September 13, 2020
Years ago, I taught a six-week class on forgiveness at a primarily white, suburban parish. Most people were very open to the experience, except one man who came up to me and asked me why we would spend so much time on this one topic. “What’s so important about forgiveness?” he wanted to know. I was caught off-guard and tried to explain—well, you know, it’s kind of at the heart of our faith. Like, it was so important to Jesus that he put it at the center of the Lord’s Prayer and even asked God to forgive the people who were crucifying him.
The man was unimpressed, waving away my jibber jabber. Yes, yes, he asked, but why make such a big deal about it? If we’re supposed to forgive people, why don’t we just do it and move on? Why would anyone need a class on the topic?
All these years later, I can’t for the life of me remember how that conversation ended. But I’ve never forgotten the questioning. The man had a point. I mean, why is forgiveness such a big deal? And why does it have to be both so important to our lives and, as a rule, so difficult to live out?
In today’s Gospel, Peter plays his accustomed role of the unwitting straight man, the guy who asks the dumb question that everybody else is afraid to ask, although, as usual it turns out that the question isn’t really so dumb at all. And today he gets a pretty unequivocal answer from Jesus, who uses the rhetorical tool of hyperbole to basically say that that you can’t have abundant life without putting forgiveness at its center and practicing both forgiving and being forgiven over and over.
It is important to understand just how much Jesus is exaggerating for effect in this parable and in the explanation he gives for it at the end. As one commentary explains, “the first servant owes about 60 million denarii, an amount so large that it exceeds the national debt of a small country. No person could repay it, even if they were to sell themselves and their family into servitude for several lifetimes. In an outrageous act of generosity and mercy, the king graciously forgives this unforgivable debt.” Obviously, no servant could have really owed that much money. Jesus is simply saying that there is no debt, no wrongdoing, that is so big it cannot be forgiven.
There’s no need to turn Jesus’s words into an equation and tie ourselves up in knots about how we’re doing—“Have I forgiven enough yet? Wait, did Jesus mean 70 times or 700 times? And who’s keeping track, anyway?” Nor should we let ourselves get hooked by a natural fear-based response to what seems like a threat of eternal damnation to anyone who can’t find it in their hearts to forgive.
If you’ll allow me to play with an old saying a bit, the whole point is simply this: to screw up is human; to forgive is divine. Our ability and our willingness to forgive are gifts from God, and so too is it a gift to be forgiven for our offenses, debts, and trespasses. You know that feeling, right? What a blessed relief it is when I have done something dumb or mean or selfish and the person I have harmed genuinely grants forgiveness. What we sometimes forget is how sweet it is to be on the other side, how good it feels to be the one doing the forgiving.
It may or may not have originated with the Buddha, but there’s nevertheless great spiritual wisdom in the adage that says “holding onto anger is like poisoning oneself and expecting the other person to die.” This, indeed, is what Jesus is talking about when he says that people who can’t forgive are going to be tormented eternally—life right here on Earth can feel like an unending torment when our souls are shackled by bonds of hatred, resentment, and anger. Only forgiveness can release us from a prison of our own making.
This dynamic works at a societal level as well as an individual one. In her book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontent, Isabel Wilkerson writes about the high price our country pays for holding onto a system that pits different segments of society against each other. Those at the bottom of our racialized caste system are most clearly and severely harmed, but those at or near the top are not unscarred. And the country as a whole suffers from wasted resources, innovation, and creativity that could be set free if we weren’t as divided and bound by caste as we are.
Wilkerson writes, “A caste system builds rivalry and distrust and lack of empathy toward one’s fellows. The result is that the United States, for all its wealth and innovation, lags in major indicators of quality of life among the leading countries in the world.” She goes on to cite statistics about gun deaths, maternal and infant mortality, incarceration rates, life expectancy, and more.
Perhaps it seems a stretch to connect these issues with the lack of forgiveness in our world today, but I don’t think so. Anger and hatred, conflict and division, are everywhere. Forgiveness of the debts we have incurred against one another, of the harms we have done and have had done against us, is a necessary first step in any effort we might make toward health and wholeness.
The great theologian Howard Thurman knew a lot about this dynamic, being one of the most prominent African-American voices to reach the white church during the 20th century. He knew that people in the upper caste and the lower caste believed they had good reasons for holding onto hatred and division, but that the corrosive effect was ultimately the same.
The first servant in today’s parable cannot find it in his heart to forgive the debt another servant had incurred; perhaps his hardness of heart felt justified because of all that he had suffered as part of the brutal system to which he was enslaved. Thurman’s analysis would say this is understandable, but not ultimately sustainable. He called hatred one of the “hounds of hell that dog the disinherited” and wrote: “Despite all the positive psychological attributes of hatred we have outlined, hatred destroys finally the core of the life of the hater. While it lasts, burning in white heat, its effects seem positive and dynamic. But at last it turns to ash, for it guarantees a final isolation from one’s fellows. It blinds the individual to all values of worth. Hatred bears bitter and deadly fruit.”
He goes on to explain that, even though Jesus was among the disinherited in his world, and even though he had every reason to understand the kind of strength that can come from it, “Jesus rejected hatred. Jesus rejected hatred because he saw that hatred meant death to the mind, death to the spirit, death to communion with his Father. He affirmed life; and hatred was the great denial.”
At this point in the sermon it feels like I should include a touching, heartwarming story about forgiveness, about two people or groups who overcame a desperately hard situation and found peace in forgiveness and reconciliation. But I’m not going to do that. Instead I want us to turn again to the answer Jesus gives Peter’s original question: “Not seven times, I tell you, but 77 times.” There is hope and mercy in the answer Jesus gives. We can never mess things up so badly that we won’t be forgiven.
But the flip side of the coin is this: it ain’t easy. Forgiveness is not a one-off, not a project we can complete overnight or in an instant. Being touchy-feely or inspirational is not the point. If we want things to be different tomorrow than they were yesterday, we have work to do. We have to be in it for the long haul. We have to let our defenses down, release our hold on privilege and self-righteousness, and do the work. The journey begins within, but its impact can reach across barriers of geography, culture, and even lifetimes. Forgives us our sins, our debts, our trespasses, we pray. Forgive us, as we forgive others. Amen.
