Forgiveness Must Lead the Way
A Homily on Matthew 18:21-35
by Griff Martin
For the Fifteenth Sunday of Ordinary Time (and the Twenty Sixth of Covid Worship)
For the Beloveds of First Austin: a baptist community of faith
September 13, 2020
*This document comes from an oral manuscript.
Let’s pray… Incarnate God, we ask that you once again take the Word and transform it into a living and breathing reality we can all together experience. Be present here in this space and in these words God, for if you are present here then nothing else will matter, but if you are not present here then nothing else will matter. In the name of the Creator, the Christ and the Comforter.
One of my favorite places in Baton Rouge was the Lakes. If you have never been to Baton Rouge, the Lakes are a series of lakes (obviously) which run alongside the LSU campus and one of the city’s oldest and most beloved neighborhoods. Think of it as if Town Lake was situated between Darrel Royal Stadium and Hyde Park. I did a lot of pastoral counseling at the Lakes -- I would meet members and we would walk or run there and what I quickly realized was everyone had a different version of how to walk and run the Lakes. Some did a 1.5 mile loop and others made a 9 mile loop out of the lake, depending on what they added or cut off. In fact, the Lake is the Marathon Course for Baton Rouge… the same trail that can be a 1.5 mile restorative loop can also be a 26.2 mile grueling marathon. It’s all about your interpretation of “The Lake Trail.”
Which means you had to be very clear with whomever you were meeting at the Lake in terms of what you were getting into… because there is a huge difference in 1.5 miles and the longest I ever went, 13.1 miles.
The Lakes is a lot like The Way of Christianity, big and full of potential and possibility. The deeper I grow in my faith, the more I firmly believe that a lot of Christian history is us taking the Way and trying to make it into one formula and, in doing so, we are missing everything. I think what Jesus came to show us was the whole host and variety of the spiritual experience of being a human being, all possibility and potential, and we took all of that and condensed it to black and white and removed the million shades of gray where Jesus lived.
Think of it like this: in the Martin household, we have several varieties of our favorite chocolate chip cookie. There is one that is more like a shortbread and is rimmed with brown sugar that caramelizes when baked. There is another that is topped with sea salt flakes and needs to be eaten immediately upon baking. There is the classic standard that we can make using the Nestle Toll House recipe that we can eat on all week. We move from Melissa Clark to Food 52 to Pioneer Woman to Smitten Kitchen and I am very glad we have all those varieties and have not reduced the cookie to just one recipe.
The problem with the text we are studying this morning is we have reduced it to one recipe, one formula. We have taken this huge concept of forgiveness and made it into this thing that typically looks like this: you are wronged or you do wrong and to make amends you must apologize and reconcile with the other party; when you are hurt or when you do the hurting, you find a time to sit and to say “I am sorry,” and that results in a restored relationship and ultimately whatever was broken is forgotten.
And here is the problem: I can’t find that specific version of an apology in Jesus’ words. We have made something biblical that is not exactly biblical. Look at Jesus’ forgiveness; this parable and the parable of the Prodigal Son have three very different examples of forgiveness. Here there seems to be judgement and reconciliation is hard to find, whereas the Prodigal Son can’t even get ‘I am sorry’ out before his father has his arms around him and has done all the work of reconciliation even when he did no wrong. Jesus stops the religious leaders from killing a woman, turns the tables on them and sorry is never mentioned in what is an issue of forgiveness. Jesus forgives those who murder him before they even commit the crime. In each of these, forgiveness looked like what was most appropriate in that instance.
Which means forgiveness might be as deep and wide as the arms of Jesus, as the love of God. The way is wide.
Now here is where I think we got this wrong; it was a well-meaning lesson from childhood. This is something the church-at-large has really missed; we have to start things off pretty black and white for children and then we move on to the beauty and truth of gray. Yet fundamental churches never move past black and white, and progressive churches start in the gray, and both approaches fail. This is the very teaching of Jesus -- some of it is more black and white and other teachings more gray based on whom he is teaching. Everything is contextual.
So as kids, forgiveness is a hard concept because it seems we are hardwired for revenge and retaliation, not reconciliation and grace. So when my kids were younger and something happened on the school playground and I had to teach forgiveness, there were two things that were most important for me: 1) To teach empathy, to help them see that the offending party very well might have been hurting… maybe he bullied because he is bullied; maybe she had a bad morning and that is why she acted that way. 2) To demonstrate reconciliation and not revenge. You want to make things right with them so this is how… And for children, this model of whomever has wronged apologizes, you accept and move on and all is well. This is often a good model for the issues they are working through.
However as they age, this model won’t hold. As we grow we put away childish things. We see more nuance and paradox, the grays come into the world and you can’t live with black and white thinking in a gray world. So, if the same child who came to me when someone skipped the line or called them a name came to me years later because they ran a business and someone had stolen from them, or if their partner had cheated on them, my answer is going to look a lot different with the same topic: forgiveness.
It’s the same thing I do with pastoral counseling when you all come to the office because an employee has stolen from you or your partner has cheated on you. Let’s take the latter… my response: Well, a good Christian might stay in the marriage and figure out what faithfulness means now and work through this, or a good Christian might be equally faithful and end the marriage and move on. I know good Christians who have done both actions and as long as you do the right action for you right now, well, you will be doing the right thing. And here’s the kicker: both of those might very well be forgiveness.
