Matthew 18:21-35
21 Then Peter came to Jesus and asked, “Lord, how many times shall I forgive my brother or sister who sins against me? Up to seven times?”
22 Jesus answered, “I tell you, not seven times, but seventy-seven times.[a]
23 “Therefore, the kingdom of heaven is like a king who wanted to settle accounts with his servants. 24 As he began the settlement, a man who owed him ten thousand bags of gold[b] was brought to him. 25 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.
26 “At this the servant fell on his knees before him. ‘Be patient with me,’ he begged, ‘and I will pay back everything.’ 27 The servant’s master took pity on him, canceled the debt and let him go.
28 “But when that servant went out, he found one of his fellow servants who owed him a hundred silver coins.[c] He grabbed him and began to choke him. ‘Pay back what you owe me!’ he demanded.
29 “His fellow servant fell to his knees and begged him, ‘Be patient with me, and I will pay it back.’
30 “But he refused. Instead, he went off and had the man thrown into prison until he could pay the debt. 31 When the other servants saw what had happened, they were outraged and went and told their master everything that had happened.
32 “Then the master called the servant in. ‘You wicked servant,’ he said, ‘I canceled all that debt of yours because you begged me to. 33 Shouldn’t you have had mercy on your fellow servant just as I had on you?’ 34 In anger his master handed him over to the jailers to be tortured, until he should pay back all he owed.
35 “This is how my heavenly Father will treat each of you unless you forgive your brother or sister from your heart.”
It
is the single hardest thing you will ever do in your life.
To forgive someone.
Forgiveness is not easy.
It’s hard.
Oh I know, you are walking in the
grocery store and someone bumps into you.
They look at you and say, “Oh I’m so sorry.”
You look at them and say, “Ah don’t
worry about it.”
You walk away from each other and
never think anything more about it.
That kind of forgiveness is
easy. It’s nothing.
I’m not talking about that.
I’m talking about finding the
strength to forgive someone who has hurt you deeply and profoundly.
How do you do that?
You marry the love of your
life. You make a commitment to that
person. And then one day you find out
that person has not made a commitment to you.
Or at least not kept that commitment.
Your beloved, has been sleeping with another.
How do you forgive that kind of
betrayal?
Someone at work you consider to be a
friend has lied about you. For reasons
you will never understand, your friend has sabotaged you.
How do you forgive that?
You’ve been raped.
You’ve been robbed.
You’ve been fired.
Someone else took credit for your
work.
Someone said something about you
when you were in the 3rd grade and you’ve never forgotten the pain.
Your mother called you fat, or your
father called you lazy, or your best friend in high school stole your
girlfriend 25 years ago.
Whatever – big or small, you have a
grudge.
And forgiving is the hardest thing
you will ever do.
In our New Testament lesson, Peter
comes up to Jesus and asks a question.
“How many times do I have to forgive my brother?”
Now Peter knows that the teachings
of the Rabbis of that time was that three is a good number. Three strikes, you’re out!
It comes not from baseball, but from
the Old Testament book of Amos.
So Peter knows Jesus is always
talking about going the extra mile. So
he suggests not three times, but seven.
“How many times do I have to forgive
my brother? Seven times?”
And Jesus says “no” – let’s make it
77 times.
Or some translations suggest a
mathematical formula – 7 times 70 times.
But the numbers are not important.
What is important is that you are
expected forgive to the extreme. Without
boundaries.
Yep, that’s not going to happen.
We’re human. You can only expect so much from us.
After all, we love the grudges we
hold.
We cherish them dearly.
That insult spoken at a family
gathering years ago. The boss who fired
you. The teacher who gave you a failing
grade. The rude co worker.
Whatever the hurt, forgiveness is
hard, hard work.
It is the hardest thing you will
ever do.
Frederick Buechner in his book of
short essays, Wishful Thinking, addresses anger and has this to say:
Of the 7 deadly sins, anger is possibly the most fun. To lick your
wounds, to smack your lips over grievances long past, to roll over your tongue
the prospect of bitter confrontations still to come, to savor to the last
toothsome morsel both the pain you are given and the pain you are giving
back--in many ways it is a feast fit for a king. The chief drawback is that
what you are wolfing down is yourself. The skeleton at the feast is
you. (Frederick Buechner, Wishful
Thinking p. 117.)
Indeed, Beuchner is right. Holding a grudge and refusing to forgive can
destroy your spirit, and your body.
Just Google the words “holding a
grudge” and add “health problems” and the Internet will show one article after
another from such sources as WebMD and the Mayo Clinic.
Chronic
pain in their back or stomach, arthritis, headaches and heart attacks. Blood pressure rises, diabetic problems
increase.
