Forgiveness

Forgiveness

Then Peter came to Jesus and asked, "Lord, how many times should I forgive my brother when he sins against met? Up to seven times? Jesus answered, "I tell you not seven times, but seventy-seven times. Therefore, the kingdom of heaven is like a king who wanted to settle accounts with his servants. As he began his settlement, a man who owed him ten thousand talents was brought to him. Since he was not able to pay, the master ordered that he and his wife and his children and all that he had be sold to repay the debt. The servant fell on his knees before him, 'Be patient with me,' he begged, 'and I will pay back everything.' The servant's master took pity on him ,canceled the debt and let him go. But when that servant went out, he found one of his fellow servants who owed him one hundred denarii. He grabbed him and began to choke him. 'Pay back what you owe me!' he demanded. His fellow servant fell down to his knees and begged him, 'Be patient with me, and I will pay you back.' But he refused. Instead he went off and had the man thrown into prison until he could pay the debt. When the other servants saw what had happened, they were greatly distressed and went and told their master everything that had happened. Then the master called the servant in, 'You wicked servant,' he said, 'I canceled all that debt of yours because you begged me to. Shouldn't you have had mercy on your servant just as I had on you?' In anger his master turned him over to the jailers to be tortured, until he should pay back all he owed. 'This is how my heavenly Father will treat each of you unless you forgive your brother from your heart.' Matt. 18:21-35

In his book, Letters to Malcolm, C.S. Lewis wrote, "Last week in prayer, I discovered, or at least I think I did, that I suddenly was able to forgive someone that I had been trying to forgive for over thirty years." How true.

In Ernest Hemingway’s short story, The Capital of the World, he tells about a young man who had wronged his father and had then run away to the city of Madrid to become a bullfighter. Out of great love and compassion for his son, the father took out an ad in the Madrid newspaper which read, “Paco, meet me at the Hotel Montana, Tuesday at noon. All is forgiven. Papa.” At the time, “Paco” was a pretty common name in Spain. So, when the father got to the hotel, he found 800 young men waiting for their fathers. We all long for forgiveness. We want to be able to forgive, and to be forgiven. But if that’s true, why is it so hard? Well, if it’s any consolation, it wasn't any easier for the first followers of Jesus, either.

In the text, Peter – playing the role of spokesman for the disciples – steps forward and plops the problem of forgiveness right there at Jesus’ feet. Maybe he thinks he’s pushing the outer limits of forgiveness. Maybe he thinks he’s pushing the envelope. But whatever he thinks, he comes to Jesus and says, “Lord, when somebody hoses me, how many times should I allow that to happen before I stop forgiving them? Seven times?” (The Rabbinic teaching of that day said that when someone wronged you, you should forgive them up to three times, and then you could stop forgiving. So, to be on the safe side, or maybe on the pious side, Peter doubles the number and adds one for good measure)

Jesus' answer is startling. “No,” he says. “Not seven times. Seventy-seven times.” Now the literal Greek in the text can be translated either seventy-seven or seventy times seven, which would be 490. But we’re missing the whole point if we think that Jesus was talking about a literal number. What Jesus was talking about is grace.

It’s a mistake if we try to understand forgiveness in a clinical way. Because if we try to understand grace (which is at the heart of forgiveness) by dissecting the law, we’re going to miss it altogether. Grace can best be understood by way of a story, or an example. So, Jesus explains the grace of forgiveness to the disciples by telling them a parable. It’s a simple, straight-forward story that doesn’t require a rocket scientist, biblical scholar, or even a great theologian to understand. And therein lies part of the difficulty.

It’s a story about a king and his servants. You see, this king had loaned his servants some money and it was time to call in the loans. Now, servant A had run up an unbelievable tab, e.g., about $2.25 billion. (Yes, that’s “billion” with a capital “B”) And the point of the parable is that this was such an enormous sum that it would have been impossible for the servant to repay. So, the king chooses to cut his losses and orders Servant A, including his wife and kids, into slavery and puts the servant’s house up for sale.

