading for his mercy, he says, “You owe me nothing.  Your sin is forgiven.  You’re free.”

            Ah, but then the debt free servant goes out and finds a fellow who owes him 100 denarii.  It’s the equivalent of about four month’s compensation.  To be consistent with what we’ve said before, that’d be about $17,000 – which I suspect for most of us is still a lot of money.  It’d make a pretty good down payment on a house – and who knows, the way things are going it might even buy gas for your car for a year. The point is that it would be a significant loss just to forgive the debt outright.  In any case, the servant now demands that this fellow pay back what he owes.  “Give me time”, he pleads, “I’ll make it up to you.”  “No way”, says the unforgiving servant.  “You owe me and I’m going to make sure you pay.”

            If you are holding a grudge against someone, if there are old wounds you are still nursing or insults you are brooding over, if there are people whom you would like to pay back for the evil they did to you, the unforgiving servant is you.  And when the master summons this servant to appear the second time, he lets him know that he is not at all pleased.  The servant has shown not the slightest comprehension of or even the tiniest amount of appreciation for the immense forgiveness he freely received.  If he had any sense at all of what a vast fortune had been absorbed for him as a loss to the Master – what a priceless treasure had been sacrificed on his behalf – he would count himself the richest man alive; and knowing that, he would freely forgive the comparatively insignificant debts of his peers.  But the master’s great gift is wasted on the unforgiving servant.  In utter disgust he commands, “Hand him over to the tormentors until he shall pay back all he owes.”  I’m guessing that I don’t need to explain what that means.  To fail to forgive is only to prove that you do not understand what it means to have been forgiven.  This lack of understanding is soul-destroying unbelief.

            It’s not part of every film version of the story, but in the book The Count of Monte Cristo, Edmund Dantès makes some surprising discoveries about revenge.  It’s not as easy or as sweet as he thought it would be.  And as he puts his plan into action to pay back those who had hurt him, it results in some unintended collateral damage.  While taking his revenge, he accidentally harms a number of innocent bystanders – in some cases they are the very people he really wants to help and protect – but what he does to get even with his enemies hurts them just the same.  In time it dawns on him that he is not the righteous avenging angel he imagined himself to be; rather he has become the very evil he wants to destroy:  someone who harms the innocent to get what he wants. He comes to realize that revenge is a business that no mere human has the wisdom or insight to implement with absolute justice.  Judgment and retribution for evil, he discovers, must be left in the hands of God for he alone knows and sees all.  God alone can judge with justice.  And when he comes to this realization and knows how truly wicked he has become, he releases the worst of his enemies from the trap he set to pay him back for what he did.  “He’s no different than me”, he concludes, and he forgives his enemy for the all the suffering and damage he’d caused him.  And let me suggest that it is at this point Edmund discovers the true treasure of Monte Cristo – that is, the treasure of Christ’s Mountain.  It’s not a cache of gold and jewels hidden in a cave.  It is the infinitely more valuable treasure of the forgiveness our Lord Jesus stored away for us on Calvary when he “was delivered to the tormentors to pay back all that we owed”.

            That treasure is ours.  We, like Edmund Dantès, have been set free from prison – the prison we deserved to be in because of our sin and continually unforgiving hearts. Specifically, we have been set free by the death of the one who held the secret of the great treasure of Monte Cristo. His death was the means for our escape. (In fact, there’s some beautiful baptismal imagery there when the body is cast into the sea:  that whole picture of how Christ’s death is our own and how we are buried with him in baptism – but I’ll leave that for you to unravel yourselves.)  The point I want to make is that Christ our Lord has entrusted his great treasure to us in the loving hope that we will use it wisely and well, that is, to forgive others as freely as we have been forgiven.  May he give us all the grace to do so.  May it be that when someone sins against you, you pay them back not with anger or unforgiveness or the desire to get even, but rather seeing what an inexhaustible treasure is already yours, you pay back their debt with the same love and forgiveness Christ has given you. In his holy name.  Amen.

Soli Deo Gloria!