“Peter said unto Jesus, Lord, how oft shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? Till seven times?”
This exchange with Peter and the parable of the unforgiving servant come at the very end of chapter 18 of Matthew’s Gospel. The whole chapter is about relationships between Christians. We might call this chapter The Great Community or even Life in the City of God. It begins with a question from his disciples:
“Who is the greatest in the Kingdom of Heaven?”
Now back in that day moralists in antiquity would have trotted out well-know heroes or statesmen: a Greek teacher might cite Plato or Aristotle; a Jew might say Moses, or Solomon or Joshua. But instead Jesus called a little child over and placed him in the center of their gathering apparently right next to himself:
“Unless you repent and become like these children, you will never enter the Kingdom of Heaven.”
“Whoever humbles himself like this child, he is the greatest in the Kingdom of Heaven. “
Now keep in mind that Jesus is talking to his own disciples about how they will live together. In a way he is talking to them about politics in the Kingdom; how the saints of God live out their citizenship in heaven. Well, what does he mean? What is the humility of a little child? In our day and time children are treated quite differently from the way children were treated in New Testament days. Children, in the Western imagination, in the last hundred years or so have been more and more idealized. Childhood is believed to be an unsullied time of life when the little one is a natural genius – pure and sinless. It is no small irony that the more we romanticize childhood in the West the more real children are made invisible. Why should the wonder of childhood be solely the property of little children? Well, it shouldn’t, not according to a raft of “therapists” who, for a price, will help you give birth to your own inner child. The more adults shell out 1000s of dollars for workshops to get in touch with their inner child, the more real children suffer invisibly. It is hugely cynical when adults think the meaning of their life is giving birth and then caressing their own inner child, when in our own nation, 16 million real children go to bed hungry and wake up to life experiences that are anything but unsullied. We should be ashamed and repent of such narcissism.
But maybe this can also help us understand something about what Jesus was talking about when he said:
“Unless you… become like these children, you will never enter the Kingdom of Heaven.”
“Whoever humbles himself like this child, he is the greatest in the Kingdom of Heaven. “
But how are children humble? What is so obvious is that Jesus doesn’t bless our romanticizing of childhood at all. He is not saying that little children are natural geniuses or naturally Christian, or naturally good or pious or any of that. What is humble about a little child is that he has no status and he is completely powerless. Jesus picked him up and put him down in the midst of the adults. That is the nature of a child; he may be picked and put down whether he wants it or not. A child is completely dependent because he is completely powerless and that is what Jesus is saying about discipleship. His disciples thought the same rules applied in the Church that applied everywhere else in their life – it was all about power and status. “Who is the greatest in the Kingdom” is another way of saying, “Who is the richest and most powerful in the Kingdom?” Jesus turned their world upside down. So let me see if I can make this as offensive as Jesus made it: unless you see that you are helpless, weak, defenseless, feeble, frail, vulnerable and fragile as a little child you will never even see the Kingdom of Heaven. “Becoming as children,” means assuming a child’s low and dependent status, which is in fact being in touch with Reality. The old political slogan, “Every man a King” is antithetical to the Kingdom of Christ.
From there Jesus went on to say that the world will naturally despise these “little ones,” a term he began using throughout the chapter. By this point, in the text, it is clear that Jesus was enlarging his use of the term “little ones” to identify not just children but his own disciples. The term “little ones” may have been a scornful phrase for Jesus low-status disciples coined by his opponents. Whatever its origin, Jesus used it to refer to his disciples not just to children. This is when he warned those who might attempt to lead one of his disciples away from him, away from Christ. Don’t do it! It would be better for that person to have a millstone tied to his neck and drowned in the sea. Don’t mess with Jesus’ disciples. Not one of them. Not the whole, nor the part. Not the sheep plural; not the sheep singular:
“It is not the will of my Father who is in heaven that one of these little ones should perish.”
