Forgiveness

Matthew 18:21-35

 

As we continue to explore real relationships, it becomes necessary for us to pause and admit that true, deep relationships are never free of conflict. If we truly know and allow ourselves to be known, periods of disagreement, periods of hurt, and periods of wrongdoing are unavoidable. Often, especially in consumer/vendor relationships, when incidents of discord arise, the relationship ends. How then can we enter into real relationships as well as persevere and grow when we are hurt or wronged? Study of Matthew 18 provides us with a look at Biblical forgiveness.

 

First, verse 23 reveals that we cannot forgive others without regard to God. In response to Peter's question, which essentially asks "How many times must I forgive a repeat offender before I become a doormat?," Jesus puts the question in perspective. Jesus takes Peter out of his own head, and provides him with a glimpse from God's perspective. From God's height, the difference between Peter and the offender are equalized. As Volf states, "Forgiveness flounders because I exclude the enemy from the community of humans even as I exclude myself from the community of sinners." Jesus is reminding Peter that we need a vantage point that enables us to see our perpetrators as part of the common community of humans, and also enables us to see ourselves as part of the common community of sinners. We must not think of ourselves as the king, and as others as offenders, but must understand that someone else is king. Before that King, we are all offenders. Without the understanding that the playing field is leveled, that we are all perpetrators, we will never be able to fully forgive.

 

Second, verses 32-33 reveal that we are only able to forgive to the extent, and only to the extent, that we have understood our forgiven-ness. This is important because in a world without God, we do not talk about our need for forgiveness.  In "The Capital of the World," Ernest Hemingway wrote, "Madrid is full of boys named Paco, which is diminutive of the name Francisco, and there is a Madrid joke about a father who came to Madrid and inserted an advertisement in the personal columns of El Liberal which said: ‘Paco meet me at Hotel Montana noon Tuesday all is forgiven Papa' and how a squadron of [the National Guard] had to be called out to disperse the eight hundred young men who answered the advertisement." We have moved from this awareness that we need to be forgiven, to an assumption that wrongdoings are always the fault of someone else. We have become a culture of victims, a culture of people who lay the blame elsewhere. In this culture that relies so heavily on therapy, we must continually affirm our own "okay-ness."  We must continually look to others as the reason why bad things happen. Jesus counters this self-aggrandizing mentality, and says that the path to forgiving is recognizing our own debilitating need for forgiveness. Like all of the young men who responded to the personal add in Hemingway's quotation, we must maintain an understanding of our own need to be forgiven. Individuals who have seriously wronged someone else and have had to seek forgiveness tend to be much more willing to forgive. Often those who have been "good" and "moral" find it more difficult to truly forgive because they have never felt the freedom of being forgiven. In this parable, the servant has been forgiven of his debt of 10,000 talents ($2.5 billion). He then fails to forgive the debt of 100 denarii (1/600,000^th of 10,000 talents) his own servant owes him, because he fails to recognize how greatly he himself was forgiven.

 

Finally, the way in which we forgive others reveals how we think God forgives us. Peter asks if we should forgive seven times thinking this stretches human moral ability. Jesus, however, says Peter's very question reveals that he has not seen and tasted God's manner of forgiveness. For Peter, even stating "seven times" shows that he is keeping track of wrongdoings.  

 

How do you forgive?  Do you harbor resentment?  Do you simply never trust anyone but yourself?  Do you make people pay for how they have wronged you?  Do you get your pound of flesh?  Do you give them the cold shoulder? Does God related to us in any of these ways?

 

How does God really forgive? Verses 34-35 can be a bit troubling. After reading these verses, the irreligious person throws out the entire passage. The religious person reads this and pronounces fire and brimstone. The Christian reads this and sees Christ. What do these verses say? The one who did not show mercy will be turned over to the jailers and tortured until he pays back all he owes. If we fast-forward to the end of Matthew, what do we discover? We find Jesus, turned over to the jailers.  We see Jesus brutally tortured until he paid back all we owed. And yet, in the midst of the insult, injury, wrongdoing, injustice, Jesus did not utter curses. He did not pronounce judgment He did not vow revenge.  Instead, Jesus said "Father, forgive them they know not what they do." He forgave his brother from his heart. That is how God forgives. The extent to which that becomes real to you, a living breathing reality, is the extent to which you will find that the call to forgive seventy times seven times is, of course, the only natural response.

 

 

C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

Christianity does not want us to reduce by one atom the hatred we feel for cruelty and treachery.  We ought to hate them ... But it does want us to hate them in the same way in which we hate things in ourselves: being sorry that the man should have done such things, and hoping, if it is anyway possible, that somehow, sometime, somewhere, he can be cured and made human again.