Reflections...

A sermon preached at Kowloon Union Church on 13 September 2026, by Revd Judy Chan. The scripture readings that day was Psalm 103:8-13, Matthew 18:21-35

Sermon – "As God Has Done Unto You"
    

This morning’s Gospel reading is a parable about forgiveness. Or “lack of forgiveness”, thus the title often given is “The Parable of the Unforgiving Servant.” Jesus told this story to follow up on Peter’s question: “Lord, how often should I forgive? As many as seven times?” To which Jesus responds, no, not 7 times but 77 times!

Peter must have been shocked. Seven is the perfect number in the Bible, but even that doesn’t seem to be enough for Jesus. What is he asking of us here? Well, he’s asking his followers to stop looking for a perfect number – in short, to stop counting altogether. Why? 

Well, says Jesus, let me tell you a story about how the Kingdom of Heaven works. 

It’s a parable in three acts. Act 1 is a King forgiving a servant for a phenomenal debt, somewhere in the realm of zillions of dollars. We wonder how could a servant owe such a huge amount? Some commentaries suggest that the servant was more like a civil servant in charge of tax collection. And somehow the servant messed things up and couldn’t come up with the full amount owed to the Treasury. 

So the King orders the servant, his family and all his possessions to be sold to pay it back. The servant falls to his knees. He begs the King for mercy. Please give me more time, he says, and I’ll pay back everything. But to everyone’s surprise, the King takes pity on the man, releases him and forgives the whole amount. Yes, a zillion dollar debt completely cancelled. 

Act 2. The forgiven servant then goes to another servant who owes him a fraction of what he had owed the King. The fellow servant also begs for mercy and more time with the promise that he will pay it back. But since the amount is small, Servant 1 is not allowed to sell Servant 2 and his family. So he throws him in jail until the debt is paid. The idea was to put pressure on the family to come up with the money to pay it back. 

Act 3: The other servants told the King what had happened. He called the first servant back. He gives him a royal telling off – how could you do that after what I did for you? I showed you mega mercy and you can’t even show micro mercy to your fellow servant! So the King handed him over to be tortured until he could pay back the zillion dollar debt. 

In summary, says Jesus, this is what God will do to you, if you don’t forgive your sister or brother from the heart.

This is a startling parable, isn’t it? So, what are we supposed to learn from it? According to N.T. scholar Klyne Snodgrass, the most important verses in this parable are vv 32-33:  32Then his lord summoned him and said to him, ‘You wicked slave! I forgave you all that debt because you pleaded with me. 33Should you not have had mercy on your fellow slave, as I had mercy on you?’ In short, says Snodgrass, the message: “Do unto others as God has done unto us.” 

Now that sounds right, doesn’t it? We’re called to imitate God’s great mercy in forgiving our sins by forgiving others of their sins. We understand this in theory, but in reality, it’s very hard to put into practice. Oh, some persons or offenses we can forgive more readily than others. And some people appear to have an incredible capacity to forgive even in the worst situations we can humanly imagine. Yet to require us to forgive everyone, every single time seems to set us up for failure. As one friend told me, I may be Christian but I’m not a saint!

So, I spent quite some time trying to figure out how to preach this passage to you this morning. Not only because it’s a difficult text, but because this is a sensitive matter. I may know what issues I have about forgiveness in my own life, but I don’t know yours. And I would never presume to understand all the pain, anger, loss and scars you carry from the past and experience in the present. All I can do is to pray and trust God’s promise in Isaiah 55:11 –

so shall my word be that goes out from my mouth;
    it shall not return to me empty,
but it shall accomplish that which I purpose
    and succeed in the thing for which I sent it.

So, let’s begin. 

Why do we find it so hard to forgive? Because humanly, forgiving others doesn’t feel natural. It goes against the norm in most cultures. If someone does something bad to you, you aren’t likely to have kind feelings about them. You want to do something bad right back to them. You’ve got to protect yourself, right? 

If you can’t do anything about it, maybe they are more powerful than you or the situation has passed, you can just cancel them. They don’t exist anymore for you, unless they apologize. 

But Jesus here is teaching something very different. He’s telling us to live by God’s Word first, not by our feelings or culture. And when we do, when we follow God’s Word rather than the way of the world, we know forgiveness is no longer optional – it becomes a part of our discipleship. 

But how do we get there? Doesn’t God know how hard it is to forgive? Yes, God does. Because that’s exactly what God already did for us. Just like the King in the parable, God has already forgiven the unpayable debt we owe Him – not because we deserved it – not because we earned it – no, God’s forgiveness is purely a gift of grace from our loving and merciful Heavenly Father. 

But make no mistake about it. God’s forgiveness was not without cost. Forgiveness must be freely given, but it’s never free to the one who forgives. In the parable, who paid the cost of forgiving the first servant’s debt? The King Himself. Likewise, when God forgave our sins, who paid the price? God Himself in Jesus Christ. As one theologian put it, “God’s own heart suffered on the cross.”

So, if we are to forgive as God’s Word demands, we cannot expect it will not cost us something. But not forgiving also comes with a cost. Psychologists talk a lot about the damage unforgiveness does to us emotionally and even physically. That’s true. But even more serious is the damage unforgiveness can cause to our relationship with God.  As the parable warns, forgiving others is essential if we’re seeking the forgiveness of God. The two can’t be separated. Therefore, says Jesus, you’d better deal with others the way you are counting on God dealing with you!