What Jesus has laid down at this point in chapter 18 is that people who have no status, no power, no precious things to hold back from Jesus – that person is the best model of the citizens of his Kingdom. “Nothing in my hands I bring, but simply to thy cross I cling,” is what his little ones know to be a first principle of Jesus’ politics. If you cling to the cross you have to let go of everything else. If you try to hold on to anything else – status, power, self-esteem, even anger or grudges or un-forgiveness – it will be impossible to cling to the cross of Christ.
With all that as background, Jesus then taught his disciples how brothers and sisters who have sinned against one another or who are thought to have sinned against one another are to deal with their personal problem. First, go to one another privately and talk it out – come to an understanding and if one has sinned against the other then admit it and then the other is to forgive his brother or sister. But if you cannot talk about it like Jesus’ little brothers and sisters, if one is recalcitrant, then you have to bring in one or two others to help come to an understanding. The others are not there to function as judge or jury, but as intercessors in prayer. The motive between brothers is to save the soul of your brother – not to get satisfaction for your hurt feelings or your bruised pride. This goes back to the way Jesus opened up the whole discussion in the first place: not one of us can make a special claim on the Kingdom of God. Any thought of status or power over a brother or sister, and that includes a brother or sister who has sinned against you, or one you think has sinned against you, is a nonstarter for Jesus. And that means that being sinned against does not give me a special status so that I may now look down my righteous nose at my brother or sister. Jesus’ polity for his Kingdom is not the easy way through life. The easy way is to go away, or to pretend to rise above it all, or to just quietly back out of the relationship. But Jesus says those are not options for his flock or for his sheep. This requires patience and truth and lets face it, the last thing most of us want is someone else’s version of the truth about myself.
“Peter said unto Jesus, Lord, how oft shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? Till seven times?”
Please see how Peter’s pre-supposition is that he is the person who has been sinned against and that makes him powerful. He thinks the power of absolution is his personal possession. And he wants to know when he can withhold that grace that he thinks is his personal possession. “When do I get to unleash my justified vengeance, Lord?” But Jesus pulls no punches:
“Jesus saith unto him, I say not unto thee, Until seven times: but Until seventy times seven.”
The fact of the matter is that Peter didn’t stand a chance of being a disciple of Jesus Christ without the unlimited forgiveness that was offered to him by the Father through his Son. Nor do any of us. Something I want you to see is that Jesus’ answer to Peter’s question was all politics. As you know the word politics is based on the Greek word polis, which means city or city-state. Politics is like the word polity, which strictly means “citizenship.” What Jesus did with Peter’s question is describing the way of citizenship in the City of God. And he is laying down how the citizens of the Kingdom are to relate to one another here and now and from now on. Jesus summed up his politics with the parable of a servant who had been forgiven all his debts by his King, but then went out and refused to forgive a fellow servant his debts. When the King found out about it he took the wicked servant and had him tortured him till his whole debt was paid. The parable makes it clear that before I go confronting my brother and sister about their sins, about what they owe me, I have to first remember and not forget that I have been forgiven for my sins, my debts to God. That makes me a member of a community of forgiven sinners. The question is not do we hold one another accountable, but rather how do we hold one another accountable in the City of God? To know how to deal with being sinned against or to know how to deal with the fact that we have sinned against others requires that we know how we became citizen of the City of God in the first place. We did not earn that citizenship. It is the free gift of grace. In fact when we were helpless, utterly dependent little babies responsible adults saw to it that we were freely given that which by nature we did not possess. We were baptized into citizenship in the Kingdom of Christ, we were regenerated, we were given the Holy Spirit, we were grafted into the Body of his Church and we were infused with heavenly virtues that we might live according to the beginning of that great gift of grace. In the Kingdom of Christ his citizen are called saints.
In the Middle Ages parish churches understood that they were in fact foreign consulates representing another King and his citizens. The faithful were thus understood to be resident aliens in a foreign land and the Church reminded them of their true citizenship by placing statues of the martyrs at the front door – scenes of decapitation, bloody swords, and saints burned to death. These are they who love Jesus above all else including their own lives. They may look powerless, but they unmasked the lies of this world and its politics of power, hate and fear and revenge. These are his little one, free men and free women, saints of God, citizens of heaven.