How Do We Follow Jesus Teaching about Forgiveness? Matthew 18:21-35 Dr. Christopher C. F. Chapman First Baptist Church, Raleigh September 14, 2014

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1 How Do We Follow Jesus Teaching about Forgiveness? Matthew 18:21-35 Dr. Christopher C. F. Chapman First Baptist Church, Raleigh September 14, 2014 My earliest memory of the story we have read from Matthew 18 dates back to a church league basketball game when I was in high school. I was not a physical player, but I was willing to stand up for myself and, while I was thin, I had good upper body strength and sharp elbows. One young man on another team pushed and held me repeatedly until I did something decisive in response. Needless to say, he was not pleased, nor was the official who observed my act of justice and gave me a technical foul, but I stopped the pushing and holding! My coach, an esteemed church leader, took me out of the game to calm me down. "What happened?" he asked, puzzled at my behavior. "He was pushing and holding me!" I replied with a sense of selfvindication. "Remember that Jesus said we are to forgive seven times seventy," he said, infuriating me with his tone. "Well, that may be," I replied, "but seven times seventy equals 490 and I had already forgiven him that many times! This was number 491 and he got what he had coming!" And imagine - that young man grew up to be a minister! I reveal this unattractive part of my past because it is illustrative of how many of us respond to the challenge of forgiveness. We know that God forgives all our sin through Christ. We know that Jesus commands us to forgive one another as we have been forgiven. We are even willing to forgive on many occasions. It is just that we would like to establish a few reasonable limits here. Do we have to forgive others even when they hurt us badly? Should we forgive the same person of the same offense over and over again? Does unlimited forgiveness help the other person? We need some reasonable limits. Peter is of this mind. "If a brother or sister sins against me," he says to Jesus, "how often should I forgive? As many as seven times?" Lest we judge Peter too quickly, the rabbinic opinion is three times. Peter is being generous with his offer, but not generous enough. "Seven 1

2 times seventy," Jesus says, or in some translations, seventy-seven times, and what he means is there can be no limit to our forgiveness. Jesus point is not to up the number of times we must forgive, as I assumed in explaining my misplaced elbow, but to say that, as there is no limit to God's forgiveness, there is to be no limit to ours. He underscores his point by telling a parable about an unforgiving servant. The servant is forgiven a great debt but then refuses to forgive a much smaller debt that is owed him and he is judged harshly for his actions. So, Jesus teaching seems pretty clear. There are to be no limits on our forgiveness. But how do we follow this teaching? I know we are in church, this is in the Bible, and it is Jesus talking, but the truth is this seems unreasonable, perhaps dangerous even in some situations. We may formally acknowledge that this is a calling of our faith but we will not pursue it vigorously without further guidance. One thing that may help us is to understand what is involved in this matter of forgiveness. Jesus is talking about forgiving the person who has harmed us, extending grace to the offender, not holding a grudge in our hearts against him/her as a fellow human being and child of God. He is not saying that the hurtful behavior is O.K. or that we should enable the other person to continue doing hurtful things. Particularly with the Ray Rice story so prevalent in national news, it is important to distinguish between forgiveness and a specific course of action toward one who may be harming us. A person who is being abused by another physically or emotionally has no moral or spiritual obligation to remain in a context of abuse. Getting out of harm s way does not mean that the possibility of forgiveness is taken off the table. It simply means that a victim moves to a safe place. I underscore this reality because a demand for forgiveness is sometimes used as a way out of avoiding responsibility for wrongdoing. If only you were more forgiving, then I could function in a better way Such demands are manipulative and only serve to confuse matters. Forgiveness does not preclude the need for change. Further, forgiveness is not the same thing as reconciliation. The ideal is not only to forgive the other person when harm has been done 2