The servant begs for mercy. He’s trying to buy time, and he’s hoping that the king will cut him a little slack. So, he literally pleads for his life. And then the most unexpected, unbelievable thing happens. The king doesn't just give him a little extra time, or even cut him some slack. He totally forgives the debt. He cancels it in its entirety. The servant and his family are off the auction block. They’re debt-free!

Now, put yourself in that servant's shoes for a minute. How would you feel at that moment? How’d you leave the palace? You’d be ecstatic, right? Like when somebody lets you merge into traffic, aren't you more likely to return the favor to another motorist? You know, pay it forward? But that’s the problem with this servant. After all of that forgiveness, he leaves as if nothing’s happened.

Enter servant B. Servant B owes servant A the princely sum of 100 denarii, or about $6,800.00 by today’s standards. And like a scene right out of The Godfather, servant A puts down his violin case and starts choking servant B saying, “I’m going to break your kneecaps unless you pay up.” Servant B begs for mercy, using the same exact words that servant A used with the king. But this time there’s no mercy. Servant A shows him absolutely no mercy. Instead, he has servant B thrown into debtor's prison until he can work off the debt. Nice guy.

But the hills have eyes. Some of the other servants see what servant A does to servant B, and they get royally ticked and squeal to the king. And for the second time, servant A is called on the king's carpet. But where, once before, the king had gone from loan shark to Mr. Generosity, the king’s pity has changed to anger as he lowers the boom and sends servant A to be tortured in prison.

The story’s over for servants A and B. But it’s not over for Peter. It’s not over for the disciples. And it’s not over for us. Because Jesus says at the conclusion of the parable that “Unless you and I forgive our brothers and sisters from the heart, we are going wind up just like servant A.” You see, this is a parable about us and our relationship with God, and our relationships to each other in terms of forgiveness. And my, how God has forgiven the debt that we’ve run up! It’s a LOT bigger than $2.25 billion. Our sin has run up a tab totaling eternal death and infinite separation from God, i.e., hell. Those are the consequences of the debt we owe.

Yet God (don’t you just love those words?), in his unfathomable love and grace, has canceled our sin debt through the life, death and bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ. He has totally forgiven that debt in its entirety. “I – yes I alone – am the one who blots out your sins for my own sake and will never think of them again.” (Isaiah 43:25) And not only that, but you and I come out on the other side with the gift of eternal life. Talk about grace!

In 1935, Fiorello LaGuardia, then Mayor of New York, visited a night court in the poorest ward of the city. He relieved the judge for the evening and took the bench himself. A case came up where a grandmother had been arrested for stealing bread to feed her grandchildren. LaGuardia said, “You’re guilty, and I’ve got to punish you. Ten dollars or ten days in jail.” And then LaGuardia pulled out a $10 bill from his pocket and threw it in his hat. He then fined everybody in the courtroom for living in a city where grandmothers have to steal bread to feed their grandchildren. They passed the hat and the woman left the courthouse that evening not only having her fine paid, but with $47.50 in her pocket.

Now, don't you think it’s more likely that she left that courtroom in a spirit of forgiveness; a greater probability that she would show mercy to those whom she met? Let’s face it, people are going to do us wrong. And some of them are going to come to us and ask us to forgive them. Granted, some of those people are going to be pretty awful – having done some pretty horrible things to us. And we think that most of them, if not all of them, don't deserve to be forgiven. So, we’re confronted with a choice. Are we going to seize on the pain? Are we going to seize on the pride and withhold forgiveness? If so, Jesus says we’re just like servant A, and we’re going to wind up in prison – a prison of anger, hatred, depression and guilt. And it’s a prison that we build ourselves.

God really does have this obsessive thing about forgiveness. So much so that he requires it. He orders it. And just like any other mandate in Scripture, forgiveness is primarily commanded for our own good. Because God knows. He knows that you and I will never really be healed; we will never really move toward wholeness; we will never really get on with our lives until we are able to let go of the resentment; until we can give up gaining revenge and forgive. Forgiveness is not a feeling; it’s a choice.

