Proper 19: Do I Have to Forgive Others?
Introduction
Good morning friends. It is great to be with you. I’m Fr. Morgan Reed, the Vicar here at Corpus Christi Anglican Church. Today is our Fall Kickoff Day, which we do each year in early September to mark a welcome back after a long summer. There are a lot of great ways to plug into the life of the church in this season.
If your calendar is anything like mine, it is also a very full season. As the calendars get full, we have more commitments, more responsibilities, more deadlines, and more stress. And when there is stress, there are more disagreements: with coworkers, young children, teenagers, siblings, spouses, coaches, and teachers. When arguments are more frequent we also have more opportunity to pay attention to what is going in inside of us and our stories. Conflict has a way of shining light on the dark places we’d rather keep hidden. Our painful moments are profound moments that have the potential for two different outcomes: they might draw us into the deep and harmful waters of bitterness and resentment or they may draw us into a deeper knowledge of God’s grace and forgiveness. Today’s passage calls us to the latter, where forgiveness is a necessary mark of the community of the followers of Jesus.
Let me pray for us. “In the name of God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen. Lord, may the words of my mouth and the meditation of our hearts be always acceptable in your sight, O Lord, our rock, and our redeemer. Amen.”
The forgiveness God grants — vv 21-27
Last week we began a discussion about forgiveness from St. Matthew, chapter 18. Jesus had told the disciples as they follow him and form Messianic communities that pursue the life of the kingdom together, they are to confront one another when sin occurs. This was for the sake of reconciliation and restoring someone fully to their life with God and life with one another. People are more deeply connected when there is conflict, assertion, ownership, forgiveness, and repair — or reconciliation. St. Peter asks a question that logically follows Jesus’ exhortation. “Lord if someone sins against me, how often should I forgive him?” He believes he is being more than generous by saying perhaps he should forgive 7 times.
Jesus goes from generous to ridiculous as he says, “not seven times, but seventy times seven”. Some translations have seventy-seven whereas some have seventy times seven. That is not important. The point is you cannot keep a tally of how often you are to be open to the possibility of forgiveness. The other important point is that the phrase Jesus uses here has been used in one other important place in the Old Testament. When you read Genesis 4 in the LXX, Lamech, who is in the line of Cain, brags to his two wives poetically saying that he killed a man for wounding him. If Cain is avenged sevenfold, truly Lamech, using the same phrase, is avenged “seventy-sevenfold.” It is the same Greek words and construction as what Jesus says here and his point is this. Inasmuch as Lamech was bloodthirsty for power, control, violence and vengeance, so should the follower of Jesus equally be eager to forgive. The desire for vengeance made Lamech less human, but to forgive is to become fully human, free of the hatred and resentment we were not designed to carry.
This is a very bold statement that I’m sure raised a ton of objections and “whataboutisms” from the disciples. Jesus offers a parable to illustrate his point. There is a king who has slaves that are indebted to him for various amounts of money. The slave we are introduced to owes the king ten thousand talents. A talent would have likely been one person’s lifetime worth of wages and the point is that this slave owes more than anyone could possibly pay back even if they had multiple lifetimes. Despite his promise, this slave could never pay this back. The king knows this.
The point was to bring the servant to the place where he is utterly dependent on the king’s mercy, knowing full well that he has debt, and except for the king’s compassion, he will continue in enslavement to pay it off. The parable highlights our deep need for God’s compassion to rescue us. The king forgives him so that he is free to become fully who he is meant to be in his vocation and relationships. He is freed to learn the nature of compassion and bring it to others.
Anecdotally, I remember having a beer with someone after a hard season of conflict with someone else. And I remember saying to them “I know this is bad, but I really desire that this person fail.” This was my desire for vengeance over the way I’d been mistreated. Over time I had to work through how that person hurt me. It took several years, but I did relinquish my desire for vengeance and I could genuinely rejoice when that person succeeded because their life was no longer really bound up with mine. It was time, separation, and a lot of personal work that led me to the place where I could truly forgive and hand God my desire for vengeance. Forgive and forget isn’t a thing. I’ll never forget the harm and disappointment, but I can hate what happened while blessing God for his grace and presence in the midst of it or for what it taught me. We learn to forgive so that we can begin to heal.
The forgiveness we should extend — vv 28-35
The parable doesn’t end there. After having been forgiven, the freed slave goes to his colleague, another slave. This slave owes him a hundred denarii. It isn’t a small amount, perhaps about 3-4 months wages. Unlike the first slave, this is something that can be paid off. He asks for patience. This is a very reasonable amount of money to pay off. But completely ignoring the compassion shown to him, the freed slave puts him into debtor’s prison. Yes, this was legal to do, but not everything legal is ethical and just. This was, in fact, unjust and cruel, despite being legal. Having done this, the king who had originally forgiven the freed slave, now becomes angry, and orders that the freed slave be seized and not only taken in custody, but tortured. Jesus gives his purpose for sharing this extreme parable when he says, “So my heavenly Father will do to every one of you if you do not forgive your brother or sister from your heart.”
