Forgiveness

                                                                Proper 19A 2014

                         Exodus 14:19-31; Psalm 114;Romans 14:1-12; Matthew 18:21-35

Father Adam Trambley

Sept 14, 2014 St.John’s Sharon

In last week’s gospel, Jesus talked about prayer, but only after first describing how we can reconcile with those who have harmed us.  This morning’s gospel reading is directly after last weeks, and Jesus takes up this idea of forgiveness more directly and more emphatically.

Simon Peter, of course, prompts the discussion.  He heard Jesus’ instructions that when someone sins against you, you should go directly to that person and work it out.  He understood Jesus’ emphasis on forgiveness and reconciliation and restoring relationship with our brothers and sisters.  But Matthew has taken Peter’s falafel six times in the past few weeks.  It’s great to be the generous forgiving one, but at some point enough is enough, right?  We can almost imagine Peter asking “Lord, if another member of the church sins against me, how often should I forgive? As many as seven times?” while he casts a smug glance in Matthew’s direction.

Now let’s face it, six times is a lot to forgive someone.  Six is a lot more times than we want to forgive.  Once could be a mistake.  Twice, and there could be extenuating circumstances.  But three strikes and you’re out, buddy.  By about the third time someone offends us in some way, even if the offense is almost entirely a figment of our imagination, we feel entitled to be upset, unpleasant, rude in return, and still feel morally superior for being generous the first two times.  Somehow we think everyone else should further our comfort and convenience, and that we should be rewarded anytime our behavior might possibly indicate that we are not the center of the universe.  So if we have already gone so far as to forgive six times, then move over Mother Theresa and somebody please put a call in to the Nobel Committee.

Now, honestly, forgiving somebody who really hurt us even once is hard.  That reconciliation takes strength, courage, prayer and usually support from the community around us.  But following Jesus means doing that hard work.  Jesus is the one on the cross who said, “Forgive them, Father.” 

But we also know, when we are on the other side of things, that being forgiven six times isn’t really enough. We hurt the people closest to us a lot more than that, and if they just wrote us off after somewhere between two and seven times, we’d all be renting rooms by the week at the Sharon Hotel.  Jesus knows how much forgiveness we need, too, and that’s why his response to Peter is, “Not seven times, but, I tell you, seventy-seven times.”  Jesus knows how hard it is to forgive that freely, but we all need that much forgiveness from God and from each other if we are going to have any chance to live as a loving community.  We can’t put a limit on how often we forgive. 

Just to note here, for the mathematically precise, that seventy-seven times is just a poetic way of saying a whole lot more than seven.  The assumption is that you can’t use your fingers and toes to count that high, so just keep forgiving.  If anyone out there is keeping a list of offenses and forgives people the seventy-sixth time but not the seventy-eighth time, please call and make an appointment to see me.  I think we have some things to talk about.

Then Jesus tells a story that changes the focus from continual forgiveness of repeated offenses to a requirement to forgive offenses no matter how large.  A king, who represents God, has a slave, who represents us.  That slave owes the king a ridiculous amount of money – ten thousand talents.  A talent was about seventy pounds of gold and was the denomination that provinces would use to pay their tax obligations to the Roman Emperor.  Ten thousand talents is an astronomical amount of money, and probably no one alive but Caesar could ever have repaid it.  Imagine being called in to the boss and told to bring in seven hundred thousand pounds of gold.  The slave appeals for mercy, and the King forgives the entire amount – he doesn’t even have to pay back the office papyrus he used surreptitiously to draw up his fantasy chariot team.  Then that slave goes out and encounters someone who owes him one hundred denarii, which is about ten thousand dollars.  Not a small sum.  Not ten thousand talents, but probably not something he could easily lose.  When his debtor begged for mercy, the slave who has just been forgiven everything decides to send him to prison until he pays up.  The crowd isn’t impressed, and tells the King what happened.  The King changes his mind and hands the ungrateful lout over to the torturers until the unpayable debt is paid in full.  Then Jesus says that’s what will happen to us if we don’t forgive our brothers and sisters from our hearts.

