Scripture can be found here...
Almost
all of us have the stories. The best friend who said something cruel. The
parent who favored the other child until it broke a heart. The one who lied and
lost our trust. These seem to be the
stuff of life: the normal hurts and harms and betrayals that seem to signify
the very heart of what it is to be fallibly human. Some, without a doubt, are
worse than others. The parents who weren’t merely neglectful, but were abusive,
or entirely absent. The sibling who stole from the family. The heart-friend who
abruptly, inexplicably, turned away, went silent, and disappeared from our
lives.
And,
to turn this thing entirely on its head, I suspect we all have the other
stories, too, although these are stories we don’t share so often or so openly.
Of the times we were the one who disappeared when we should have stayed, or the
times when we did not live up to our promises, vows, and compacts. The times
when we weren’t there for our children, turned hard-hearted towards a friend or
relative. Maybe some of us have even had the experience of asking for
forgiveness, and hearing, if not “no,” then a stony silence that told us… the hurt
was still too deep, or too fresh, not something they could forgive.
And
so, Jesus has a story to tell us, about being the forgiver and being the
forgiven. Beginning today, and throughout Lent, we will be reading parables of
Jesus—stories, sometimes brief, sometimes just a sentence or two, designed to
help us to think and intuit more deeply about a problem or paradox. Parables
are not allegories. It’s not always easy to identify who, in a parable, stands
for God, for example. Sometimes it is the very last person we expect. Sometimes
parables are framed as analogies: they begin, “the kingdom of heaven is like
this…” and then we hear a story.
Sometimes
parables are hilarious. Sometimes they are horrifying. Today’s is both, though
the hilarity, we have to dig for, just a little, because we are not first
century Palestinian Jews, and therefore, don’t necessarily catch all the nuance
of the tale.
But
before the parable, we need the setup. And today’s setup is a long one. It
begins with the issue of conflict in the church. What do we do when someone in
the church has harmed us? Jesus outlines an incredibly sensible and gentle path
towards reconciliation and healing, a path churches still use to this day. At
last, Peter raises a critical question. Lord, he asks, if a member of the
church sins against me (actually, in the Greek, it’s “my brother,” but we
understand it to be a church member by the context), how many times should I
forgive him? How about seven?
Seven
is a great number. Seven is a symbolic number in scripture, a number of
fullness and completion—the six days of creation plus the day of rest. Perfect.
Complete. It’s a brilliant suggestion.
No,
Jesus says. Try seventy-seven. (That’s what it says in English.) Try seventy times seven. (That’s what it says in the
original Greek.) In other words, there is no limit to how often we ought to
forgive. None.
This
is a hard teaching. I’m not going to sugar coat it. Being hurt—physically,
emotionally, spiritually—affects us on so many levels. For one thing, it plays
out deep in the reptilian brain where everything is about fighting or running
away. For another thing, our conscious minds tell us the story of how it was
supposed to be, and that can be hard to let go of. Someone has said,
forgiveness is giving up on the idea that we can change the past.[i]
Sometimes, we can’t seem to find our way to giving up on that.
And so
Jesus tells a parable. There is a king, and there is a slave. And the slave
owes the king ten thousand talents.
So,
let’s stop right there. A talent was more than fifteen years of wages for a day
laborer. This slave owes the king ten thousand talents. So… that’s 150,000
years’ worth of wages for a day laborer. The king orders the slave and his
whole family to be sold for cash, but the slave begs him for time to repay.
This is the hilarious part. The slave is planning to work so that he can come
up with 150,000 years’ wages to pay his debt. The king has absolute discretion.
The life of this man is in his hands. He can imprison him, or sell him, or do what
he will to get his money back.
He
forgives him. He forgives him this debt, which might as well be a gazillion
dollars, or a kajillion dollars. A googolplex of dollars.[ii]
And
then, the slave does something really unforgiveable: he refuses to forgive
someone else’s debt. Another slave owes him 100 denarii—the denarius is one
day’s wages for a day laborer. So, this is a debt that could be paid off in
less than a year, theoretically. Instead, the forgiven one has his fellow slave
thrown into prison.
Of
course, the king finds out. And, it turns out, the king can forgive a debt of a
googolplex of dollars. But he cannot—or will not—forgive a lack of forgiveness.
Well, isn’t that ironic? The king sentences the slave to be tortured.
The
parable uses forgiveness of financial debts, which is a relatively simple
matter in one sense. The king evidently had the wealth or the magnanimity or
both to forgive the ridiculously enormous debt of the slave; but that same
slave could not or would not forgive a far more modest, even meager debt.
It’s
not so simple when we remove numbers and money from the equation and start
talking about the heart. As for me and
my family, I come from a long line of Olympic-level grudge-holders. For a time,
one of my relatives could have proudly told you her statistics in this area.
