If God Is Gracious, Why Be Good?
Oct. 7, 2007 Rev. David C. Huffman Mt. 18:21-35

Religion and morality have always been joined at the hip. I suspect that all of you here this morning are religious or else you wouldn’t be here. But I have a very basic question I want to ask you. If you found a brief case full of money in the parking lot on the way to your car after worship, what would you do with it? What would be your first instinct? Relax; this is not an experiment. You can keep your seats; I didn’t plant a brief case full of money in the parking lot. When I was a little boy, my family took a walk around the block with a neighbor’s family, and I found a five dollar bill. Remember, Mom? I was so excited that you would have thought I had found a thousand dollars! Actually five dollars in 1958 would be worth about $60 today and that bought a lot of baseball cards and candy bars back then.

I

So what would you do with the brief case? Turn it in to the church office, take it to the police station, or quietly slip it into the back seat of your car and consider it your lucky day? Robert Coles’ father said that integrity is doing what is right when no one is looking. So did Jesus, in a manner of speaking. God never promised that living by the Ten Commandments and the Sermon on the Mount would be easy, convenient, or profitable. But God did promise that goodness is its own reward. Our parable this morning strikes at the heart of the matter. A king decided to run an audit on his books and discovered that a dishonest servant had run up a debt of three billion dollars. Of course this is a ridiculously large amount that he could have never personally incurred. One scholar suggested that this amount exceeded the annual taxes for Syrian, Phoenicia, Judea, and Samaria combined.1 Perhaps he had handled transactions with other nations that had gone bad: things like sub prime loans. Nevertheless, he was responsible for his mistakes, so the king threatened to sell him and his whole family into slavery so that he could work off the debt, or at least part of it. The point here, of course, is that the debt was so astronomical that he and his family would never be able to pay it off in their life time. Hang on to that point

The man immediately fell on his knees and begged for mercy. The king was so touched by his request that he let him off, canceling the entire debt. The man was so overjoyed and grateful that, as he left the room, he came upon another servant who owed him about five months salary and gave him the same courtesy he had just received, right? Wrong! He seized the man by the throat and demanded that he pay it off. When the other servant begged for mercy – using the exact words he had just used with the king – and promised to pay it off later, he had him thrown into debtors’ prison until he could pay off the debt. When the other servants saw this, they were so outraged that they ratted him out to the king, who immediately hauled him back to court and, after reading him the riot act, had him thrown into jail – not debtor’s prison but a punitive prison where he would be tortured until the entire debt was paid back.
Wow! What a story, the kind of story that elicits strong emotions and has an ending that leaves us savoring the sweet taste of revenge which the king leveled against the ungrateful servant who “did unto others as he did not want done unto him.” The upshot of this parable is that one who had just been forgiven of a huge debt – a debt so large that it was unpayable– when the tables were turned refused to act accordingly. Thomas Jefferson was right: we want grace for ourselves and justice for our neighbors. Moreover, the first servant’s debt was gigantic, but by comparison the second servant’s debt was miniscule. If you do the math, the second debt was 1/600,000th of the first debt.2 The contrast is so large that it is laughable. The New Testament is full of similar outrageous comparisons: Jesus said that some people see the speck in their neighbor’s eye and ignore the log in their own eye and that it is easier for a rich person to get into heaven than for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle. These images are so preposterous that they make us laugh.

II

What’s going on here? This is essentially a clever story that depicts the ancient moral dictum, the Golden Rule: we should do unto others as we would have them do unto us. The first servant didn’t mind receiving mercy, but he also didn’t mind withholding it in an identical situation. If the king had been interested only in justice, he would have sold him into slavery and been done with the matter. But the king chose mercy instead. He canceled the debt. But minutes later, when the recipient of grace had the opportunity to offer it to one of his debtors, he balked. And even though the king wasn’t looking, the community was, and they reported this dastardly deed to the king, who quickly rescinded his offer. That’s the thing about morality. Just because we have done the good and right thing in the past doesn’t excuse a bad deed today. To quote Forrest Gump, “Goodness is as goodness does.”