Jesus parable tells us two very important truths: that we desperately need God’s forgiveness and that we cannot receive God’s forgiveness if we do not forgive one another.

I hope I don’t need to convince anyone that we need God’s forgiveness.  We have sinned and turned against God in any variety of ways.  Since God created everything, including us, when we hurt others, mess up his creation, or even hurt ourselves, we are incurring a huge debt we can’t pay back.  We may as well owe all the gold in the Roman Empire because we have nothing of our own to repay God with.  God gave us everything we have, including our bodies, our time, our labor, and anything else we like to think of as our own.  So without God’s forgiveness, given to us in the gift of his Son Jesus Christ, we are hopelessly lost.  We can only ask God for mercy, and, just like in the story, when we ask we receive it.  Our only requirement is to go out and forgive others, as well.

When I was younger, I use to think this requirement was just plain mean, as if God was waiting for a legalistic “Gotcha” to withhold his forgiveness from us.  But God is always waiting to forgive us. The problem is that when we don’t forgive others we erect barriers between ourselves and God that make our own forgiveness impossible.

See, forgiveness is not really about us and the person who sinned against us.  Forgiveness is mostly about us and God, with the offending party playing a very minor role.  When we forgive, we claim our faith in God as God of the past, of the present, and of the future.  Forgiving our brothers and sisters acknowledges that God was with me no matter what offense, injury or harm was done to me.  Forgiving acknowledges that God is with me right now in this moment to strengthen me to act out of his boundless love even for my enemies.  And forgiving acknowledges that God will continue to be with me in the future even as I go forward having lost whatever it that was taken from me – whether dignity, property, relationships, status, or life itself – and that God will provide what I need so I don’t have to resent someone else because I am afraid that I won’t have enough for whatever I think I’ll need.  Forgiveness is about faith that God will be God for us, and that no one else can take that fundamental relationship away.

When we refuse to forgive, however, we decide that God cannot make right what someone else did wrong.  Unforgiveness professes that our injury is beyond the reach of God’s love and mercy.  Hardheartedness toward others is our decision that we prefer the self-pity of resentments and anger to the healing presence of God.  By not forgiving someone, we put our emotions and our lives in their hands, instead of in the hands of God.  We bind ourselves to the one who hurt us instead of to Jesus.  We decide to hitch our future to the fear and hurt done by another human being instead of holding the hand of our Almighty Father in heaven as we walk through even the valley of the shadow of death. 

Remember last week when Jesus said, “Whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven”?  When we refuse to forgive, we bind ourselves to the sin committed against us.  When we hold onto sin, whether our own sin we refuse to repent of or the sin committed against us that we refuse to forgive, we put up a huge wall between us and Jesus who took all sin to the cross and got rid of it.  If we don’t want to forgive and hand the sins over to Jesus, we’re telling him to stay on his side of our walls.  I’m not sure a better definition of hell than being stuck in a place with a huge wall between us and Jesus, and that hell can happen in this life, and usually we put the wall up ourselves.  How ironic that when the King hands the slave over to the torturers at the end of the parable, it is really the slave himself who has built the jail and designed the torture.

God’s love and mercy is so great, however, that he can forgive even our unforgiveness.  When our hardness of heart has isolated us from God and neighbor, Jesus is always willing to help us tear down our walls and forgive.  He will help us with the difficult work of healing our pain, seeing a way forward, and loving those who hurt us.  He is always waiting to forgive us and help us to forgive others. 

There is an old monastic story that I like, where someone goes and asks an old monk what they do.  He says, “We fall and we get up.  We fall and we get up.”  Forgiveness, the getting up and helping each other up, is at the center of the Christian life.  We ask forgiveness for ourselves, and we forgive others, whether one time or seventy-seven, whether small inconveniences or unspeakable harms, and God’s mercy is always there for us.