Matthew 18:21-35 - by Don Neuendorf
"Lord, how many times shall I forgive my brother when he sins against me?"
How in the world can we understand these things when we have completely abandoned the framework for understanding them? Do people still "sin against" one another? Really???
Or do we just experience "friction" or "misunderstandings". You know the routine...
Someone says something in public, usually a politician or a celebrity, that is offensive. They use words that reveal their feeling of superiority over others, that diminish others. There is a brief uproar (and some people who defend the remarks as free speech). And then the person makes a public statement that they are sorry if anyone was offended. We're sorry that some people felt bad.
But forgiving? In order to forgive, there must first be a real offense. An actual sin. An intentional act of self-serving. And then we have to admit that we didn't just "slip up" in our words. We actually said something unkind because we're sometimes self-centered unkind people!
But no... that's now how we treat things. Divorces "just happen." Children get drunk, get in car accidents, get pregnant, contract a venereal disease, and if we talk about it at all we say that "this isn't the way we'd have liked things to go, but sometimes these things happen with children."
We have lost forgiveness... because we have lost sin. We no longer understand sin or believe in it as a society. I Googled news sources for the words "sinned" or "sinner". Apart from stories about religion (stories in denominational newspapers), the word seldom occurs. In some recent articles the word sinner was used, carelessly, in an article about a soccer game. "More sinned against than sinning." In another article the word "sinner" was put into quotation marks - probably the way that it should always be written in the mainstream news, because we don't really believe that people are actually "sinners". They are only so-called sinners.
But think of what we have lost. In our haste to escape the discomfort of dealing with sin, we have lost the ability to reconcile. Peter's brother will sin against him many more than 7 times... but modern-day Peter will never forgive him. He won't even know how.