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A Community of Habitual Forgiveness Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis March 21, 2010, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill Genesis 4:17-26 Matthew 18:21-35
Apparently the custom of forgiveness and mutual forbearance among God's people was well established by the time Peter asked Jesus how often he should forgive a member of the church who had sinned against him. It is a custom that continues to this day. As Ellie Wiesel explained in a film on The Power of Forgiveness and from the perspective of a wrong-doer approaching the one who has been wronged, "I must ask up to three times for forgiveness from the person I have wronged. If the person still does not forgive, then the wrong is no longer mine but his." This leads me to believe Peter must have thought himself magnanimous in his preemptive answer. "How often should I forgive, Jesus? As many as seven times?" he said, thinking Jesus would praise him for his merciful bombast. "No," Jesus replies, "not seven times, but I tell you seventy-seven times." In other words, the quality of mercy is never to be strained: forgiveness as practiced by the community of faith has no end. For one not only shaped by Israel's law and holiness code but also steeped in Scripture, the number had to return Peter to the words of Lamech, son of Cain, spoken in the beginning to his wives: "I have killed a man for wounding me, a young man for striking me. If Cain is avenged seven fold, truly Lamech seventy-sevenfold." Lord, how often should I forgive? Seventy-sevenfold says Jesus, surely intending to reverse by his words--and soon by own flesh nailed on a cross--the ancient and honorable practice of revenge. But more, for he says this to Peter, the rock on which the Community of Habitual Forgiveness is to be built, Peter who will soon deny him three times, Peter who was to know himself as a man forgiven seventyfold. Jesus had said the same concerning forgiveness at the beginning of his public ministry when, sermonizing on a mountain, his command reversed the law of Moses and thus countermanded the justice that had underwritten centuries of blood in the taking of "an eye for an eye" with the mercy that counseled the community to "turn the other cheek.walk the second mile.give coat and cloak as well." Moreover, earlier in Matthew's eighteenth chapter Jesus goes so far as to suggest we extract our own eye if it causes us to stumble, cut off our own hand lest it be raised against another, maim ourselves if we fail to show mercy. Then just before our lesson we read of the ominous responsibility to forgive given to the community. "Truly," Jesus says after outlining a process of dealing with a member of the church who has offended the community, "whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven." That is to say, our dealings with one another as the church, as representatives of God's judgment and mercy, will reverberate eternally: in the very being of the Triune God. Therefore, said Jesus, pray like this: forgive us our debts and we forgive our debtors. For two millennia, the church has given lip service to this prayer not only as regards a world full of reprobates but in relation to one another. So used are we to retributive justice, to the retribution that justifies an eye for an eye, we cannot fathom what a community of habitual forgiveness might look like. So accustomed has the church become to bowing down before the God who hates the same people we do, that we cannot conceive of a realm where God's mercy is from everlasting to everlasting. Jesus knew, of course, that short of metanoia.short of a complete reversal of our human existence before God.short of the repentance that is the graceful gift of our redemption rather than a willed act of moral rectitude, will we ever grasp the mercy that has grasped us in Jesus Christ nor will we show that mercy to one another. So Jesus follows his outrageous command to forgive seventy-seven times with a confounding parable about debts and debtors that invites us to imagine the enormity of forgiveness we have been given even as the same parable confirms our dwelling in the narrow world of righteous revenge. Again as when you heard this parable a moment ago, notice the characters with whom you identify. There is a king who is owed money by his slave. This, in and of itself, is an outrageous imbalance of power, the imbalance of power that has been the premise of religious sacrifice since the beginning of time. Human beings are slaves who owe the all-powerful deity a debt they cannot pay. The number of ten thousand talents is more than astronomical, a talent being fifteen years' wages. Even the price of the slave's wife and children and possessions would not be sufficient to cancel the debt. In a word, the servant owes the king his life-a premise that we who have graciously been given our lives by God can begin to understand. "Tonight your soul is required of you" roared God's voice in another parable before the bursting barns of the rich fool. Rich in things and poor in soul, we come to the throne of judgment and of grace as beggars. Likewise, the slave's only recourse