We often have the wrong idea about forgiveness.
In our Gospel lesson, Jesus tells a parable of forgiveness. The parable is set in the Kingdom of Heaven, which is not the afterlife, but it is a time and place, here on earth, where God’s justice is truly done. When the King’s servant, who owed 10,000 talents—a huge sum, like millions of dollars, could not pay his debt and asked for more time, the King forgave the debt completely! But then, the servant was himself owed a hundred denarii—just a few dollars in today’s money—and refused to forgive the debt! The King, learning of this, handed the servant over to be tortured until the entire debt was paid!
Such are the consequences of failing to forgive. When asked by Peter how many times we should forgive, Jesus says seventy-seven times. This is an idiomatic way of saying as many times as we need to. We are always called upon to forgive.
We often act as if we can only forgive someone who has wronged us if they have repented in some way. Forgiveness isn’t easy, because we have been truly wronged and it hurts. Isn’t our hurt, our pain, righteous and just?
This week, we remembered the seventh anniversary of a great wrong—the evil attacks of September 11, 2001. We remembered the victims: those who died, those who were maimed in body or spirit or both, and those whose lives were changed forever by the loss of loved ones.
But we need to remember September 11, 2001, as an event that challenges us to forgive. We aren’t called to forgive for the benefit of the perpetrators of those awful deeds, but for our own.
We pray for this in every service of our church in the Lord’s Prayer: “Forgive us our sins, as we forgive those who sin against us.” Our sins, our debts, are forgiven, only to the extent that we forgive others. Remember the servant, who was forgiven his great debt only as he was willing to forgive a small one.
While it is a good thing when someone who hurts us asks our forgiveness, what if they don’t? Do we hold on to our anger, our pain and say we can’t forgive unless they apologize?
There are many stories of people who will not let anger go, especially when their cause is just. What have they gained with their anger? Sorrow, bitterness, loneliness, physical and mental pain. We believe that when we are hurt we must be compensated. We say, “Don’t get mad, get even!” Sometimes we claim the role of God, who said “Vengeance is mine”—that is God’s—“I will repay.”
After September 11, some felt that we need to take action in reprisal and, to some extent we did, when we invaded Afghanistan. In many ways, that could be justified as removing from power an evil regime that supported the perpetrators. But many of us saw our role as avengers, that we were punishing evil, forgetting that vengeance is God’s role. But, some of bitterness and pain we felt over 9/11 caused us to do things which we can not justify. How do we square some of the things we have done as a nation over the last seven years with the promise in our Baptismal Covenant to “respect the dignity of every person”? Might not some of these misdeeds of our own been avoided had we been willing to forgive?
Does forgiveness mean forgetting what has happened? No. Even when we forgive, we may not forget and perhaps should not forget. But when we begin the healing process—the process of reconciliation—by forgiving, we are reminded that we have already been forgiven ourselves. We need to remember the importance of forgiveness in our lives and not the least, here in St. Christopher’s.
Many years ago, I had the opportunity to see a concrete example of forgiveness that should inspire us. On November 14, 1940, the medieval cathedral in Coventry, England, was destroyed by the German Air Force in a raid that did horrible damage to the city and took many lives. When a new cathedral was built, part of the shell of the old cathedral was left standing. Behind the altar, on the ruined wall was placed the words: “Father Forgive”. If out of the pain and grief of that war, those people could forgive that debt of 10,000 talents, how can we do less and not forgive that debt of a hundred denarii?
No comments:
Post a Comment