Forgiveness takes 77 times
Link to video: https://www.facebook.com/stlukesferndale.org/videos/643232986397656
Clare L. Hickman
St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, Ferndale
September 13, 2020—Proper 19A
Matthew 18:21-35
I sometimes wonder whether we try to equate religion with a kind of purity code that’s mostly an avoidance of sexual behaviors, because the things Jesus really emphasizes scare the heck out of us.
Which is to say: Grace and Forgiveness.
Grace and forgiveness sound so quiet and gentle. But when you begin to explore them, when you actually begin to experience them in your life and discover what they ask of you, you realize that they are HUGE, and irrational, and so incredibly … uncontrolled!
Look at the extravagance of the images Jesus uses for them! Today’s story is enough to give an accountant nightmares for a year, as he describes a king who not only loans a servant the equivalent of 10,000 years of labor but then decides to cancel that debt!
It’s a Jubilee image, evoking the biblical ideal that no-one should be indebted for a lifetime, and definitely not across generations. But as striking as that idea is, it isn’t even Jesus’ main point here. His focus is on the way in which the servant, whose life has been transformed by such grace and generosity, then turns around and refuses to extend the same forgiveness to another servant.
He’s talking about what happens to us when we don’t forgive or don’t allow ourselves to be forgiven. Because he knows how transformative it is to be forgiven, knows the generosity that pours out of us when we have truly experienced grace. And he knows that this does not always happen. Knows that we have each had logs pulled out of our eyes and yet we will still turn right around and bitch and moan about the speck in our neighbor’s eye.
We will. Because we are excellent at applying double standards to our own behavior and that of other people. Or because we have incredibly short memories. Or because we can’t even really believe we were forgiven that thing, can’t really forgive ourselves for that thing, and so we start telling ourselves we didn’t really do that thing. Not really.
So the forgiveness didn’t happen. Or it wasn’t that big a deal.
Because really, who can really believe God has that kind of forgiveness in Him? What reasonable God would allow such behavior without unleashing lightning bolts? And what sane person could accept such a God, if that God existed? And don’t even get us started on the kind of suckers who would forgive the kind of debts we hear about in today’s gospel…
Still, we know that sin happens. We have done wrong, and we have been wronged. And on our best days, we are willing to go through the process of confession, repentance and restitution, as hard as that is. We will do the work. Still, at the end, our grip on the wrong might well be just as tight as it was in the beginning.
I’m not sure whether our resistance to the idea of grace and forgiveness is because of how impossible it feels to forgive others, or how impossible it feels to be forgiven (and thus to forgive ourselves). It hardly matters, it turns out, since Jesus is really, really clear that you can’t have one without the other. Even if you forget today’s gospel, it’s right there in the Lord’s Prayer: forgive others as you have been forgiven.
It’s that central. It’s that huge. And it’s that easy.
No, I’m kidding. It’s really difficult. So difficult that it will take 77 times to even begin to get there. Honestly, I think that’s the truth in that exchange between Peter and Jesus. This isn’t about forgiving the same person 77 times for having done the same thing to us 77 times. It’s about the number of times we might think we’ve let something go, might think we’ve moved past it and learned to love and accept that person as a flawed human being just like us … and then discovered that we’ve over-estimated our abilities.
Which is just the flip-side of our own struggles to do better, our own recognition that the sins we confess today are the same ones we’ve confessed and promised and asked for help with for the last 77 (or 70 times seven) times.
As Ann Lamott is fond of saying, our progress on any of this is pretty much clog and slog and scootching on the floor, until finally, we are somehow ready to receive the grace of forgiveness. Which arrives as gift: a gift so huge it might as well be the equivalent of 10,000 years of labor.
Forgiveness is scary. It feels as though we are letting go of the right to fairness, to the need for consequences, to the hope of any kind of restitution. It feels as though we are leaving ourselves open to being hurt again, or to hurting someone again. Frankly, we fear that forgiveness is a get out of jail free card.
But that isn’t what forgiveness is actually about. The healing of relationship and community still requires all the remorse, the atonement, the restitution, and punishment you could desire. But forgiveness actually stands alone. Not as a commandment: that you must forgive (so try harder)! But as a promise that no matter what has happened to you, no matter what you have suffered and how terribly someone has wronged you, that you don’t need to be chained to that pain and anger forever. A promise that no matter what you have done, that you do not need to be chained to that guilt and self-doubt and regret forever. That you can somehow accept that humans make awful mistakes sometimes, and move forward. Painfully. In 77 fits and starts perhaps. But forward.
Forgiveness is not a transaction, in which this plus this will produce this. It is big scary grace that we can only get to by facing all our messy fears and desires. We have to examine our treasured illusions about ourselves and other people—who we are, what we’re capable of, how the world is supposed to work—and be willing to let them die.
We do not go easy into this. Like the servant in the gospel, who cannot take hold of it even after tasting its promise, we often kick and scream and cling to our old ways. To the things that make sense: “I am OWED this!” Letting that idea die feels (indeed) like a kind of death. But the promise is, the Good News of the Kingdom of God is, that it will instead be a release from torment, from the torture that would otherwise take hold of you forever.
Forgiveness is not a transaction. It’s a gift. It’s a mystery. It’s something you’ll have to scootch your way toward. But someday, it will bring about the healing of your soul. May it be so. Amen.