The 22nd Sunday after Trinity
“Lord… how often should I forgive? As many as seven times?’ Jesus said to him, ‘Not seven times, but, I tell you, seventy-seven times.”
When we think of forgiveness as a concept or as an act that we do in our lives, what is the image that our minds conjure, or the feeling that our hearts feel? I think for many of us forgiveness going either way – the asking for it or the giving of it – is difficult because we think and feel that forgiveness causes us to assume a posture of weakness.
Certainly the vulnerability that we feel when we approach another to ask their forgiveness of us for something that we said or did is humiliating – and I mean that in the real sense of it humble-izes us – and puts us in a position of openness and what we can feel to be weakness. And when another comes to us and asks for our forgiveness for something that they said or did we can likewise find it difficult both because of the hurt that was caused to us, but also because we often unknowingly experience our anger towards someone who’s hurt us as power, we perceive our anger to be power, our ill-thoughts towards them as a kind of upper-hand that we have over them. No matter what has happened in our life or how we’ve hurt others, if we can just stay mad at this person we can hold the moral high-ground, and have this modicum of power over them.
But of course while this is a fairly normal thing for us to experience, we’re silly to allow it, because forgiveness, and not the withholding of it, is what is powerful. We might even say that as long as we don’t forgive someone, as long as that hurt is held onto, no matter how righteous we feel, it’s more like a millstone around our neck than a crown upon our heads. And what is forgiveness? It’s not giving a pass to someone as if to say that their hurt was okay, but forgiveness is the releasing of your anger, and your bitterness towards another, it’s freeing ourselves and them to no longer be bound by this particular weight.
But of course no matter how we talk about it, it’s hard, and it has always been hard, as we hear in the Gospel today when Peter asks Jesus – perhaps cringing a bit at the thought – “How often should I forgive? As many as seven times?” No, Jesus replies to him, “Not seven times…but seventy-times-seven times” a limitless amount, which is tough for us to even imagine, but impossible for the world to accept, especially in a time such as ours which is so obsessed with power and the power we get when we withhold forgiveness, when we cancel those with whom we disagree, whose views we do not share. Jesus’ parable to the Disciples in the Gospel today tries to illustrate something about forgiveness but to our ears, and likely to theirs, it’s hard to find the wrongdoing.
What exactly did the servant do wrong? The servant owed, but the servant was owed a considerable sum by one of his fellow slaves, four months’ worth of wages. Now of course because we’re hearing this parable in church we know precisely what the servant did wrong, and we all know how condemnable it is, and we can click our tongues at it and shake our heads, but it’s a different story out there, what seems easy here is much harder in practice out in the world. If you’ve ever been forgiven a debt, did you turn around and forgive one of your debtors? If you were ever forgiven by someone, did you go and find a person you need to forgive and give them that gift? Under what circumstances might we even consider forgiving someone of a debt worth four months of wages?
But the parable, lest we go astray, isn’t primarily about debts, but rather it’s about what happens to us when we demand to get what we want and when we get it. The servant who demanded his due pay from the fellow servant had every right to do so – in this he wasn’t wrong; we have every right to demand the payment of the debts owed to us, we have the right to exercise our wills in all kinds of ways that might benefit us but harm others – but it begs the question of what place rights and claiming for ourselves what we are owed have in the Kingdom of God.
The servant in the parable demanded what was due to him, he exercised his right in claiming the debt, and in the end he receives precisely what he asked for – the fruit of him exercising those rights – he was locked away in prison, locked away by the anger, darkness, and selfishness of his own heart. What we see in the parable happening to the servant who was forgiven but refused to forgive a debt is the fulfilment of the wish “my will be done” and not “thy will be done.”
Because of course God doesn’t judge our adherence to the law or the proper exercising of our rights, but God sees the heart and judges the heart. We can lay claim to and demand every single thing that is rightly owed to us in this life and we can justly use every power and authority available to us to do it, but if our hearts are unsoftened by mercy, if our wills are so dead-set in their ways that we cannot forgive the trespasses or the debts of others as we have been forgiven our trespasses and our debts – then so what? What are we left with but ourselves, alone with everything that we demanded back from our debtors, sure in our righteousness , and glad that we never forgave that particular person, but at the same time we are mired in bitterness and weighed down by the burdens we carry.
The error of the servant in the parable was that he gave expecting something in return, but this is not love and this is not the way of God’s kingdom – God’s love and mercy isn’t contractual (I love you if you do x), and nor should ours be. The servant’s debt to the King of 10,000 talents is unimaginable – 10,000 talents is equal to something like 370 tonnes of silver, it was 60M denarii, or for the servant the equivalent of 160,000 years of labour. But even that extraordinary act of mercy by the King had so little effect on a heart so hardened and bitter that even when he was forgiven a debt of 60 Million, he showed his gratitude by turning around and choking a man who owed him all but 100 denarii.
Forgiving a debt, forgiving a trespass…these things may seem to us as the relinquishing of a certain amount of power that we’re always reluctant to give, ceding the high ground as it were – and it is, in a way, until we recall that power is not ours, but God’s to have and through acts of forgiveness it’s not our own power that allows us to forgive, a power which will never be enough and always let us down, but it is the power of God dwelling in us.
Paul writes to the Philippians today and praises the good things he sees and hears about their faith and the growth of their church and he prays that they may be filled with the fruits of righteousness. Not that they will grow those fruits, not that their power or will can seize them, but that they will be filled with them by Jesus Christ.
If you feel like all of sets some impossible bar that you can’t possibly reach, it’s because you can’t. If you feel like you have failed others with respect to forgiveness, mercy, or charity, it’s because you have. Because we all have, because what we’re talking about is absolutely not something we can do on our own, and our best attempts will fall woefully short. But the good news is that we are not left to our best attempts or do it on our own.
The goal of our Christian life is to allow the goodness of God to become our goodness, to make room for it to bear fruit in us; to forgive by the power of God in us; to think not with our mind but God’s mind; to give charitably of all that we are and have with the generous spirit of God in us; to desire not what we want but what He wants; to pray always and most earnestly that in all things Thy will and not my will be done.