is the king's mercy. He falls down in worship before the king, begs him for patience and makes an absurd promise to repay everything. To the astonishment of all who are listening, on the spot, the king forgives his debt completely. Can you comprehend the enormity of the king's forgiveness? Can you imagine how your life would be transformed if suddenly, to stay with the financial metaphor, your mortgage was cancelled, your college loan forgiven, your credit cards paid off and your hospital bills covered for life. Well, maybe not the latter! That would be socialism ?. Or imagine, even more unimaginably, that every person you had wronged, every lie you had told, every hurt you had caused, every opportunity to do the truth you had missed because you were so obsessed with yourself, your reputation, your advancement, your own righteousness, imagine that you were given the chance to begin again from scratch, the slate wiped clean, your broken self reunited with every other self who had forgiven you at great cost and been forgiven at great cost. Would this not become a community of the forgiven who now make it a habit to forgive one another? But the forgiven slave, instead of paying it forward, immediately goes after his fellow slave, seizes him by the throat and while in the process of choking him demands he be paid the one hundred denarii (a hundred days of wages) he is owed. The debtor pleads for mercy to no avail and is thrown into prison. Now this whole scene has been witnessed by the community of slaves who also must owe the king significant sums of money. Through these bystanders, according to biblical scholar Bernard Scott, we enter the action, "the fellow-servants [being] the first characters to share the reader's perspective. Because of [our] shared indignation," he says, "[we] identify with the group of fellow servants, who return to the king seeking justice. [But w]hat commonly goes unnoticed," says Scott, "is that the fellow-servants themselves do not forgive, nor do they follow the instructions given [by Jesus to Peter in the preceding verses]. By seeking justice with the fellow-servants, the reader becomes entangled in the story and implicated in a non-forgiving attitude that ultimately becomes problematic." So with his listeners still inhabiting the ancient plot that is marked by retribution rather than redemption, Jesus continues the story. The indignant fellow-slaves along with the readers rush to tell the king what they have just witnessed so that justice will be done, so that the king will enforce the eye-for-an-eye world they and we know best. "Should you not have had mercy on your fellow slave," the king asks, "as I have had mercy on you?" "You're damned right!" we cry, not thinking that one day we also will be called to settle our accounts. Again says Scott, "By identifying with the fellow servants in reporting the [unforgiving] servant, the reader bears with them responsibility for unleashing the king's wrath." In anger, says Jesus-or maybe says Matthew--the king hands the servant over to be tortured until his debt is paid. That is, he hands him over to be tortured eternally because the debt cannot be paid: it can only be forgiven. Matthew is said to have added the last stinging sentence in an effort to impress upon the early church the ultimate significance of their forgiveness: if you do not forgive your brother or sister from the heart, he has Jesus say, so my heavenly Father will not forgive you. Who can stand? No one save the one who is telling the story, the innocent victim who is present to us as forgiveness, the slain brother whose blood calls out from the ground, now not to incite vengeance but to reveal the depth of God's mercy. Jesus' words will only begin to make sense, writes theologian James Allison "when we speak of the human story in its working out starting from the resurrection." We live in what Allison calls "the time of Abel. The time in which the innocent victim is made present to us as forgiveness.." The Christian faith takes root, says Allison, "in the return of Abel as forgiveness for Cain, and the return of Abel not only as a decree of forgiveness for Cain, but as an insistent presence which gives Cain time to recover his story..[It will be] the story of one who can look into his brother's eyes neither with pride nor with shame. He will look instead with the gratitude of a man who has received himself back at the hands of the one he himself killed." I thought this morning's proclamation was going to be about the things we do, the etiquette we practice, the behavior we build into our common life that forms us more and more into a community that habitually forgives as we are forgiven. Instead I know only him who continually forgives us for not being this community and so who is made present to us at the font and table, on the pew and in the loft, down the avenue where we see him hungry and across the sea where we meet him homeless in a Haitian hut, with our children just beginning and our parents coming to the end, in the moment of birth and at the hour of our death he comes to us as forgiveness and, little by little, reveals to us the realm where mercy is not strained. Thanks be to God. |