This brings us to my third question I want to ask God when I get to heaven. “If God is so gracious and forgives our sins, then why be good?” Does it really make any difference? The Corinthian Christians asked this question in Paul’s day. They said, in effect, “if God is in the mercy and forgiveness business, and we like to sin, then why don’t we just keep on sinning so God can keep on forgiving.” Sounds like a good deal, doesn’t it? Paul wasn’t impressed and ruled such a question out of order, suggesting not very politely that if they felt that way, then they must not have received God’s grace in the first place.
Paul was uniquely qualified to be an expert in this matter. He had risen to the top of the heap in the ranks of the Pharisees. The Pharisees believe that one earned one’s ticket into God’s kingdom by obedience to the law, and they were masters at defining the rules and keeping them. When God revealed his moral plan for the universe to Moses on Mt. Sinai, it included only “ten” commandments. But considerable inflation had taken hold by the time the Pharisees reached the apex of their power and influence 1250 years later. In fact, that number had grown to over 450. They must have been in cahoots with the Jerusalem Bar Association. Paul had spent his entire life based on a religion of law and obedience: he had perfect attendance in worship and Hebrew School; he aced his Bar Mitzvah exam; he was an Eagle Scout and the Valedictorian of his graduating class as Tarsus High; he received the law and ethics prize in his senior year in seminary; he made a perfect score on his SAT, GRE, and LSAT tests; and the Jerusalem Rotary Club had named him Man of the Year before he was 35 -- twice. No one had more impeccable religious and ethical credentials than Saul of Tarsus.

But all that changed one day on the road to Damascus. If Paul had ever written his memoirs a good title would have been, “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Damascus.” He discovered that true religion isn’t about obeying laws or earning merit badges with God. The Risen Christ revealed to Paul that God saves us by grace through faith and nothing else – zip, nada, end of story. And so Paul experienced one of the world’s most radical and rapid transformations. He went from being the number one persecutor of the Christian church to its number one missionary overnight. And he spent the rest of his life spreading the gospel of grace and establishing and nurturing churches throughout the Mediterranean world. This was not only a radical departure from the religion of his day but from virtually every other known world religion.
The foundation of most religions is morality and ethics: you have to earn your salvation through good works or obedience to the rules. God grades on the curve; and those who do not make a passing grade go straight to jail and do not pass go or receive $200. But Christianity preaches a radical gospel of grace and forgiveness. Like the merciful king in the parable, God has mercy on those who seek forgiveness, and through the death and resurrection of Jesus, he cancels our debt. That’s what our Lord’s Table is all about: grace and forgiveness, mercy and steadfast love, not justice, judgment, or vengeance. It reminds us that we are all in the same boat, that Christians are beggars telling fellow beggars where to find food.

III

So, if it’s all about grace and forgiveness, then why be good? Does it really matter? Aren’t we heaven-bound already through grace and faith? Don’t we already have our passports validated? Well, I think the gospel teaches that religion is not just about heaven; heaven can wait. Christianity is far more than our destiny; it includes our whole life. God didn’t come into the world through Jesus Christ just to stamp our passports to heaven. God came into the world that we might have life and have it abundantly, and that abundant belief begins here and now.

So, why be good? Because we can’t help it, that’s why. If we have had an authentic experience of grace – if we have genuinely received the unconditional love of God – then we have become infected with a powerful agent that invades our mind, body, and soul and begins to transform us into a whole new creation. God created us to love and to give and to live in mutually beneficial relationships, but our own sin and selfishness get in the way along the way. So when grace comes into our hearts it changes us. It gives us a new heart, a new set of eyes, a new reason to get up in the morning. It transforms us from self-focused people into other-focused people – from selfish people into “otherish” people (I looked it up; the word doesn’t exist. It does now.) It fills us with the fruit of the Holy Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness and all that other wonderful stuff.

Why be good? Two reasons: number one: because we can’t help it; God has given us a new heart that is inclined toward doing the loving, good thing. People who are loved want to love in return. And number two: because we are so grateful for such a wonderful gift that we want to express that gratitude by pleasing its donor. But what about the first servant in the parable, you ask? Wasn’t he genuinely loved and forgiven by the king? Oh, yes he was. The text is very clear: the king had mercy on him and forgave him. The problem was that the servant didn’t really internalize it. His heart must have been coated with Teflon. He had lived a life of such self-focus that his heart had become hardened, and although the king had offered him a genuine gift, it didn’t take, as his encounter with his debtor soon showed. So what happened was that he lost the gift, which was essentially still in the mailbox unopened.

For, if he had opened it and accepted it, his heart and outlook would have changed, and he would have acted graciously toward his debtor, just as the king had acted toward him. “Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors.” Sounds so simple doesn’t it? But we have such a human tendency to complicate it. Come; come to our Lord’s Table where God wants to straighten us out, so that we too can have our hearts and minds transformed. Dinner is ready. Let’s eat.

 

1Eugene Boring, New Interpreters’ Bible, vol. VIII, Abingdon, 1995, p. 382.
2Ibid.