The Limits of Forgiveness

Propers: The Fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost (Lectionary 24), A.D. 2017 A

Homily:

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

The Parable of the Unforgiving Servant speaks to us in terms that we can understand: debt.

A great king seeks to settle accounts with his servants, his bondsmen, one of whom owes him some 10,000 talents. Now, this is a ludicrous sum. A talent, in today’s money, would be somewhere in the neighborhood of one and a quarter million dollars. And this guy owes 10,000 of them. We’re talking billions.

And so the king rightly seeks to punish him, and to recoup the loss. So he orders that the servant be sold into someone else’s servitude, along with his family, and that all his property and possessions—which one would assume to be extensive—be liquidated to pay off the debt. The servant, who is either an inveterate embezzler or criminally incompetent, throws himself on the mercy of the court. “Have patience with me,” he cries, “and I will pay you everything that I owe!”

And the king, out of pity, releases the servant and forgives him the debt. Note that the king does not simply give the servant more time to repay it, as requested. Rather, he forgives the entire amount, purely out of mercy, purely out of grace. Such a magnanimous lord! Foolishly so, some might say.

And then the servant, forgiven his billions, goes out into the wide world and happens across a fellow servant who owes him 100 denarii. Now, a denarius is a laborer’s daily wage. So this second servant owes three months’ minimum wage to the fellow who was just forgiven a dozen billion dollars. “Pay what you owe!” says the first to the second, and his fellow bondsman quotes back to him his own words: “Have patience with me, and I will pay you!” But the wicked servant has no pity on the poor debtor, and has him thrown into prison until the full amount is repaid.

Of course, news of this rapidly gets back to the king, who is doubly outraged by the injustice and public shame of it all. “You wicked slave!” he roars. “I forgave you all that debt because you pleaded with me, and you could not have mercy on your fellow slave as I had mercy on you?” And in anger, the king throws the wicked servant into prison, to be tortured, until he can pay back 10,000 talents in full. For by your standard of measure, so shall it be measured unto you.

The Parable of the Unforgiving Servant uses hyperbole—billions and billions!—to illustrate the magnanimity, the ridiculous superabundance, of God’s mercy toward us. We owe an unpayable debt, the lovelessness we have shown toward God and our neighbor, yet we are forgiven ten thousand million times over, purely out of mercy, purely out of love.

Justice and mercy both demand of us, then, that we pass this love on, that we let it flow out from us into all the world around us. I mean, what sort of sick, twisted Wall Street mogul, having just been forgiven twelve and a half billion dollars, then goes out and assaults a poor, vulnerable man to extract from him a few thousand? If that’s the world you want, Jesus says, then that’s the world you will be given. And woe unto you, when you receive what you demand.

So, how often are we to forgive a member of the Church? As many as seven times? Not seven times, I tell you, but seventy-seven times! We are to forgive as we have been forgiven, without reckoning, without limit, without end. Forgive us our sins, Lord, as we forgive those who sin against us.

Which is all well and good, I suppose, when we’re talking about money. But what about when we’re speaking of something a bit more painful? What about when someone has been the victim of an assault? What if the victimizer, the perpetrator, the abuser, has shown neither remorse nor repentance, and might not even be known? What happens then—when we are still raw—and we are told we must forgive?

I cannot help but think back to several years ago, in Pennsylvania, when a madman went on a rampage at an Amish elementary school. The parents of those children, that very night, went to the parents of the killer, and publicly forgave them. It was an astonishingly powerful witness to the Christian faith, humbling to all who watched. I certainly don’t think I would have been able to do it, if it were my child at that school.

But then—the madman’s parents weren’t the killers, were they? They were just as shocked and mournful and wracked by grief as the Amish themselves. Perhaps even more so. They cried out for that forgiveness. They needed the grace of God.

It is an agonizing thing to demand that a victim, still suffering, forgive an unrepentant assailant. And this is not a hypothetical situation. A few years ago, a woman named Maria Mayo wrote a book called The Limits of Forgiveness, after her experience of being assaulted and hospitalized by a home invader. Her attacker was never identified, and remains anonymous to this day. And while she was yet in her hospital bed, well-meaning Christians kept telling her that she would never be whole, never be healed, until she forgave her attacker. This she called the “cruel torture” of unconditional forgiveness.

Our modern notions of therapeutic forgiveness are not biblical. We have a hard time seeing this, because we always think in terms of the individual, while the Bible always speaks in terms of the community, the family, the people of God. Nowhere does the Bible say that it’s on you, the victim, to forgive an unrepentant attacker. Forgiveness in the Bible is always tied to reconciliation, to the community. And that necessitates repentance.

A far more biblical model of forgiveness may be found in the Truth and Reconciliation Committees in South Africa and other nations healing from horrific wounds. There the guilty confess their crimes—they speak the truth, openly and publicly, admit to the wrong—and then they are forgiven. Then they are readmitted to the greater community of the nation. And the people can now go forward together.

I’m not saying that God wishes us to be vengeful, or to hold a grudge. But there is no true mercy without justice, and no true justice without mercy. Any sin can be forgiven. Any rift can be healed. But you cannot forgive one who seeks no reconciliation, no repentance, no continued life together.

Because that’s what forgiveness is! Forgiveness means living in community together. It doesn’t mean that we forget the wrong has occurred, and it certainly doesn’t mean that we pretend it never happened. What it means is that we will go forward from this point together. We are given the gift of new life—but it has to be shared.

Forgiveness, dear Christians, is a mercy. It requires humility and selflessness and grace. We would find it impossible had God in Christ Jesus not first forgiven us. But precisely because forgiveness is a mercy, it cannot be cruel. It cannot put disproportionate pressure on the victim. It must speak the truth.

Confess the sin, repent, and beg forgiveness. All else is psychobabble.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.