Free Lunch

 

They say that there is no such thing as a free lunch.  This is absurd…of course there is such a thing as a free lunch, just ask any college boy who is home from university for the summer and whose family isn’t charging him rent! I know this because I too was a college boy who came home from college for the summers and ate all of my parent’s food without paying rent.

As a parent…these seem like free lunches…at least to my off spring, but as a student I didn’t consider these meals to be free lunches at all, due to the fact that I was required to mow the lawn, shingle the roof, build some decks and paint the house to “earn” my free lunch!

As an adult, I too insisted that our son mowed the lawn and took care of other tasks around the house to “earn his keep” during his summer of respite.

So what is a “free lunch?” Is there such a thing?  There has been a few times in which I have taken advantage of “free lunches” being served by various businesses around town, free hot dogs, free burgers, free appetizer with the purchase of two entrée’s…wait…what?

The closest I feel that I have come to a “free lunch” was when I stood in line for 5 hours on opening day at Pizza Ranch in Little Falls.  The new restaurant promised free pizza for a year to the first 50 people into the store that day.  I was #5.  I must admit that I was a little dismayed to learn that free pizza for a year meant 1 large pizza per month for the next 12 months…but, beggars can’t be choosers. 

You could say that I received 12 free lunches.  But here’s the thing…those 12 pizzas had to cost someone, something.  Someone had to pay for the products and the workers to prepare the products. Someone was paying for the electricity of the oven and the dish soap to wash the pans…I hope. The 12 pizzas even cost me 5 hours on a Saturday morning.

In the same way, grace is costly.  Forgiveness is costly.  In Matthew 18:20-35, Jesus lays out an incredible parable about forgiveness.  He turns the world of thought on forgiveness upside down.  He insists on a forgiveness that is unprecedented and radical.  At a glance, the picture of grace evidenced can seem cheap, but it is anything but cheap.  In fact, it is incredibly costly.  In Jesus’ parable it is the King who absorbs all of the cost.  The King pays an incredible price to offer forgiveness to the servant. 

Forgiveness is becoming harder to find in our society.  Yet, even in the diminishing evidence of forgiveness in our culture, the incredible payment of Jesus for the remission…the forgiveness of our sins resonates loudly, if we will only listen.

May we come to encounter the Grace of Jesus Christ…that we too may be empowered to pay the cost of forgiveness.