3 but to reconcile a broken relationship. But reconciliation requires an acknowledgment of wrongdoing, real acknowledgment, not a hypothetical apology. We have all received those. If I have done anything to cause you pain If?! Reconciliation requires truth telling and it is always the goal, but in those instances where reconciliation is not possible, either because the offending party is not alive or is unwilling to take responsibility, forgiveness is still possible. It is possible for us to forgive another in our hearts even if the other never owns up to the word or deed, and it is our best interest that we do. Frederick Buechner puts it this way. To forgive somebody is to say one way or another, You have done something unspeakable, and by all rights I should call it quits between us However, although I make no guarantees that I will be able to forget what you ve done and though we may both carry the scars for life, I refuse to let it stand between us. I still want you for my friend (Wishful Thinking, pp ). That s forgiveness. Understanding what it is helps. Another thing that can help us follow Jesus teaching on forgiveness is to understand what the options are. When we are hurt, one option is to deny our feelings or at least the significance of them. "Who me, hurt? Bothered by what she said, what you did? Of course not!" This is a popular way of dealing with hurt feelings. It is, after all, very Southern to avoid conflict and Christian to be genteel and civil, and the truth is there are times when we should forbear one another, live with inconveniences and tolerate idiosyncrasies that annoy us. However, if real harm has been done, we do not help another person by allowing destructive behavior to go unattended. Furthermore, we are only fooling ourselves if we think we can live with the results of injury. We shove feelings of hurt and resentment deep down into the basement of our souls until one day we open the door to store another feeling and there is no room. What comes back in our face is not simply the one feeling we attempt to put away, but all we have stored for years. I have shared with some of you the story of a woman who attended a conference led by William Miller. Miller was speaking about the 3

4 importance of getting in touch with the shadow side of our existence. He said we all have darker feelings and contended that it is healthy for us to get in touch with them. During a break a nicely dressed woman came up to Miller and said with a smile, "I find this all very interesting, but I do not have any dark feelings." Before Miller could respond, a man walked up to the woman and said, "Honey, I'm going home," and in an instant the woman's smile changed to a frown. "Do you know who that was?" she asked. William Miller said, "Your husband, I assume." "Do you know where he is going?" "Home I assume." "Do you know what he's going to do? He's going to sit in that stupid chair in front of that stupid television and drink that stupid can of beer while he watches that stupid ballgame!" "Really?" said Miller. He sits in that stupid chair and watches that stupid ballgame when I have a meal ready and he says, 'Just one more play, honey, just one more play.' It makes me so mad! Do you know what I'm going to do?! One day I'm going to walk into that room and take that can of beer out of his hand and pour it over his head and smash...!" At this point she stopped talking because she realized the room was quiet. Everyone was listening to her, the woman who didn't have any dark feelings. I suspect that this is how we deal with many of the hurts that come our way. We re not bothered, we don t hold a grudge, we are more noble than that. Then, one day something triggers the feelings we have buried deep within and we realize we haven't been so noble after all. We have simply saved our rage for a rainy day, and we haven't really helped the other person. Option number one, the option of denial, very attractive on the surface, turns out to offer little that is redeeming. Another option we have when we are hurt is to hold on to our anger and wait for an opportunity to seek vengeance. Sometimes our anger is set loose directly on the one who has harmed us. Sometimes we vent our rage on someone else. Other times the anger turns inward. But the result is the same. Our fire is never extinguished. It burns within us every day as we lash out at others and find our own souls consumed. In Shakespeare's play The Merchant of Venice Portia attempts to persuade Shylock not to pursue vengeance. "The quality of mercy is not strained," she says, "it droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven upon the 4

5 place beneath. It is twice blessed: it blesseth him that gives, and him that takes..." Mercy is twice blessed but vengeance is twice cursed. Anger damages the one who inspires it and the one who holds on to it. Perhaps this is why the parable Jesus tells ends with severe punishment. A straightforward reading of the parable indicates that God is the one who punishes the unforgiving servant, which doesn t seem like God. The parable begins with God, the king, offering forgiveness of a great debt. But some scholars have suggested we might read the parable in a different way. It s not so much a matter of God inflicting punishment directly but rather the unwillingness to forgive having its own consequences. Unresolved anger is an oppressive force. The primary options to forgiveness are denial and anger. Once we examine them a bit more carefully, the challenging possibility of forgiveness doesn t seem quite so bad. So, it helps to understand what forgiveness is and what the options are, and then, it helps to appreciate what our motivation is. There are many motivations for forgiveness among human beings. It is good for us, good for others and good for the world around us. But in a Christian context the primary motivation is grace. When we fully appreciate the scope of our need and the depth of God s love, somehow revealed in Jesus suffering on a cross, we cannot help but be gracious with others. This is the point of the parable Jesus tells. We know it is about a servant who is forgiven a great debt and then refuses to forgive a lesser debt. But we re not really talking about financial debts. We re talking about forgiveness. It is right on the heels of his exchange with Peter about forgiveness that Jesus says, For this reason the kingdom of heaven may be compared to The story is about forgiveness. Furthermore, the king in this parable is not simply a person wealthier and more powerful than the servant. The king is God. We know this not only because of the ending wherein Jesus makes an explicit connection to God but also because of the financial details of the story. How much money does the servant owe the king? 10,000 talents! A talent is worth over 15 years wages of a laborer. So, we re talking about over 150,000 years of income, as someone has said, billions of 5

