We started off the study of Matthew with a simple set of questions.  We asked ourselves if Jesus really meant what he said and if he did mean it, did we actually have to follow it.

We started looking at the Sermon on the Mount, we saw who Christ considered to be blessed in this world – -the poor, the meek, the person of peace.  We tried to see how Jesus wanted us to live in relation to other people.  We saw that though the Golden Rule is a good thing, we seem to be called to an even higher rule –we are to do unto others as Christ did unto them.  We learned that discipleship, in Christ’s view, was the servant knowing his place behind his master.  The student knowing her place at the foot of her teacher.  And we learned what the cost of that discipleship could mean to us.  And last week, we spoke about how our forgiving of others is directly related to how much we believe that God has forgiven us.

If we believe that Jesus meant what he said and if we believe that we are indeed meant to follow it, then we need to ask if there is any real benefit or consequence to answering yes to those questions.  Matthew 24 seems to answer that for us.  The good and terrible answer is that one day Jesus will come back.  It’s good news if we are found following the master’s footsteps.  It’s terrible news if we are not.

There are times that Jesus speaks in parables and mysteries, this is not one of those times.  His words here are very to the point and direct.  His understanding of how we are to live our lives seems to be very important to him.  He wants to make it clear to us that there will come a day when he will return and he will judge his servants on whether or not they have obeyed their master, on whether or not they have followed in the footsteps of their teacher.

I think that Jesus is adamant about this point because he knows how easy it is for us to do what we think is right in life.  He knows how easy it is to live for ourselves and for our own comfort.  He very much grasps how easy it is for us to lean on our own understanding.  And when we do those things, we become the servant Jesus talks about in the scripture.  We find that we have forgotten that our master will return one day and that he will want an accounting from his stewards for what he has left us in charge of. This can be rightly viewed as terrifying.  If we have decided to go our own way, if we have decided that we know better than Jesus, then that will be a sad day indeed for us. But I hope that we will really view this as a message of hope.  These words of Christ as an inspiration for joy and peace.

Christ isn’t expecting us to make every right decision, or to have a perfect theological system, or to know which choice is always better than the alternative choice. What he expects of us is that we live how he lived, in every situation we find ourselves, every day of our lives. We are to be people of peace, gentleness, kindness, patience, forgiveness, and above all love.

I have no natural talent for playing the guitar.  I’m up to knowing about 20 cords and can put them together in a somewhat reasonable fashion but it certainly does not come easy.  I find hymns especially troublesome.  There are lots of chord changes and lots of flats.  And I find that even if I practice other songs without practicing the songs we play on Sunday, I have a really hard time getting it to work out well.  I have to practice them beforehand.  It’s a must.

As we have gone through Matthew, our main focus has been on recognizing the words and actions of Christ and determining whether or not we must live by that ethic.

So we come to Matthew 18 and we find Christ talking about forgiveness with his disciples.  This is a recurring theme.  It’s not shocking that Peter would want clarification on what it entails.  Peter is actually being quite generous by saying seven times.  In Amos chapters one and two, we see God forgive rebellious city’s three times and only enforcing judgment on the fourth infraction.  So Peter was actually more than doubling the amount of forgiveness that God would forgive.

But once again, Jesus takes something that the disciples have heard and turns it in a new direction, gives a radical new orientation to life.  He even goes above and beyond in an almost exaggerated way of how many times to forgive.  He tells us the parable of the unforgiving servant.  This servant owed 10,000 talents – -a huge amount.  600 talents was the Roman yearly tax on all of Palestine.  This was a debt that the servant could never repay.  The seriousness of the situation was very real for him.  It even affected his family.  The servant begs for patience but the king goes over and above what was asked for.  The king forgives the entire debt.  Not half of it, he doesn’t refer him to tax consultants, he doesn’t put him on a payment plan.  All of the debt – - paid.

So what does the servant do with his freedom?  He uses it for his own gain.  He uses it to make a profit for himself.  His debtor asks for the same thing he did – -patience in repayment.  But the servant refuses—-he doesn’t except half of it, he doesn’t refer him to tax consultants, he offers no payment plan.  He goes over and above what was necessary.

This certainly doesn’t sit well with the king.  The king understands that forgiveness must/should result in forgiving.  How we forgive others is not what saves us but it is a marker that shows the work of salvation.

Much like I have to prepare to play the guitar on Sunday, we must be in the act of preparing to be forgiving.  Let’s ask ourselves this question – -how many times should we love of our wife or husband or our kids?  Seven times?  777 times?  Or do we find that we actually live in a state of love for them?  Should not be the same with forgiveness?  It is hard to forgive in the moment.  But what if we lived in a constant state of forgiveness?  Always prepared to forgive?  It is in doing this that we would remind ourselves that Christ has already forgiven us.  That we needed forgiving.

So maybe we don’t have to follow the Golden Rule.  Now that doesn’t get us off the hook, it only leads us deeper and deeper into Christ’s ethic.  It calls us to follow the Platinum Rule –Do unto others as Christ would do unto them.  That seems to make our responsibility much simpler but probably quite a bit harder.

I think Christ knew this and he talks about it in Matthew chapter 10.  What we are told to do, we are to do.  What Christ did, he did because he was told to do it by his father.  In the same way, we are to walk in the way of the Master.

It seems that we get ourselves in trouble when we start to drift outside of the ethic laid out by the words and deeds of Christ.  When we start to believe that we know better than our teacher, we believe ourselves to be above our teacher.  When we start to believe that our thinking, that are rationalizing, that are common sense is better than that of our master, we believe ourselves to be above our master.

So why do we always seem to drift in this way?  Because it’s easy.  And because it’s hard to follow the ethic of Christ.  It simply goes against all we have been taught by the powers of this world.  From the very beginning of the fall of humanity, the fallen powers of this world have been lying to us.  These powers have spent this whole time trying to get us to believe that their way is the best way.  Their way is the only way.  Those powers one as listening to them.  In Christ knows this.  So his response is to say, “You need to listen to me.  I am the one who knows best. I am the one you should follow because I am the one who follows my Father.”

The trouble for us is that when we start to follow, we get put down, we could put upon, we get maligned.  This is what the world did Christ.  Why would we expect it to be different for us?  The good news is that we do not have to fear this though.  What Christ leaves us with from this passage is…  Hope.  All things will come out in the end.  The light will eventually shine out in the darkness.  But what are we to do until then?  How are we to go on through it all?  The hope comes from Christ telling us that no matter what we go through God will always love us.