A Wicked Forgiveness

Propers: The Fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost (Lectionary 24), A.D. 2020 A

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.

You have to be careful with forgiveness. Forgiveness is easy to abuse.

In our culture we have this ridiculous phrase: “Forgive and forget!” We imagine that in order to forgive someone for having wronged us, we must pretend as though the initial offense did not occur, like it didn’t happen. It’s a do-over, in other words, a sort of voluntary amnesia whereby I pretend, and you pretend, that nothing bad ever happened between us. There was no conflict. And this we call forgiveness—or, perhaps more accurately, a cover-up.

Of course this is impossible. We cannot make ourselves forget. We cannot make the injury magically disappear. Indeed, to pretend that nothing happened is itself a form of lying, both to ourselves and to the world at large, and that can’t be right. There is no love without truth, after all, and no truth without love. When Jesus commands us to forgive our brother or sister from our heart, would He command us to lie?

The other fishy thing about this whole notion of forgive-and-forget is that it’s almost always used by the powerful against the vulnerable. A husband betrays his wife, and when he’s found out, the onus is put upon her to forgive him—otherwise she’s the one who’s being unchristian, right? Shame on her.

Likewise the wealthy and the powerful get bailed out all the time—“too big to fail.” But God help us if we forgive the poor their debts. Then we’re creating dependency.

And so forgiveness, or at least this notion of forgiveness, has become anathema to those in our society who rightly demand justice. They see forgiveness—mercy, grace—as a get-out-of-jail-free card played by those in power to weasel out of responsibility for their actions. They can sin without consequence.

And so in response we have the rise of “cancel culture.” Old sins are dredged up from the abyss of Twitter feeds past and paraded in public for all to see. And then the offender is cancelled, removed from public discourse, rejected by society. It’s how we shun people in the information age.

Now, bringing sins to light is good. But without a mechanism for mercy, a ritual or sacrament of absolution, there is no avenue for healing. And so public life continues to fracture into progressively smaller and more self-righteous groups, little tribes defined by the sins of others. And this dysfunction permeates our society, nowhere more visible than in our politics.

We have then a false dichotomy between justice and mercy, between holding people accountable for their sins and declaring their forgiveness so that healing may occur. It’s a classic Catch-22: damned if you don’t, damned if you do. And our only escape from this dilemma of our own making is to go back and reclaim a biblical understanding of forgiveness: what it is, and what is isn’t.

Forgiveness doesn’t mean forgive-and-forget. Forgiveness doesn’t mean that the rich and the powerful and the strong get away with murder. Forgiveness can never be an excuse for doubling up abuse by shifting responsibility and blaming the victim. No. In the Bible, forgiveness and vengeance are two sides of the same coin. Vengeance, we know, is a force too powerful, too destructive, to be entrusted into mortal hands alone. “Vengeance is mine,” sayeth the Lord. Not ours.

Forgiveness is nothing more, and nothing less, than relinquishing our claim to vengeance.

When you forgive someone, biblically, you are not saying that the wrong did not occur. You are not saying that you agree to a sort of voluntary amnesia. Rather, what you are saying is that the wrong has been acknowledged, the sin has been exposed, and thus the relationship can now move forward together. That doesn’t mean that the relationship will necessarily look the same. It may well need to be renegotiated. It might even have to be crucified and resurrected as something entirely new. We needn’t pretend as though everything were okay.

It may well be that the only way for you to forgive—the only way to move forward—is to let go and walk away, trusting that what cannot be healed in this lifetime will surely be restored in the Resurrection at the end of the age. This too is a type of healing. This too is a form of forgiveness. “Let go and let God” does indeed sound trite. But it’s a heck of a lot better than hanging onto hatred, however deserved, for the rest of your earthly life.

That sort of bitterness becomes a canker, a wound that refuses to heal. Left unattended, taken too far, our thirst for vengeance can twist us into something no longer fully human. It eats away our soul. Forgiveness is the way that God sets us free. We let go of forgive-and-forget, that we may cleave instead to truth and reconciliation.

When we pray in the Lord’s Prayer, “Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors,” “Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us,” this cannot be a request that God’s forgiveness mirror our own. That would be a horror. Rather, we must pray that our forgiveness mirrors God’s: that when we cannot let go, when we cannot forgive, when the wound is just too deep, then we must invoke the Holy Spirit of the Almighty to dwell within us, to intercede for us, to burn up in His all-consuming fire the bitter hardness of the hatred in our hearts.

Forgive us, Lord, and give us the power to forgive others: the power to relinquish our claims upon vengeance; to let go of old grudges; to walk away from dysfunction that serves no purpose other than to spiral us all together straight into hell. And this forgiveness, true forgiveness, entails honesty, entails openness, entails justice. More than that, it entails empowerment and dignity and mutual respect. Never can the mercies of God be misused as a weapon to inflict guilt upon the vulnerable. That much at least should be clear in the parable that we read today.

We started this morning with a Baptism, with God’s ultimate act of forgiveness. When that little girl was brought to those waters, she was joined, forever, to Christ’s own death, already died for her, and to Christ’s own eternal life, already begun. He didn’t just forgive the sins she’d already committed—because honestly, whatever our understanding of Original Sin, how wicked could a beautiful baby girl truly be?

No. Christ promised to forgive all of her sins, past, present, and future, forever! In Baptism, Jesus promises that He is yours, and you are His, period. Come what may, come hell or high water, as surely as that water is wet, the promises of Christ are secure. You will always be forgiven in the waters of your Baptism. You will always already be forgiven whenever we return to Jesus Christ our Lord.

And that’s a good thing too. Because you and me? We’re sinners. Otherwise Jesus wouldn’t have bothered to call us—for the healthy have no need of a physician. And when you gather together a body of sinners, guess what? We sin. Every day, in every way, you and I make choices big and small that separate us from God’s loving will for all His Creation that we have life and have it in abundance.

Think about it. Each Sunday, we start off with Confession and Absolution, a return to our Baptism. We confess every week because we sin every week—and by God, Christ absolves us every week. We really are sinners and we really are forgiven. And then 30 minutes later, halfway through the same single hour of worship, we Pass the Peace, the sign of reconciliation, which is again forgiveness: forgiveness poured out into us in our Baptism, that we may pour it out upon all those around us.

Twice in an hour, we need to be forgiven by God and by our brothers and sisters. And twice in an hour, every hour, we are forgiven from God’s own heart. I cannot stress enough the power that this gives us, the liberation that God grants us. The power to let go. The power to walk away. The power to renounce vengeance and claim justice, claim healing, claim a future that will not be defined by our past. And this power, this promise, this forgiveness from on high is irrevocable.

There will be consequences for sin, yes. In God, mercy and justice are not opposites, but one and the same Truth. Yet come what may, never will God abandon you. Never will Christ fail you. Never will the Holy Spirit leave you orphaned or alone. You are God’s and He is yours forever. And you’re just going to have to deal with that.

My old Confessions professor used to say that if you were to die tomorrow and find yourself standing before God’s Throne, and God were to say to you, “You wicked, vile sinner! You deserve to burn in hell forever for your crimes!”—then you can raise up your Baptism like a shield and proclaim with utter defiance, “You know what, God? You’re right. But that’s tough! Because you promised, and God does not break promises!”

Such, dear Christians, is the power of your Baptism.

Such is the forgiveness that will raise this whole world up from the dead.

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