Grit

Propers: The Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost (Lectionary 27), A.D. 2019 C

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for you know his sins are great.

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

Difficult Gospel today. Rather perplexing, taken out of context. It helps, I think, to add the verse before.

“If the same person sins against you seven times a day,” sayeth the Lord, “and yet turns back to you seven times and says, ‘I repent,’ you must forgive them.” To which the disciples reply, “Increase our faith!”—which is another way of saying, “Nope. Can’t do that. If you want us to do that, you’ve got to put something in us that’ll get the job done. Because we cannot forgive so much on our own.”

In some ways it’s a very humorous exchange, in that it is so surprisingly, refreshingly human. “Forgive the same person seven times a day,” Christ proclaims, and the Apostles respond, “Um—we’re gonna need some help with that.” Because of course they are. We all would. We all do! How do you forgive someone over and over again? How do you let go of offense, of wrongs, of righteous indignation? How do we relinquish claims to justice we think that we are owed?

And Jesus, with some weariness, I imagine, tells them: “If you but had faith the size of a mustard seed, you could say to this mulberry tree, ‘Be uprooted and planted in the sea,’ and it would obey you.” Now there’s an image for you. As a kid I used to read a lot of sci-fi, and when I first heard this in Church about mustard seeds and mulberry trees, I took it rather literally—as though, if we could only genetically engineer people with perfect faith, they could then toss forests around with their minds via telekinesis, like the X-Men.

But of course that’s not what Jesus is getting at. Quite the opposite, in fact. Faith cannot be reduced to magic or even miracles. Nor can it be quantified, as though we could just pour it into you, top it off, so that now forgiveness comes effortlessly, automatically. “Lord, increase our faith! Then we’ll forgive. Honest.”

And as if this weren’t all convoluted enough, Jesus then launches into this little ditty: “Do you thank a slave for doing what was commanded? So you also, when you have done all that you were ordered to do, say, ‘We are unworthy slaves; we have done only what we ought to have done.’” Now, this is jarring for a few reasons, not the least of which being that our context is so far removed from Jesus’ own, 2000 years ago and half a world away. Slaves were a dime a dozen in the Roman Empire.

But we should not discount Jesus’ shock value. He often uses provocative, jarring language to shake us from our complacency so we may see the world anew.

His point, so far as it appears to me, is that forgiveness is not some superhuman feat which must be trumpeted and announced in the streets. It does not take special magic or miracles beyond the common life of the believers. It simply takes grit. Christians are to forgive because we are commanded to forgive, and faith consists ultimately in simple obedience. “Why do you call me, ‘Lord, Lord,’” Jesus states elsewhere, “yet you do not do the things I say?”

The great author and minister George MacDonald scoffed at the idea that faith could be limited to intellectual affirmation of certain propositions—as though we could simply nod along to the Apostles’ Creed or the Small Catechism and thereby claim to have faith. “Instead of asking yourself whether you believe or not,” wrote MacDonald, “ask yourself whether you have this day done one thing because He said, ‘Do it,’ or once abstained because He said, ‘Do not do it.’ It is simply absurd to say you believe, or even want to believe, in Him, if you do not do anything He tells you.”

In Christianity, the extraordinary lies hidden, wrapped, buried in the ordinary, as plain and simple as a mustard seed. We forgive because we follow the Christ who first forgave us, period. No special magic required, no extra faith ladled out. Bitterness and woundedness do not fantastically evaporate, of course—not for mere mortals such as we—but we can, indeed we must, relinquish our claims to retribution and revenge. We must forgive in fact if not in feeling.

For truly it is through these simple, workaday expressions of faith that true wonders occur. There is nothing plainer than a mustard seed, after all, just a tiny smidge of a thing. Yet that seed contains within it a surprisingly virile plant that not only grows into a rather large bush—veritably a tree—but also spreads enthusiastically from field to field despite all efforts to control or contain it.

We have seen such seeds bear fruit in surprising and breathtaking ways. More than a decade ago, back in Pennsylvania, a mentally troubled man murdered several children at an Amish elementary school. It was a shocking, horrifying tragedy. And that night—that very night!—the parents of those Amish children visited the parents of the man who had killed them, and embraced them in forgiveness and shared mourning. It was astonishing. Humbling. The news couldn’t figure out what to say. What could there be to say? Eternity had broken into time.

More recently, we’ve seen the trial of an off-duty policewoman who walked into the wrong apartment and shot the man who lived there, in his own home, thinking that he was an intruder in hers. How does that happen? Yet at her sentencing, the victim’s 18-year-old brother embraced the woman, in the court, forgave her for killing his brother, and offered her the life-giving words of Jesus Christ our Lord. And the video of that has been on social media ever since.

For all the world’s weariness and wariness, for all the huckster preachers and judgmental fundamentalists, for all the sarcastic pop-atheism that our society so fluently speaks, that witness—of people forgiving the unforgivable because Jesus taught them to—that witness does more for the furtherance of God’s Kingdom on this earth than all the Crystal Cathedrals and Joel Osteen books in the world. And there is absolutely nothing that can be said against it, because it is pure beauty, pure truth, pure grace.

I’m not saying it’s easy. It’s not supposed to be easy. But this is the Way of Christ. It is narrow and treacherous. There are crosses to be carried, and seeds to scatter profligately along the path. But it leads to life eternal—not only for us, but for all around us, for all the world! Christ has called us forth to die, that we may rise anew.

So forgive whenever someone asks. Serve wherever the opportunity arises. Make these things not once in a while, blow-the-shofar important deals, but make this your everyday life: obedience, faith, forgiveness, serving, healing, loving, all for Christ, all in Christ, all by Christ’s Spirit. You do that, and the tiniest little thing you do for Jesus, like the tiniest little mustard seed, has astonishing potential to transform the world into the Kingdom of God.

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