Well maybe – but knowing that
holding a grudge is unhealthy does not make it any easier to forgive.
We all believe in
forgiveness. But practicing it is so
very difficult.
In a recent nationwide Gallup
poll, 94% of respondents said it was important to forgive, while only 48% said
they usually tried to forgive others. (“Holding a Grudge Can Be Bad for Your
Health” by Mike Fillon, WebMD News).
Katherine M. Piderman, Ph.D., staff chaplain at Mayo Clinic, Rochester , Minn.
People think that to forgive you must forget, but that’s not
true says Piderman. We can’t
forget. We have to remember. We can’t help but remember. The act that hurt or offended you may always
remain a part of your life. You cannot
erase it. In fact, you should not. Our sufferings make us who we are. When we go through difficult and painful
times, we have the potential to become stronger, more mature in our faith and
values. Forgiveness is not forgetting,
but letting go --- of the pain, even
while you remember what happened.
Nor is forgiveness reconciliation. Sometimes the other person does not
repent. Heck, in their opinion they did
nothing wrong. But forgiveness is
letting go --- of your resentment.
Forgiveness also doesn’t mean that you deny the other
person’s responsibility for the pain inflicted upon you.
Forgiving is just letting go --- of the wounds.
During World War II, Eric
Lomax was a signals officer in Singapore British Empire . An overwhelming 80,000 British, Indian and
Australian solders became POWs.
Eric Lomax was one of them.
When it was discovered that he
had taken part in building a radio, Lomax was taken away to be tortured and
interrogated. His pain was
unimaginable.
In the movie based on his
authobiography, THE RAILWAY MAN, it was the arrival of the Allied army that
liberated and saved Lomax’s life.
After the war he went home to
live in apparent peace. But he was not
at peace. He lived with hate and anger
and bitterness.
And then he found that his
interrogator was still alive. Not only
was this Japanese soldier, Nagase, still alive, but strangely he was a docent
giving tours at the former POW prison that had become a museum for tourists.
Lomax traveled half way across
the planet to seek revenge on this man.
He was successful in
restraining his former tormentor. He
treatened to torture him with the same methods once used on the prisoners. He held a knife he brought with which to kill
the man.
But he doesn’t kill him.
Instead he stands on the
bridge of a railroad he and others had been forced to build for the Japanese
army and quietly threw the knife into the river below.
Lomax and Nagase later come face to
face once more.
Both are silent for several
minutes. Then the former Japanese
soldier bows to his former captive.
Finally, the former Japanese solder
says with tears in his eyes. “I am
sorry. So sorry. I don’t want to live that day any more.”
The former captive who had harbored
so much hate for so many years looks at his tormentor and says, “Neither do
I.”
The two break down in tears and
embrace.
Later in his life, Eric Lomax wrote
to the Japanese man, “The war has been over for many years. I have suffered much. But I know you have suffered, too. And you have been most courageous in working
for reconciliation. But I cannot forget
what happened in that prison so many years ago. But I assure you of my total
forgiveness. Sometime the hating has to
stop.”
Such a good example of forgiveness.
It does not come easy.
Forgiving someone may be the most
difficult thing you will ever do in your life.
And sometimes, as it did with Lomax
in THE RAILWAY MAN it takes years.
In the New Testament lesson, Peter asks Jesus how many times he must forgive a brother who sins against him.
As part of his answer, Jesus tells a parable.
A man is in debt up to his eyeballs, and he begs
his master to forgive him.
And the master forgives.
Not only that, but allows the man to continue to
work for him.
In telling this parable, Jesus uses exaggeration
for ironic effect. This man owes his master 10,000 talents – a talent was a
large sum of money.
In his book Antiquities of the Jews, historian Josephus, said
that the total tax revenue for Judea, Idumea, Samaria ,
Galilee , and Perea for one year amounted to
800 talents.
And in the parable, the amount the man owed to the
master was an overwhelming 10,000 talents.
But the master forgives this debt, as big as it is.
What happens in the parable is that the one who is
forgiven then goes to someone who owed him money. Just a tiny bit of money. A mere 100 denarii. Pocket change.
And the man who was forgiven by his master, refuses
to forgive the man who owed him money.
Now, this is not a lesson in economics and debt
relief.
It is a reminder that God has forgiven us.
Not because we deserve it. Not because we earned it. God has forgiven us freely by his love and
grace.
And because of that, we are expected to forgive others.
