The thing about forgiveness
Clare L. Hickman
St. Luke’s Episcopal Church
June 11, 2023—Pentecost 5A
Matt 9:9-13,18-26
All of today’s lessons, with their talk of covenant and grace, sin and righteousness, got me thinking (once again) about forgiveness. And that reminded me of something I once heard about, called the Apology Line. During the 80s and early 90s, a man named Allan Bridge used simple record-a-phone technology to offer those who called the opportunity to apologize, anonymously, for things they had done. Other callers could then access those recorded apologies, listen, respond, or leave apologies of their own. Allan Bridge himself would often leave messages of response to those who had called, speaking words of understanding into the prison cell of their pain and guilt.
At its heart, this was not an exercise in voyeurism, though surely some who called to listen to others’ tapes were using it as such. But if you listen to some of the tapes, to the outpourings of sins from the mundane to the heinous, you can hear the brokenness and the yearning of these people. Over and over, whether they are confessing to snapping a friend’s bra strap in school, stealing from stores, or killing someone, they express the hope that talking to the tape will make them feel better. Wounded by their own deeds, sickened by their secrets, they grope out toward healing even as their voices deny any belief that it will come (http://www.apologyproject.com; also This American Life, radio show titled “Apology,” aired 11/5/04).
Now I would imagine that there was some therapeutic benefit to calling up and just speaking these secrets aloud. Breaking silence can, in itself, open the way for healing. But to my ear, most of the callers were looking for something more than an opportunity to speak the truth and hang up: they were searching for forgiveness. A forgiveness they were mightily unsure of receiving. A forgiveness they were not even sure they deserved.
When we make a mess of things, when we hurt someone or destroy something, even if it’s accidental, we sometimes struggle to believe ourselves forgivable. On the other hand, unforgivable can be a lot easier to take hold of. Most of us have done or experienced things that cause so much damage, or scare us so badly, that our imaginations cannot move past them. So we can’t imagine anyone else moving past them either. Not even God.
I thought about that this past week, in the face of the reactions I saw to the death of televangelist and religio-political pundit, Pat Robertson. It is, I will admit, a complicated matter. It feels … uncomfortable to see people rejoice in another person’s death. However, it remains true that his warped and un-Christian preaching caused significant damage, and its effects will most certainly outlive him. He spouted dangerous rhetoric against the LGBTQ+ community, and he played a major role in the rise of a twisted Christian nationalism. His death doesn’t change that, and I don’t think those who have been harmed need to pretend that it has wiped everything clean.
His life’s work, honestly, is just the kind of thing that gets us tangled up in questions of unforgiveability.
So maybe we can sympathize with the religious leaders in today’s gospel. They see this man Jesus, who calls himself a holy man of God, breaking bread with tax-collectors, and they are horrified. Tax-collectors were the lowest of the low. Not only were they collecting taxes from other Jews to give to the foreign, gentile oppressors; they were collecting money that would help finance the construction and upkeep of pagan temples. So they were not only collaborators but blasphemers!
They did real damage. And for Jesus to break bread with them not only sullied his good name, it also suggested that those sinners were being let off the hook somehow. That they weren’t unforgiveable after all…
Jesus, of course, couldn’t care less about his good name. All he wants is to offer healing to anyone who needs it, whether they are wounded in body, heart, or soul. He is here to raise Jairus’ daughter from her death-bed. He is here to relieve the woman from her hemorrhage and bring her back into the community. And he is here to walk the love and mercy of God into all our tangled need to forgive and be forgiven.
Like the religious leaders, we don’t always love that last part. Some damage seems too big to forgive. But the forgiveness Jesus brings does not mean (in this case) that we need to pretend the harm done by Pat Robertson and his theology never happened. It did, and some of us still bear the scars. Anger is a natural and healthy recognition that serious wrong has been done. But then eventually we might want Jesus to walk his holy, healing presence into the midst of all that pain. We might pray for forgiveness to come to us, because it is really so much less bitter and corrosive in the long run. The good news for us is that forgiveness doesn’t have to look like absolution. Doesn’t have to deny the harm that was done. Forgiveness, in many ways, is just the name we give to whatever can heal us of that corrosive anger or fear or resentment. So it can look like a lot of things. For instance, when it comes, forgiveness might simply look like you, embodying Christ’s hands and heart in this world, working to heal others of the kind of damage that was done to you.
The larger work of absolution, which is to say, the healing of the one who has done the damage, lies with God. When it comes to Pat Robertson, as Pastor Lura Groen (Facebook post, June 8, 2023) puts it: Divine Love has him now.
“Pat Robertson,” she suggests, “is being surprised by Love. [And] I do not know if discovering the vastness of God’s love is hell for him, or heaven. Perhaps a little of both. That’s above my pay grade. But Divine Love has him now.”
Depending on how you feel about him, that might feel like just the shocking comeuppance Pat needed, or way better than he deserves. Perhaps a little of both.
And I have to say, that’s a pretty decent summary of the Christian theology of judgment and grace: a shocking comeuppance that’s way better than we deserve. For which we can all be somewhat nervous, and profoundly grateful. May it be so, Amen.