6 dollars. A servant could never make that much money much less accumulate that much debt. By contrast, the other servant owes him 100 denarii, a hundred days work. That amount seems reasonable. As a story about financial debt, the parable is too outrageous to make sense. But as a story about forgiveness wherein the king is God and we are all servants, it makes perfect sense. Our debt to God is immeasurable, as is God s forgiveness of us. By comparison, whatever wrong someone has done to us is miniscule. How can we refuse to forgive one another, the story says, how dare we, when we consider how much we have been forgiven?! If we understand the nature of the grace we have received, we cannot help but extend grace to others. In an issue of The Christian Century (May 22-29, 2002) Barbara Brown Taylor tells a personal story about forgiveness. She committed her offense on an expressway and the person who forgave her, or at least suspended her fine, was a Traffic Court Judge in Atlanta. In a sudden traffic slowdown, Taylor rear-ended a Toyota just before a Ford truck rear-ended her beloved 1987 Saab. All three drivers got out of their cars. All were O.K. and had insurance. It was just a matter of waiting for the police to arrive and process the details. So, the driver of the Toyota, an African-American man; Taylor, a Caucasian woman; and the driver of the truck, Miguel, a Mexican-American; waited together for about ninety minutes, a roadside symbol of the new America, until the officer came. Twenty minutes later, all three drivers were on their way. Six weeks later Barbara Brown Taylor and her companion for this journey went to court to have their citations for following too closely considered by the court. Taylor says she went with anxiety, as she had not been to court in thirty years and had heard many stories about crowded courtrooms, belligerent defendants, cranky judges and whopping fines. Matthew s sheep and goats bawled in her ears and she knew she was guilty. So, in she went with a racing pulse, but the cases that preceded hers and Miguel s did not live down to her expectations. First, an old man with a cane appeared before the judge for failure to yield. I didn t mean to get in anyone s way, your honor, said the man, but that old car of mine stalled You still caused an accident, said the judge, but I m suspending your fine. Now get that car looked 6

7 at, O.K.? Miguel and Taylor eyed each other. Next, two women came forward each of whom insisted the other had run a red light. Are there any witnesses in the courtroom? the judge asked. When no one answered, he said to the women, I m dismissing your case for lack of evidence, but if you want your insurance companies to fix your cars, I suggest that you get together and sort this thing out. Obviously, this judge was not what Taylor feared. He let everyone have his or her say. He asked the right questions and either dismissed the case for lack of evidence or made a judgment that seemed fair. Taylor went before this judge trusting his judgment. The judge asked her a few questions and then asked Miguel a few in Spanish, then told them to sit down. The clerk came over and whispered that they were free to go. Their fines had been suspended. Taylor concludes the story with these words, I was judged last week, by someone who accepted my plea. I was a goat, no contest, but instead of sending me into outer darkness he sent me back into the world, with a suspended fine and a gratitude so deep that I drove like an angel all the way home. It is a wonderful story that can be understood on many levels. To make sure we get this, Taylor says, On earth as in heaven, the quality of the judgment depends on the judge. So, she is talking about her day in court and much more. She is talking about the larger court of life and the Great Judge who hears everyone and sorts things out in a way that seems better than fair. She is talking about how it feels when goats get better than we deserve. We drive like angels all the way home. I don t claim to know all that this implies, but I do know this - angels don t drive home and repeat their previous offenses on purpose. Angels don t go about judging others harshly when they have experienced forgiveness. Angels feel so grateful at the gift of having been judged lightly that they forgive others. This is what Jesus is calling us to do in light of the forgiveness we have received from God. This is what the parable about a forgiven servant who is unforgiving is about. Jesus teaching about unlimited forgiveness may seem unreasonable, but when we understand what forgiveness is, consider the options and appreciate the grace we have received, forgiveness seems like the most natural thing in the world. 7