But still we resist. Sometimes it just doesn’t feel fair. What about the victim’s rights? Does forgiveness mean we have to throw away our concern for human dignity and the pursuit of justice? 

British theologian Stephen Cherry says absolutely not. In cases of significant or shattering harm, he says if the abuse is still being committed, the priority must be to stop it. When it is stopped, then the primary concerns are grief, recovery and justice. Forgiveness may need to be delayed then, unfolding on its own deep schedule rather than a forced deadline. 

So forgiveness is obviously not a simple or quick fix. The process can be bumpy, unpredictable and long. In cases of extreme harm, Cherry witnessed victims suffering overwhelming agony and confusion – the wilderness of hurt as he names it. The moral struggle, the internal chaos and wrestling that people go through after hurt is heartbreaking. And it can last for years or a lifetime. 

All this can be a definite challenge to our spiritual commitment to forgiveness and obedience to God’s Word. But it can also be recognition that there may be times we cannot forgive and we desperately need God’s grace and help. That’s when we have to let go of control, put it in God’s hands and ask Him to heal where we cannot. 

At this point, I think the best way to flesh this out is with a real-life story. So I’d like to share the story of an American woman named Rachael Denhollander. She is a former gymnast who was sexually assaulted multiple times during treatment by USA Gymnastics physician Larry Nassar. She was 15 years old at the time. Sixteen years later she was the first woman to publicly accuse him. It led eventually to hundreds of others coming forward with similar stories of abuse by the doctor. Nassar was convicted in 2018 and sentenced to life in prison.

Denhollander is an evangelical Christian. But all during those years, she admits she had to wrestle with her faith —over and over and over again. Did God care? If He did, why didn’t He do something? It took a long time to get to a place where she could trust in God’s justice and call evil what it was, because she knew God is good and holy.

Denhollander recalled an important breakthrough when a family friend shared a biblical insight. No one at that time knew her secret suffering. “Sometimes,” the friend shared, “I haven’t liked the answers God’s given me. Or I haven’t gotten answers at all.” Denhollander understood what that was like. “But, you know,” the friend continued, “I keep going back to the time when Jesus asked Peter if he wanted to walk away—stop following Him. Peter asked, ‘Where else would I go, Lord?’ The friend concluded: “I gotta ask myself that, too, when things feel darkest.”

Denhollander knew that was her answer as well. Where else would I go, Lord? She’d explored every other option. Removing God from the picture, changing how Scripture defined Him, considering other faith traditions or no faith tradition—none of them fixed her problems. No matter where she looked, she was confronted with things she couldn’t explain without God. And specifically, without the gospel. 

At Larry Nassar’s trial, Denhollander was the last of 156 victims to speak. She detailed the horrible abuse and shame she and others experienced, not only from the doctor, but also from authorities who protected him or refused to believe victims when they spoke up. Yet, at the end, she refused to be bitter and vindictive. 

Because of her faith, she was certain that seeking justice and granting forgiveness were not contradictory in God’s eyes. As she put it, an attitude of justice longs for wrongs to be made right and for wrongdoing to be punished; an attitude of forgiveness longs for the inclusion and restoration even of our enemies—for them to cross over from death to life. These two are compatible with each other; what’s excluded is an attitude of hatred, vengeance and revenge. 

So as she stood face to face with Larry Nassar in court, here’s part of what she said: 

..the Bible you speak of carries a final judgment where all of God's wrath is poured out on men like you. Should you ever reach the point of truly facing what you have done, the guilt will be crushing. And that's what makes the gospel of Christ so sweet because it extends grace and hope and mercy where none should be found. And it will be there for you. I pray you experience the soul crushing weight of guilt so you may someday experience true repentance and true forgiveness from God which you need far more than forgiveness from me though I extend that to you as well.

Rachael Denhollander today is a lawyer, wife, mother, author and advocate for sexual assault victims. In a talk she later gave at a Christian university, she said: 

“One of the dynamics of walking through this process has been realizing afresh how beautiful the grace of God is. I am not Larry Nassar, but I have sinned. … That could be me in God’s courtroom with final judgment being passed. But it won’t be because of the sacrifice of Christ. Not because of my merit, not because saying the magic words ‘I’m sorry’ meant that I hadn’t done wrong things, but because I am loved by a redeemer who stood in my place.”

And so are we all. We are all loved by the Redeemer of the world, our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. So wherever you and I are in the hard journey of forgiveness, we may not be saints, but we can pray for a miracle. We can pray through the power of the Holy Spirit that one day we might become that miracle – a miracle of grace with a heart of mercy – forgiving as we have been forgiven, loving as we have been loved, doing unto others as God has done unto us.

Let’s pray:  O Lord, we come to you for where else would we go? You have the words of eternal life. We pray and give thanks, O God, for the people we have forgiven, and the people who have forgiven us. We pray and ask for help for the people we find hard to forgive, and the people who find it hard to forgive us. May we humble ourselves, release control and put it in Your hands, trusting in Your ultimate justice and mercy for all of us through Jesus Christ we pray. Amen.

Sources:

Stephen Cherry, Healing Agony: Re-imagining Forgiveness (2012)

Rachael Hollander, What Is A Girl Worth? (2019)

Liberty University, “Former gymnast who suffered abuse shares biblical view of forgiveness, justice”, 9 April 2018, https://www.liberty.edu/news/2018/04/09/former-gymnast-who-suffered-abuse-shares-biblical-view-of-forgiveness-justice/

Klyne Snodgrass, Stories with Intent, 2nd Ed. (2018)