This parable does not end well. In the parable the master finds out that the
man who was forgiven for this huge debt was himself unforgiving to another for
a small debt. Jesus said, “The master
summoned the man and said to him, “You wicked slave! I forgave you all that
debt because you pleaded with me. Should you not have had mercy on your
fellow slave, as I had mercy on you?’ And in anger his master handed him over to
be tortured until he would pay his entire debt. So my heavenly Father will also do to
every one of you, if you do not forgive your brother or sister from your
heart.”
From your heart!
It’s not enough to live forgiveness and to just restrain
yourself from seeking revenge. You must feel
the forgiveness. From your heart.
Forgiveness like that may well be the most difficult thing
you will ever do.
Many years ago, during the Nazi era of Germany , Corrie
ten Boom, along with her sister and father, were sent to Ravensbruck, a Nazi
concentration camp.
Her sister and father died there, but Corrie was released,
due to a “clerical error.”
After
the war this native of Holland went back to a
defeated Germany
with the message that God forgives. It
was a message she believed that a bitter, bombed-out nation needed to
hear. She often gave her favorite
illustration of God’s forgiveness.
Perhaps because the sea is never far from a Hollander’s mind, she liked
to think that that’s where forgiven sins were thrown.
In many gatherings she gave the familiar speech: ‘When we confess our sins,’ she said, ‘God
casts them into the deepest ocean, gone forever. And even though I cannot find
a Scripture for it, I believe God then places a sign out there that says, ’NO
FISHING ALLOWED.’
One night, as she was giving this familiar story, she
looked out at the faces, and that is when she saw HIM.
He was dressed in a brown hat and an overcoat, but in her
mind she saw him in a blue uniform, wearing a cap with a skull and crossbones.
She remembered this man.
She had seen him when she was in a crowded room with dozens
of other prisoners. There was a pile of
dresses, a pile of shoes, and she and her mother and sister were walking past
him, naked and afraid.
This man she was now looking at was one of the guards at
the concentration camp where her father and sister had died.
And now this man was in front of her.
After she finished the message, he walked up to her and
Corrie ten Boom wondered if he remembered her.
He thrust out his hand and said, “A fine message, Fraulein!
How good it is to know that, as you say, all our sins are at the bottom of the
sea!"
As Corrie ten Boom later told the story, “I, who had spoken
so glibly of forgiveness, fumbled in my pocketbook rather than take that hand.
He would not remember me, of course—how could he remember one prisoner among
those thousands of women? But I remembered him. I was face-to-face with one of
my captors and my blood seemed to freeze.
The former guard continued to speak to her. "You mentioned Ravensbruck in your talk. It just so happens that I was a guard
there."
No, he did not remember Corrie ten Boom.
"But since that time," he went on, "I have
become a Christian. I know that God has forgiven me for the terrible things I
did there, but I would like to hear it from your lips as well.
Fraulein,"—again the hand came out—"will you forgive me?"
And she stood there.
She whose sins had again and again been forgiven—and could not forgive. Her
sister had died in that place.
Corrie ten Boom said, “It could have been many seconds that
he stood there—hand held out—but to me it seemed hours as I wrestled with the
most difficult thing I had ever had to do.
“For I had to do it—I knew that. The message that God
forgives has a prior condition: that we forgive those who have injured us.
"If you do not forgive men their trespasses," Jesus says,
"neither will your Father in heaven forgive your trespasses." And
still I stood there with the coldness clutching my heart. Woodenly, mechanically, I thrust out
my hand into the one stretched out to me. And as I did, an incredible thing
took place. The current started in my shoulder, raced down my arm, sprang into
our joined hands. And then this healing warmth seemed to flood my whole being,
bringing tears to my eyes.
"I forgive you, brother!" I cried. "With all
my heart!"
[Holocaust Victim Forgives Captor, Citation: Corrie Ten
Boom, Tramp for the Lord (Berkley ,
1978), pp. 53-55]
Corrie ten Boom describes forgiveness like letting go
of a bell rope. If you have ever seen a
country church with a bell in the steeple, you will remember that to get the
bell ringing you have to tug for a while.
Once it has begun to ring, you merely maintain the momentum. As long as you keep pulling, the bell keeps
ringing.
Corrie ten Boom says forgiveness is letting go of the
rope. It is just that simple. But when you do so, the bell keeps
ringing. Momentum is still at work. However, if you keep you hands off the rope,
the bell will begin to slow and eventually stop.
It is like that with forgiveness. When you decide to forgive, the old feelings
of unforgiveness may continue to assert themselves. After all, they have lots of momentum. But if you affirm your decision to forgive,
that unforgiving spirit will begin to slow and will eventually be still. Forgiveness is not something you feel, it is
something you do. It is letting go of
the rope of retribution.
It’s
time to let go of the rope.
Copyright
2014, Dr. Maynard Pittendreigh
All rights reserved.