She never forgot a wrong, and she never forgave one either. Until, she held a
grudge against her own sister for a good dozen years. And then, when that
sister’s husband became ill, the grudge was dropped, and all was forgiven. And
the further truth is, that grudge had cost my relative. It was a little like
being sentenced to jail to be tortured, except she kept the key to her cell on
a chain around her own neck. It was time she never got back.
To
err is human, to forgive is divine, we are told. So, it might not always be
possible to forgive under our own steam. But what feels impossible to us might
be possible if we were to enlist God’s help in the matter.
Elsewhere,
Jesus tells us that we should pray for our enemies. One tiny step towards
forgiveness might be this: to start praying for the person who has injured you.
Notice, I didn’t say, “whom you want to forgive,” because sometimes, we don’t
want to forgive, and so it’s hard to get started on any action that might lead
us down that path. So, rather than thinking about forgiveness, we might think
about praying for our enemies, and start there. It's a small thing. But it
gives God something to work with.
Many
of you know the story of the late Christian Dutch underground member Corrie ten
Boom. She told a story of traveling in Germany after the war, bringing a
message of forgiveness. The war had cost her family dearly. Though they’d
hidden and saved countless refugees, Jews and Christians alike, they could not
save some of their own. Corrie had watched her beloved sister, Betsie, die in
Ravensbruck concentration camp. She writes,
“It was in a church in Munich that I saw
him—a balding, heavyset man in a gray overcoat, a brown felt hat clutched
between his hands. People were filing out of the basement room where I had just
spoken, moving along the rows of wooden chairs to the door at the rear… And
that’s when I saw him, working his way forward against the others. One moment I
saw the overcoat and the brown hat; the next, a blue uniform and a visored cap
with its skull and crossbones. It came back with a rush: the huge room with its
harsh overhead lights; the pathetic pile of dresses and shoes in the center of
the floor; the shame of walking naked past this man. I could see my sister’s
frail form ahead of me, ribs sharp beneath the parchment skin. Betsie, how thin you were!...
“Now he was in front of me, hand thrust out:
‘A fine message, Fräulein! How good it is to know that, as you say, all our
sins are at the bottom of the sea!’
“And I, who had spoken so glibly of
forgiveness, fumbled in my pocketbook rather than take that hand…
“‘You mentioned Ravensbruck in your talk,’
he was saying, ‘I was a guard there…’
“‘But since that time,’ he went on, ‘I have
become a Christian. I know that God has forgiven me for the cruel things I did
there, but I would like to hear it from your lips as well. Fräulein,’ again the
hand came out—’will you forgive me?’
“And I stood there…and could not forgive.
Betsie had died in that place—could he erase her slow terrible death simply for
the asking?
“It could not have been many seconds that he
stood there—hand held out—but to me it seemed hours as I wrestled with the most
difficult thing I had ever had to do…
“I knew [forgiveness] not only as a
commandment of God, but as a daily experience. Since the end of the war I had
had a home in Holland for victims of Nazi brutality. Those who were able to
forgive their former enemies were able also to return to the outside world and
rebuild their lives, no matter what the physical scars. Those who nursed their
bitterness remained invalids. It was as simple and as horrible as that.
“And still I stood there with the coldness
clutching my heart. But forgiveness is not an emotion—I knew that too.
Forgiveness is an act of the will, and the will can function regardless of the
temperature of the heart. ‘… Help!’ I prayed silently. ‘I can lift my hand. I
can do that much. You supply the feeling.’
“And so woodenly, mechanically, I thrust my
hand into the one stretched out to me. And as I did, an incredible thing took
place. The current started in my shoulder, raced down my arm, sprang into our
joined hands. And then this healing warmth seemed to flood my whole being,
bringing tears to my eyes.
“‘I forgive you, brother!’ I cried. ‘With
all my heart!’
“For a long moment we grasped each other’s
hands, the former guard and the former prisoner. I had never known God’s love
so intensely, as I did then.”[iii]
Forgiveness
is not an emotion, and even the most faithful and courageous among us can find
it a burden. And though she describes it as “an act of the will,” it was still,
clearly, something that could not be conjured up by her will alone. Forgiveness
was something she needed to receive as a gift from God. She couldn’t come up
with it on her own. She had to ask for it.
Ten
Boom suggests that those who were unable forgive the war crimes against them
were unable to heal from their injuries. I’ve heard that phenomenon described
in many ways, but this may be the best: To forgive is to set a prisoner free,
and then discover that the prisoner was you.[iv]
Forgiveness
is not easy, it is not automatic. With God, it is possible. It starts with asking
God to help us to forgive. If we can’t do that, it starts with asking God to
help us to want to forgive. If we can’t do that, it starts with asking God for
help, to set this prisoner free. Thanks be to God. Amen.
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