Leaving the church...

[AI translation] You will have noticed that I have read the same Word again as last time. Well, yes, because I want to pick up where I left off. There are two parts to this story. As sublime, majestic, joyful as the first part is, the second is sad, disappointing. Of course, because the first part is about God, and the second part is about us humans! Now I want to talk about this second part. About the man who does not transmit the grace, the goodness, the love that he has received from his Lord to his fellow human beings, and thus loses it himself!The real trouble begins earlier, not when this servant, going out from his master, began to strangle his fellow servant. But when Peter asks Jesus: "Lord, how many times may my brother sin against me and be forgiven, even seven times?" As long as in a marriage or in a family, or even in a human community, even in national life, the problem is how many times we have to forgive our fellow human being before we can strike him, before we can strike him, there will be trouble in families and between people. In this respect, the Christians' spirit is no different from that of the pagans. Look, when Peter asks Jesus how many times his brother must be forgiven, he adds, "even seven times?" He hardly dares to say it, it's so terribly many according to him. According to the rabbinic theology of the time, you had to forgive someone three times if they sinned, but that was it, no more! Peter sensed something in the presence of Jesus that this was perhaps too strict a law after all. He voluntarily increased the three to twice, and added one more, making it seven. Okay, seven times! But that is really the upper limit! You really can't go beyond that! And then Jesus says the utter nonsense of even seventy times seven!
There is no other way to understand this nonsense, except to first take account of what we have received and continue to receive from God. Hence what we owe to men. What did this servant in the parable receive from his Lord? The forgiveness of ten thousand talents of debt! This ten thousand talents is about one hundred million forints in today's Hungarian money. It is inconceivable in human terms that such a debt could simply be cancelled for someone! Indeed, Jesus tells a story that is impossible in reality. It is psychologically, economically, financially, legally and tactically absolutely impossible! No way! Indeed, in man-to-man relations, there is no such thing! Neither such debt nor such compassion on the debtor. But in the relationship between God and man there is!
What could never happen in the world of money is repeated every Sunday here in the church between you and God. There is always a great showdown. We always come here as hopelessly indebted, unfaithful servants who cannot pay. Here again we hear the gospel, the great good news that God cancels debt, forgives our sins for the sake of Jesus. The cross of Calvary, around which we gather on Sundays, speaks of the ransom being paid. No more debt, taken on by Jesus, the Son of God. Satisfaction is made, we are acquitted. A week from today, the Lord will again set His table for us and call us, "Take, eat! This is my body, which is broken for you" (1 Cor 11:24) - then the door of the temple is opened and we, like the parable servant, pardoned and released from debt, go out into the world, into the midst of men. And then what?
The servant in the parable, when he went out from the presence of his master, freed and pardoned, met a fellow servant in the street who owed him a small debt. Not quite a hundred forints. And what does he do? We know. He attacks him, strangles him, demands the debt. When he can't pay, he throws him in prison. Terrible, isn't it? Has it not occurred to this servant that his fellow servant's small debt is part of the immense debt that his Lord has just forgiven him?! Would it not have been natural for this servant, when he saw his fellow servant, to tell him what had just happened to him? He would be happy to let him know that he now owed nothing, since that hundred forints was a part of the hundred million that had been cancelled for him? But no! This man has understood nothing of the mercy that has been shown to him! Nor what it obliges him to do. Do we understand better? How do we behave when we leave the church? We too go out of here pardoned, forgiven, blessed, soon to meet our neighbour in the street, our spouse at home. Then tomorrow at the office with our colleague who is always so unfriendly, or at the factory with the one who has poisoned our lives so many times. The people who have caused us so much trouble with their stupid views.
On our way out, we meet our fellow man, our fellow servant, whom we regard as our debtors. For everyone has such a debtor fellow-servant. Perhaps one is thinking of his wife, for whom he has so often been bitter, from whom he does not get what a wife owes her husband! He has no intention of changing. Perhaps someone is thinking of her husband, who she knows is often in debt for his loyalty, his tenderness. It's terrible what he's doing to his family. He doesn't even feel guilty, the wretch! He has no idea that he is in debt! Or perhaps it's his colleague who's plotting against him, who's denied him a promotion. Or the woman next door who spread such untrue rumours about him. Or the people of the same race, language and religion who have caused so much trouble to people of other languages and religions. As soon as he leaves the temple, he meets someone from his fellow servants who owes him a debt. He is confronted by someone who reminds him of such debts of a hundred denarii. And we who come out of the temple groan to ourselves: this is the wretch who has ruined my life, who has stolen from me, cheated me, deceived me, made me miserable!
And yet these people owe us less than a hundredth of the debt God has cancelled for us! Are we able to see that the debt that we are claiming from others is also part of the debt that God has already forgiven us? Every person who owes a debt to us is a person to whom we owe a debt! I know that this is very difficult to acknowledge, let alone to realize! What, that I still owe the woman who ruined my life? Do I owe it to the man who treated me so vulgarly? Do I still owe that spiteful colleague, that arrogant boss? Me? Owe me what? What do I owe to the man who hurt me, humiliated me, humiliated me, cheated on me? Never forget that you come from the church! The one where you heard your billion-dollar debt was forgiven! You come from the Lord when you are confronted on the street, or at home, or at work by a fellow servant who owes you a debt. Now someone might be thinking, what does that other person have to do with where I come from? That I was in the church, that I come from a God who forgives sins? What does my debt have to do with it? That is my private business! And to his throat! With or without an atomic bomb! Am I going to be a sucker? I'm not gonna leave what you owe me in it. I'm gonna run him in. And we'll strangle the son of a bitch. If not otherwise, at least in thought, emotion, word or deed, as he may deserve it after all! Isn't that how it usually is?
But what else can we do? - What? Well, forgive! Not only six or seven times, but seventy times seven! With forgiveness you can never get to the point where you say, "But enough is enough! No more! But there is more! To forgive again! Without end! If Christianity had really done this during the last two thousand years, it would not be so immensely burdened with people and nations now! Forgive? What is forgive? Not to trivialise the sin, the debt. Not to say that a hundred denarii is not such a big deal! No! But to forgive! To try to look at the one who hurt us the way God looked at us in this story. To try to see that person as an object of God's compassionate love! Try at home, in times of family conflict, in the midst of office tensions, in the midst of political passions! But really try to see the debtor through God's eyes! Dare to forgive him! Don't be ashamed to be thought a fool for it! The Christian's vocation is to bear witness to God's incredible love! Forgiveness is an incomprehensible and impossible act, reflecting something of God's incomprehensible and impossible act at Calvary! What happened on the cross was also incomprehensible and impossible.
Then you owe it not only to the other person to forgive them, but also to yourself. He who cannot forgive is ruined! Believe me: many people are ruined spiritually, morally and physically because they cannot forgive! You can see it here in the parable: this poor servant who attacked his fellow servant was really destroyed because he could not have mercy on his fellow servant. It was his fault that he could not be generous to his debtor! We all live by forgiveness. And we are literally ruined if we cannot forgive!
Well, we came here again today, to church, and here we found out that we owe God billions of dollars in debt. And it's all been written off again by God, crossed out in the blood of Jesus, we are saved! Now we would be willing to believe that this is all settled, we can go home! No, brothers! Now is when the realization or loss of the forgiveness we have received really begins! When we go out of the temple into life, into the world! Among those waiting for our forgiveness, our compassion, our acts of love? No, but those who may not be waiting at all. God is waiting for us to treat people as He has treated us. God waits for us to learn to pray really well, "And forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us." (Mt 6,12)
Amen
Date: 11 December 1960.