We graduate from our childhood view of forgiveness to a more mature view because our ethics grow and enlarge and because our theology grows and enlarges. Because a childhood theology will handicap us as adults, in particular this concept… this view of forgiveness gives us a God who is just a big eraser for all our mistakes, which is not much better than the Google God who we only go to when we need something.
As we grow, we understand concepts and God in new and truer ways, bigger ways.
I think Jesus is giving us a theology of forgiveness here where forgiveness is the desire of a better future, the hope that we can do better, that we will learn from what happens to us in life and will do better as a result. Which is exactly what I think the forgiveness of God is: a relationship all about the hope of a better future, the promise that together we can go through hard things and learn and God will be by us, supporting us using those things to better ourselves and our world.
And there is a tiny detail in this passage which makes me believe this: it’s the number 70 times 7. I think Jesus is an incredible communicator and his communication is layered and everything is intentional. It comes from Genesis 4, right after Cain kills Abel and everything goes to hell in a hand basket real quick here. Cain’s family tree includes a great-great-great grandson Lamech, who inherits the family gene for murder… apples don’t fall far from the tree, and recent research in trauma is showing us how much we carry in our bodies from our family history. This great-great-great grandson boasts in the Genesis 4, essentially saying that the murder he committed in revenge far exceeds God’s promise of seven-fold punishment for anyone who kills Cain, he says: “I have killed a man for wounding me, a young man for injuring me. If Cain is avenged seven times, then Lamech seventy-seven times.”
I don’t think Jesus pulls this 70 times 7 number from nowhere, I think this is a direct reference back to Cain and Abel, to a dysfunctional family system whose very blood now contains the trauma of envy, greed, jealousy, hatred, violence and retribution. You know, the stuff that make the very world seem to go round these days.
And what Jesus is saying is forgiveness is the end to all of that, time to end the cycle. Which is all the evidence I need of a bigger form of forgiveness since there is no way Cain can go back and apologize to Abel, they are both long gone when Jesus states this. What Jesus is telling us is forgiveness is the hope for a better future by letting go of the past once we learn the lessons we need to make ourselves and our world better.
Which is why forgiveness is such a key to all that Jesus teaches and commands of us. Two-thirds of Jesus' teachings are directly related to forgiveness. It’s why Jesus compares forgiving to breathing, the one thing you and I do from the minute we are born to the minute we die. Forgiveness is not an action, it’s a state of mind, it’s essential to the Kingdom of God.
Forgiveness is the hope for a better future by letting go of the past once we learn the lessons we need to make ourselves and our world better. This is how we get to a better world.
And it’s how we save ourselves, because we either forgive or we hold on and we become bitter and exhausted. We are imprisoned by it. Which is key to understanding the end of this parable, I think that is exactly what Jesus is trying to get us to see: The King forgives a servant for an unbelievable sum the servant owed the king, the servant then goes to a fellow servant who owes him a very minor amount, it’s a drop in the bucket compared to what he owed the king and he demands repayment and when it’s not met, he has the servant thrown into prison. The king comes back angry, ‘You wicked servant,’ he said, ‘I canceled all that debt of yours because you begged me to. Shouldn’t you have had mercy on your fellow servant just as I had on you?’ In anger, his master handed him over to the jailers to be tortured.
And maybe what the King knew is he was already in jail, he had imprisoned himself because he was back in the cycle of revenge, relation, scarcity, fear.
How many of us land in the jail?
Forgiveness is not a simple apology, it is not washing away the consequences, it is not a "get out of jail free" card, it’s not forgetting. It is the hope for a better future by letting go of the past once we learn the lessons we need to make ourselves and our world better. It is how we get to a better world.
Anne Lamott says it perfectly: the inability to forgive is like having a rodent problem, so choosing to drink rat poison yourself and then waiting around for the rat to die.
Forgiveness frees you. You don’t have to carry it anymore. You don’t have to be bitter and angry. You can have hope. You can learn and grow. You can be better, whole.
We get to the better normal by forgiving.
A beautiful, difficult film came out several years ago, Philomena. It’s the true story of a young Irish girl named Philomena who became pregnant as a teenager in the early 1950s. Her father sent her to a convent where nuns took in unmarried pregnant girls. Harsh conditions were imposed on the girls there. The nuns blamed the girls for their predicament, and most of them seemed completely without compassion. After giving birth, the young mothers had limited access to their children, but it was enough for strong and deep bonds to be formed. However, the babies and toddlers were soon taken from their mothers and put up for adoption. More accurately, they were sold, to generate income for the convent. Philomena’s son was sold to a wealthy American couple when he was three years old and she never saw him again. Finally, as an old woman, she tries to find her son with the help of a journalist.
In the last scene of the movie, Philomena and the journalist confront the now quite elderly and frail nun who was responsible for much of the pain Philomena had suffered. Philomena turned to the nun. “Sister, I forgive you.” The journalist was stunned. He said, “Just like that, you forgive her.” Philomena shot back, “No, not just like that. This was hard for me.” “Well,” the journalist said, “I won’t forgive her. I’m angry.” Philomena looked at him. “That must be exhausting,”
Forgiveness is the hope for a better future by letting go of the past once we learn the lessons we need to make ourselves and our world better. This is how we get to a better world. Let’s go there. Amen and Amen.
*artwork: The Conference of the Birds, by After Attar
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