Is forgiveness more important than loyalty?
Clare L. Hickman
St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, Ferndale
February 20, 2022—Epiphany 7C
Luke 4:14-21
While re-watching Mad Men recently, I heard a question that stopped me cold. In this particular episode, our 1960s advertising agency is hoping to win the chance to work with Honda. But one of the firm’s partners, Roger Sterling, fought against the Japanese in World War II, and he is kicking up a major stink at the idea of doing any kind of business with people he still sees as the enemy. After a meeting in which he insults the Japanese executives repeatedly, the office manager lashes into him. But he is unrepentant in the face of her pleading that he let bygones be bygones. Invoking his fallen comrades once again, Roger asks Joan: “Since when is forgiveness a better quality than loyalty?”[1]
Since when indeed. Especially in the context of this advertising agency, whose concern is clearly less about the value of forgiveness and more about the value of the account and their willingness to work with anyone, as long as it’s profitable.
But today’s gospel demands that we (as Christians) take Roger’s question more seriously. Because the words of Jesus insist on the primacy of forgiveness; that forgiveness is, in fact, one of the defining qualities of the kingdom.
Love your enemies, he says, and then offers some specifics: when someone hates you, you should do good things for them; when someone strikes you, turn the other cheek; and if someone takes your cloak, maybe you should give them your shirt as well.
Everything Jesus says here turns what feels right and natural on its head. And like Roger, most of us resist the heck out of these ideas. At the very least, we’d like to let them brush right past us, and then continue to let our gut guide us in situations like those.
But our guts aren’t always a particularly reliable guide. They’re trained by a wide variety of influences, for both good and ill. Which means that those of us who wish to follow Jesus would do better to stop and let these words of Jesus work within us, asking questions of the values that come to us more easily (like loyalty, perhaps), seeing where He is pushing us to grow.
Jesus says Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, be actively kind to those who have abused you. And Roger speaks up for the parts of us that say No Way. He invokes loyalty in his stand against the call to forgiveness, and this sermon will do you no favors if it argues that loyalty is not a good thing. I cannot simply discard the fact that Roger put his life in the hands of those men, and saw them die, and needs to honor that now. Because we humans instinctively fight for those we love, for those who have stood at our side, and worked and sacrificed and even died to protect us. Having people do that for us moves us to do the same in return.
Roger wants to fight for his fellow soldiers, and it seems to him that working with a Japanese company would somehow reward the enemy. Would suggest that it was okay they killed all those Americans. Would feel like he’s letting them off the hook. And he doesn’t want to let them off the hook. The pain and the loss still burn, and the desire for revenge lives on. I mean, can you blame him?
And yet, Jesus asks us to love our enemies. This commandment is the blazing, brilliant heart of the Kingdom of God, whose values upend all that we have come to know, and when God brings it in full it will be a great and glorious thing! But … what does it look like here and now, as it manifests in our very real and broken world? And how are we supposed to get past our gut, which fears that it means we should let our enemies do whatever damage they want to us, with absolutely no consequences?
And while we’re talking about things that complicate our understanding of the value of forgiveness, what about things like the two-year sentence that was handed down on Friday to Kim Potter, the former police officer who was convicted of manslaughter for killing Daunte Wright during a traffic stop? In a different world, that sentence could have been a beautiful demonstration of forgiveness, of the ability to see the difference between malice and a terrible mistake, of a vision of justice in which we can actually balance questions of punishment and rehabilitation. But such a perspective can only be the truth of this once we offer this kind of forgiveness with any kind of equity. Can only be a valid response once I don’t have to ask the question: who is it that receives our forgiveness (our leniency) in this society, and who is it that always seems to get what we call their “just deserts”?
Roger asks about loyalty, and I would argue that he’s asking for all of us. We want to know what to do with this part of us that leaps to protect our own. And Jesus, it seems, doesn’t need us to get rid of that instinct; he just asks us to expand it. Wants our sense of who is “our own” to become broader. Needs us to get beyond “us vs. them” to the realization that we are all connected, grounded in the idea that a world in which we are all thriving, even at a more modest level for some of us, would be the best possible outcome. It would, in fact, be the Kingdom of God.
It doesn’t mean surrendering everything. Doing good for those who hate you doesn’t mean that you have to allow someone to continue abusing you. Letting them abuse you is NOT doing good for them. Stopping the abuse, having them face consequences for the abuse: these are necessary first steps towards any possible healing that might come about for them.
This is also true, I should note, if we are the ones who have been committing the abuse, and doing the damage.
If we want to follow Jesus, he calls us to look beyond our self-interest. Far beyond the instinct to protect and work for the welfare only of those closest to us, to the detriment of anyone else.
This is not an easy thing. Much of the time, it goes against our gut, putting us at odds with the values of our culture. Which is why Jesus warns us over and over that following him will be costly. At its core, the gospel is not a thing that will bring you societal status and respect. It turns EVERYTHING on its head. Love your enemies. Do good to those who hate you. Worry more about the well-being of the person who just took your coat than your own.
It looks like weakness. It looks like foolishness. But it’s not. Christianity is simply a different kind of strength, a different kind of wisdom. And it offers salvation to a world that’s being strangled by the old kind of strength, and the old kind of wisdom.
It’s no soft and simple thing that we’re welcoming Mercer into today. It is a love so fierce that it cannot even stop itself before encompassing our enemies. If we take it seriously, even when our gut says no way, it will change us. And it will save us. He will save us. With his love working in us, may we have the courage for it to be so. Amen.
[1] Roger Sterling to Joan Holloway, Mad Men, Season 4 Episode 5, “The Chrysanthemum and the Sword”