Last week we I preached about our obligation to love even when someone sins against you. The loving thing is to point out the sin, within the community of faith, and get support to have that sinful behavior stopped. We are to hold one another accountable within our faith community because we are part of the body of Christ, the church. If we can’t deal with sin and forgiveness here, where will we ever make that a reality? As I closed that sermon I jumped ahead to the beginning of this morning’s passage on forgiveness.
15 minutes could save you 15% or more on car insurance. Yeah, everybody knows that. But did you know there is an oldest trick in the book? Have you seen these Geico commercials???? The scene is of a couple at a movie theater and then we cut away to a renaissance man reading from an old book with his young apprentice saying, “Trick number 1. Looketh over there.” He looks. “Ha madest thou look. So endeth the trick.” This is just one of many humorous commercials reinforcing the notion that we all know their slogan. Even though I have seen those commercial for years I have never gotten a quote from Geico. Just because we know something doesn’t make us more likely to do something about it. I think this teaching from Jesus affects us much the same way. We all know we are to forgive not seven times like Peter asks which is a lot more than would be expected. The cultural norm would say 3 times would be good. No, we are to forgive 70 times seven which simply put means continually. Can we ever stop forgiving? Jesus would say never. We know to turn the other cheek, to love your neighbor as yourself, to love because God first loved us. Yet I would venture to guess that we all still struggle with forgiveness. We want to forgive, we know we should. Some wrongs, some debts, just seem too overwhelming to forgive. In a way I think we get attached to the wrong done to us, or we are so desperate for it to have never happened, we simply wish the past could be different. I heard a saying this week about forgiveness that came from Lily Tomlin, “Forgiveness means giving up all hope for a better past.” We hold on to grudges, seeking to change the past. We certainly cannot change the past, but we think forgiving another will let the wrongdoer off the hook. Eleanor Roosevelt, after finding out about her husband’s infidelity, said to him, “I can forgive but I will never forget” (Feasting on the Word, A4, 70).
All of these thoughts come from a human perspective without much thought of God or God’s grace. The parable of the king forgiving the immense debt of his servant, a sum he could never repay, represents the tremendous grace we find from God through Christ. Christ takes away all of our sins, pays our debt, and God seeks to bless us with all the promises of our psalm passage- God forgives, heals, redeems, satisfies and renews. God always wants to forgive you; is always ready to forgive you. However there is the second part of the story, the conditional part, the part we don’t really want to see. For God, forgiveness must engender forgiveness. The forgiven must forgive others. Otherwise this parable becomes about divine forgiveness and divine punishment. The unforgiving servant does not extend the abundant grace he just received from his master to his fellow servant which brings him crashing back into his own debt. The unforgiving servant not only is without grace, he attacks this fellow, grabbing him by the neck and then throws him into prison. That anger creates its own prison for the unforgiving.
If you’re stuck in unforgiveness, not wanting to let go of the past, harboring resentments, then I offer you a carrot and a stick to possibly motivate you to change. The stick is the conditional nature of God’s forgiveness in this parable. In this parable God is likened to the master who imprisoned and tortured his unforgiving slave. It ends with “so my heavenly Father will also do to you, if you do not forgive your brother or sister from your heart” (35). Matthew teaches this conditional nature of grace many times. “For if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you; but if you do not forgive others, neither will your Father forgive you” (6:14-15). Every week in the Lord’s Prayer, we pray to God to “forgive our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors (6:12). Like it or not, we the forgiven must forgive others. To spin this to the positive, if you are like the unforgiving slave, you have grossly underestimated the magnitude of God’s grace in the first place. You didn’t realize that all that you have and are comes from God, our very peace of mind is contingent upon God’s grace.
If that does not motivate you to forgive maybe this will. Rabbi Harold Kushner told this story. “A woman in my congregation comes to see me. She is a single mother, divorced, working to support herself and three young children. She says to me, “Since my husband walked out on us, every month is a struggle to pay our bills. I have to tell my kids we have no money to go to the movies while he is living it up with his new wife in another state. How can you tell me to forgive him?” he writes. I answer her, “I’m not asking you to forgive him because what he did was acceptable. It wasn’t, it was mean and selfish. I’m asking you to forgive because he does not deserve the power to live in your head and turn you into a bitter angry woman. I’d like to see him out of your life emotionally as completely as he is out of it physically, but you keep holding on to him. You’re not hurting him by holding on to that resentment, but you’re hurting yourself.” (“Letting Go of the Role of Victim” Spirituality and Health, Winter 1999, 34). Living in unforgiveness only hurts you. You get to keep your righteous anger, but you are trapped by it as well. Unforgiveness separates you from God and God’s grace and it also robs you of your peace because you are trapped in a prison of resentment. As sure as the unforgiving servant gets locked up in a cell and tortured, when you choose to hold onto old hurts you are imprisoned and suffer pains only these pains are emotional. “Forgive, not because they deserve forgiveness, but because you deserve peace” (Author Unknown). You deserve all the abundant love and grace that God so desperately wants to offer you. You deserve true peace; a peace that comes from being right with God and right with others. You deserve a peace that is bathed in God’s grace, love and wellbeing. You might need to take action and forgive someone to receive that peace. “Forgiveness does not change the past, but it does enlarge the future” (Paul Boese). A future of God’s immeasurable grace and love, the wellspring of Christ forgiveness and joy, the peace of mind knowing your house is in order. The choice is yours. Amen.