This is a hard saying, and it is not meant to give us any 1:1 correspondence to the theology of eternal punishment or reward. It is meant to impress on us the gravity of forgiveness as the defining characteristic of the people of God. No one who follows Jesus is exempt from the obligation to forgive, not for others’ sake, but for our own. It sounds simple enough, but we need nuance with what constitutes forgiveness because my fear is that people will say “you have to forgive” when what they actually mean is “Forget it and just get over it.” This is not real forgiveness, and it robs us of the opportunity to grow. I would encourage you to journal and work backwards. Not everything can be traced to a particular person or part of our story, but when we take note with the wise guidance of others then we begin to notice patterns. Perhaps it is a priest, therapist, spiritual director, or all three!
As patterns begin to emerge, we have to begin accepting grace and holding space for healing to take time. Someone once said that in your twenties you had the nagging sense that your parents preferred your sibling to you, but then in your 30s and 40s you discover they really did. The family systems, friendship experiences, church experiences, and other impactful relationships will shape your current relationships in ways that take time to unearth. Go slow. We cannot be rushed into forgiving someone if we haven’t fully named the impacts of harm. Certainly we can forgive along the way for what we have come to understand, but depending on the level of harm, it may take longer to bring the details out and forgiveness will come in stages.
In a group this large, I do not want to gloss over and bypass the real stories of hurt, trauma, abuse, neglect, and wounding. Please don’t hear me say that forgiving is as easy as flipping some mental switch or that you should forget parts of your story. Forgiveness does not mean that we allow abusive people back into our lives without them doing the deep and long work of repentance and amendment of life. Forgiveness does not mean that we refuse to speak ill of the dead. I had a relative that I loved who died, but lived their whole life through the lens of being a victim and it unfairly put me in the place of rescuer when I was a teenager. I had to process the ways that came out sideways in relationships in my 20s and 30s. We aren’t shaming those who harmed us, but we have to name what didn’t go right in order to heal. If forgiveness is our relinquishing the desire for vengeance, then we can delineate that from reconciliation, and restoration. They are different things with different processes and different lengths of time.
Forgiveness heals us because we are releasing the desire for harm and vengeance on others that we are not meant to hold. This is the mechanism by which our deep wounds become scars integrated into the story of grace in our lives that God continues to unfold. God’s forgiveness opened up the possibility of our reconciliation and restoration to life as God intended it to be. It’s up to us to grab hold of it. Similarly, forgiveness is the first step toward reconciliation, but it is not a guarantee. If the offender has a pattern of gaslighting, succumbing to their own unresolved trauma and maladaptive coping strategies, an inability to own what they’ve done wrong, etc., then reconciliation may not be possible. Reconciliation is beautiful, but false reconciliation is destructive, so go very slow and do not push reconciliation before the offender has honestly and deeply repented with authenticity. You might even think of that as causing an infection where otherwise there might have been healing.
This is why it is so important that the church become a community marked by truth-telling, forgiveness, and the blessing of scars. We forgive those who hurt us. We forgive ourselves for what we wished had turned out differently. We need relinquish our resentments for a life we feel is unfair. And although God is big enough to hold onto our rage, which is what the category of lament teaches us, we also need to begin relinquish our resentments against God for what we have come to resent about ourselves, our bodies, our lives, and our world.
Conclusion
God is bringing us into healing and new creation and it is often the profoundly difficult seasons that we point back to that have shaped us. One writer says this, “...We need to forgive those who have hurt us, forgive ourselves for our own failings, forgive life for not being fully fair, and forgive God for seemingly being so indifferent to our wounds. We need to do that before we die because ultimately there is only one moral imperative: not to die an angry, bitter person, but to die with a warm heart.”[1] May our church be a community which receives and lives out forgiveness and where the love of Christ is known and made known. This keeps us tender to one another as we grow in our gratitude for the great gift of mercy that we ourselves have received.
Let us pray:
Lord Jesus Christ, you said to your apostles, “Peace I give to you; my own peace I leave with you”: Regard not our sins, but the faith of your Church, and give to us the peace and unity of that heavenly city, where with the Father and the Holy Spirit you live and reign, now and for ever. Amen.
[1] Ronald Rollheiser, Sacred Fire: A Vision For A Deeper Human and Christian Maturity, 259.