But what God orders, the Holy Spirit empowers. The mistake we make a lot of times is that we look at who the person is who’s wronged us and what they’ve done. But this parable reminds us that that’s a mistake. When we’ve been wronged, we need to look at who God is and what He’s done for us. “OK, so how far do I have to go with this forgiveness thing?” I don’t know. How far has God gone with you? “But aren’t there limits for crying out loud?” I don’t know. What are the limits to God's grace? You see, it’s all about mercy and grace, and grace says, “I won't give him what he deserves; I will forgive him.”

In fact, this forgiveness thing is so important that it could permanently ruin the “Lord's Prayer” for you. Go to Matthew 6, and look at verse 12. Right in the middle of the Lord's Prayer is a phrase that you and I, if we’re not careful, mindlessly pray when we say it: "Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors." But have you honestly thought about what you’re asking God to do there? In fact, by the time we get to verse 12 we just want to go silent, or maybe mumble hoping that God won’t hear. Right?

In his book, What’s So Amazing About Grace, Phillip Yancey tells the story of Simon Wiesenthal, a Nazi prisoner-of-war. One day, as Wiesenthal's prison detail was taking out the trash from the hospital for German casualties, a nurse approached him. “Are you a Jew?” she asked hesitantly, then signaled him to accompany her. Apprehensive, Wiesenthal followed her up a stairway and down a hallway until they reached a dark, musty room where a lone soldier lay, covered in bandages. White gauze completely masked the man's face, with openings cut out for only his mouth, nose and ears. The nurse disappeared, closing the door behind her, to leave the young prisoner alone with the soldier.

The wounded man was an SS officer, and he summoned Wiesenthal so that he could make a deathbed confession. “My name is Karl,” said a raspy voice that came from somewhere behind the bandages. “I must tell you of this horrible deed; tell you because you are a Jew.”

Karl began his story by reminiscing about his Catholic upbringing and his childhood faith, which he lost while in the Hitler Youth Corp. Three times, as Karl tried to tell his story, Wiesenthal pulled away as if to leave. But each time the officer reached out to grab his arm with a white, nearly bloodless hand. He begged him to listen.

In a certain town abandoned by the retreating Russians, Karl's unit stumbled upon a booby-trap that killed 30 of their soldiers. As an act of revenge, the SS rounded up 300 Jews, herded them into a three-story house, doused it with gasoline, and fired grenades at it. Karl and his men encircled the house, their guns drawn to shoot anyone who tried to escape. “I saw a man with a small child in his arms. His clothes were afire. By his side stood a woman, doubtless the mother of the child. With his free hand, the man covered the child's eyes, and then he jumped into the street. Seconds later the woman followed. Then from the other windows fell burning bodies. We shot. Oh God.” Karl went on to describe other atrocities, but he kept circling back to the scene of that young boy with the black hair and dark eyes falling from a building who was used as target practice for the SS rifles.

“I am left here with my guilt,” he concluded at last. “In the last hours of my life, you are with me. I do not know who you are. I know only that you are a Jew, and that is enough. I know that what I have told you is terrible. In the long nights while I have been waiting for death, time and time again, I have longed to talk about it to a Jew and beg forgiveness from him. Only I didn't know whether there were any Jews left. I know what I am asking is almost too much for you, but without your answer I cannot die in peace.”

Simon Wiesenthal, an architect in his early 20's, now a prisoner dressed in a shabby uniform marked with a yellow Star of David, felt the crushing burden of his race bearing down upon him. He stared out the window at the sunlit courtyard. He looked at the eyeless heap of bandages lying in the bed. He watched a fly buzzing around the dying man's body, attracted by the smell. “At last I made up my mind,” Wiesenthal writes. “And without a word I left the room.”

How far are we willing to go with this forgiveness business? We’ve been hurt. We’ve been wounded. In little ways. Sometimes in catastrophic ways. And deep down inside, our gut tells us that there’s got to be a limit. So, we play church because we say we know Jesus, and that we’ve surrendered our lives to him. Really?

Well then, please forgive me. Forgive me for asking, “What difference will playing church make the next time you and I run into servant B?” There’s someone who needs to hear us say, “I forgive you.” Will you? And if so, will you really mean it?

Grace,

Randy