16th Sunday after Pentecost Year 19A – The Rev. Mark S. Winward, MDiv,ThM
Forgiveness After September 11?
Friday, our nation paused to remember the horrific attacks on September 11, 2001. Do you remember how you felt that day, 25 years ago? I do.
Like the rest of the country, I was angry. This was our generation’s Pearl Harbor. And like many of us, a part of me wanted revenge. With that desire for revenge against the extremists who had attacked us came an awakening of my old distrust of Arabs in general, buried since the Gulf War. My head told me that we could not blame an entire people for what these men had done. My heart was having a harder time catching up. I wanted the perpetrators brought to justice, but I also knew that some of what I was feeling went beyond justice.
Somehow, I knew that there was a need to forgive. Forgiveness would not relieve us of the responsibility to protect others or to bring those responsible to justice. But what would it mean to do those things without allowing hatred to take over our lives? Was this too much of a crime to forgive? So how much forgiveness is too much?
How Much Forgiveness Is Enough?
That’s exactly the question Peter brings to Jesus in this passage from Matthew’s Gospel. How often must I forgive someone who sins against me? How about as many as seven times? Peter’s suggestion sounds generous. Most of us would feel we had gone a long way if we forgave the same person for the same offense seven times. At some point, certainly, we’d be entitled to say we had done enough.
But Jesus tells Peter, “Not seven…but seventy-seven times.” Some translations say, “seventy times seven.” Either way, the point is that Peter is asking for a number, and Jesus is calling him to a way of life which no longer keeps count.
Then Jesus tells a story.
A Debt No Lifetime Could Repay
A servant owes his king ten thousand talents, an almost unimaginable amount of money. A single talent represented thousands of days’ wages for an ordinary laborer. Ten thousand talents would be a debt that no amount of work over a human lifetime could repay. The king orders the servant, his family, and his possessions sold. The servant falls on his knees and begs in desperation, “Give me more time and I will pay back everything!” But realistically, more time won’t solve his problem. But then the king, moved with pity, goes far beyond the servant’s pleas. He cancels his astronomical debt and lets him go.
Imagine what that would mean to him. The servant had faced the loss of everything – his home, his family, his freedom – and now he is free. The debt would have dogged him the rest of his life. This is the picture Jesus gives us of God’s mercy. The servant didn’t do anything to earn his freedom. He had absolutely nothing to offer that could make things right. His freedom comes purely from the compassion of the king.
As Jesus’ disciples came to understand his death and resurrection, they would begin to grasp what that mercy meant. Paul writes in Romans that “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” Each of us has broken God’s commandments. Each of us has things we would rather excuse, minimize, or forget. We may be able to make amends for some of the harm we have done, and we should. But we can’t undo the past or put ourselves right with God simply by promising to do better.
God’s goodness demands that he does not dismiss evil or treat the suffering it causes as unimportant. Yet his response to our sin is to come among us in Jesus Christ and bear its cost himself. As Paul writes, “But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” That is why the cross stands at the center of our faith. Our hope rests not in what we do for ourselves but in what God has done for us. Through Christ, we receive forgiveness and the freedom to serve God as he meant us to.
Mercy Received but Not Extended
In Jesus’ story, the king releases the servant from judgment and gives him an unearned chance at a future he could never have bought for himself. The question is: what will the servant do with that freedom? But as soon as the newly freed servant leaves the royal court, he finds another servant who owes him one hundred denarii – about one hundred days’ wages. That is real money. Most people would certainly feel the loss of several months’ pay. Jesus is not saying that what the second servant owes is unimportant. But compared with what the first servant has just been forgiven, it is a pitifully small amount.
The first servant grabs him by the throat and demands his money. His fellow servant falls down on his knees and begs for patience, using almost the same words he himself had spoken before the king. “Give me some more time,” he says, “and I promise to pay you.” Now one would think those words would at least make him pause – given that he has just been on his knees making that same plea. But he refuses to listen and has his fellow servant thrown into prison. When the king hears what has happened, he summons the first servant and confronts him: “Having received such mercy from me,” the king asks, “why couldn’t you have shown the same mercy to your fellow servant?”
And that’s the point of Jesus’ story. The king’s generosity should have changed the way this man saw his own life and the lives of those around him. Instead, he accepts the benefit and continues to treat others as though mercy has no place in their dealings with him. He wants forgiveness for himself while stubbornly insisting on payment from everyone else.
The conclusion is severe. The king holds him accountable for the debt, and Jesus warns his disciples about refusing to forgive from the heart. And Jesus means for us to take that warning seriously. We cannot ask God to deal mercifully with us while deciding that another person is permanently outside the reach of our mercy.
What Forgiveness Does – and Does Not – Mean
Still, there is a difference between struggling to forgive someone and deciding that we will never forgive them. That struggle may be the very place where God is beginning to change us. A person can bring anger and hurt to God, asking for help. That distinction matters because the wounds people carry are real. Some have been betrayed by someone they trusted. Some have been abused. Some have lost people they love through another person’s cruelty or negligence.
Nor does forgiveness mean pretending the wrong never happened or giving someone another opportunity to hurt us. Protection and accountability may still be necessary. Trust may take a long time to rebuild, and a relationship may never be safe to resume. We can forgive someone and still tell the truth about what that person has done.
The Long Work of Forgiveness
I know something of that struggle myself. Before I joined the Navy or met my beloved KC, while I was studying for the priesthood in seminary, my first wife left me for another man. Joining the Navy was a bit like joining the French Foreign Legion – a chance to start a whole new life. Eventually, though, God blessed me with my lovely bride, KC, and I came to realize that God hadn’t changed his call of me to ordained ministry.
I also gradually began to grasp that if I was going to assure others of God’s forgiveness, I needed to face my own unwillingness to forgive. How could I honestly speak about God’s mercy while not extending it in my heart to my former wife? That didn’t mean I could simply wake up one morning with the hurt gone – and it took me seven years to feel I could forgive her. There was no way to change the past, but there was a way for God to change the hold it had on me.
I believe God has used that painful experience to help me understand and care for others. I’ve also been blessed with a wife who loves me and has managed to put up with me for 39 years! After a lot of pain and healing, I can honestly say I have arrived at a place where I can forgive my former wife and pray for the best for her.
Mercy Experienced, Mercy Demonstrated
The need to forgive is not just for priests. Bitterness can become like a cancer poisoning every corner of our lives. Before long, the person who hurt us can occupy more of our thoughts than the people who love us.
If that is where you find yourself, begin with an honest prayer. Tell God you’re angry, that you’re still hurt, and that you don’t know how to begin to forgive. Little by little, as you come to understand the mercy you’ve received, you may find yourself able to offer it to someone else. Mercy experienced will produce mercy demonstrated. That is the change the king expected to see in his servant, and it is the change Jesus calls us to allow in ourselves. Is there someone who wronged you years ago against whom you still hold a grudge?
Is there someone whose name immediately brings back an old anger? Those are places to bring before God. Each time we pray the Lord’s Prayer, we ask God to forgive our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. God’s mercy and our own go hand in hand, so we ask for the grace to grant forgiveness to those who have wronged us as God has immeasurably forgiven us. Such grace cannot help but transform us and flow to a world so badly in need of God’s grace. Amen.