Strength to Forgive

Propers: The Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost (Lectionary 27), AD 2022 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.

Forgiveness is not a feeling. Forgiveness is not a sentiment. Forgiveness is not an emotion. And that, I think, is precisely what we get wrong about it.

We think that to forgive means we have to change our feelings. But we don’t. I’m not convinced that we can. Emotions are like smoke: ephemeral, mercurial things. Once they’re out of the bottle, good luck getting them back in. But forgiveness is a choice, an act of the will, an action. And that we can do. It might not be easy, and it might take work, but it can be done.

Forgiveness is easily abused by the powerful, is it not? When they do wrong, when they do harm, what are we to do? “Forgive and forget,” right? Like it never happened. Go about your business, and smile while you do it. But forgiveness has nothing to do with forgetting, and it sure as heck doesn’t have anything to do with enabling. Forgiveness is about healing, about moving forward. It is the very opposite of ignoring harmful structures and relationships.

Bare-bones biblical forgiveness is simply this: we renounce our claims on vengeance. That’s it. Forgiveness is the refusal to respond to a wrong done against us with a wrong of our own. No more eye for an eye or tooth for a tooth. In other words, it is the renunciation of violence, even verbal violence, emotional violence. Sometimes forgiveness means going forward together, having reached a new understanding. And sometimes it means walking away.

The purpose of forgiveness is to free us from cycles of vengeance and violence, of pettiness and pain. It is shaking the dust off our feet. It is refusing to let someone live rent-free in your head. It is turning the other cheek, which is not a sign of surrender or of weakness, but of active, peaceful defiance, an unbending witness to the truth.

This then is the hallmark of Jesus’ Kingdom, the ethos of the Prince of Peace: nothing less than forgiveness, which is our liberation, our healing, and His truth. And that’s a tall order in an honor-shame culture, a tall order in a world of ego. But you best buck up, buttercup. Because this is what Jesus demands of us. He forgives us—purely out of love, purely out of grace—that we might be empowered to go out and forgive all those who sin against us. It’s right there in the Lord’s Prayer.

Forgiveness isn’t just some pronouncement from on high. Forgiveness is a way of life, the Way of Jesus Christ. It’s not just something we say. It’s something that all of us must strive to live out each and every day—not because we have to earn our salvation, which has been poured out freely for all from the Cross, but because this is our salvation, the very life of Christ within us, here and now today.

Yet even this we cannot do. Even this needs grace.

“Be on your guard!” Jesus warns His disciples. “If a brother or sister sins, you must rebuke the offender, and if there is repentance, you must forgive. And if the same person sins against you seven times a day and turns back to you seven times and says, ‘I repent,’ you must forgive.” In other words, rebuke the wrong, stand strong, but renounce your claims on vengeance.

And the Apostles, in direct response to this, throw up their arms and cry out, “Lord, increase our faith!” We just can’t do it, Jesus. Somebody pops me, I’m gonna pop ‘em right back. Someone hits me, I cut ‘em; someone cuts me, I shoot ‘em. That’s the Judean way, the Roman way, the Western way. St Peter’s gonna throw hands. And if you want us to forgive people, well, then You’re going to have to pour out some special juju juice, some extra heaping helping of the Holy Spirit.

Give us that magic faith, Jesus, some supernatural power to keep us from punching back.

And Jesus says, “Man, if you have faith the size of a mustard seed, you could say to this tree, ‘Go plant yourself in the sea,’ and it would do it, or say to this mountain, ‘Remove yourself hence,’ and it would go.” He talks about faith here as though it were plutonium, as though the tiniest grain of it, cracked open just right, could blow mountains off the face of the earth. But that’s not what it’s like. Faith isn’t some magic elixir. You don’t top it off like fuel.

Faith is just obedience. That’s all it really is. That’s what moves mountains. To have faith in God is more than just belief, more than just some mental affirmation. It is to trust in God: that God is good and God is love and God will save your soul. But this is more than just mental affirmation of an abstract proposition. It’s more than simply checking a box on the census. If we trust in God, if we really have faith in Jesus Christ, then we will do what He says. Otherwise we’re just playacting.

In the words of George MacDonald: “It is simply absurd to say you believe, or even want to believe, in Him, if you do not do anything He tells you.” “If you do not obey Him, you will not know Him … I am always beating that anvil—that obedience to Christ is Christianity.” And the one thing here Christ clearly commands is that we must forgive.

Again, this isn’t sentimental. It’s not roses and sweet cream in the gardens, rainbows and unicorn farts. This is a hard-bitten act of will requiring fortitude and grit: to say clearly: “I have been wronged; yet I will not harm you for harming me.” And you don’t need magic faith for this. You don’t need a grain of radioactive power. You just need to do what you’re told.

Not because Jesus will force you; He won’t. Not because He’s going to spank you if you do not do as He says. But simply because we trust Him. We trust that He loves us. And if this is what He tells us that we really need to do, we had better do it, or stop pretending to be Christians. Jesus does not give us this instruction in order to guilt us or to shame us. He tells us this to set us free.

My God, what wouldn’t we give for insults and slights to just slide off us like water off a duck’s back? Yet I say it can be so! Not by some secret arcane art but by exercise, by determination, by a willingness to tough it out, to do as Jesus does. Forgiveness is athletic. It is humbling, but not humiliating. It forces us to tamp down the ego, yet in so doing, it reveals our true self within: the Image of God in Christ.

“Do you thank the slave for doing what was commanded?” Jesus says. “So you also, when you have done all that you were ordered to do, say, ‘We are worthless slaves; we have done only what we ought to have done!’” Now, there’s a lot to unpack there. But consider what Jesus is saying; consider the context. The Apostles have said that they cannot swallow their pride, they cannot forgive wrong without some superhuman infusion of faith.

And Jesus says, no. When’s the last time that you thanked a slave, Peter? Or you, Judas? Or you, Thomas? I don’t need swaggering, boastful, cocksure would-be heroes for the Kingdom of God. I’ve got legions of angels if I need someone to clean Satan’s clock. What I need from you, My disciples, My Apostles, is to trust Me. Have faith in Me. You want to change the world? You want the Kingdom of God? Then learn to swallow your pride. Learn to stay your hand.

Build the strength it takes to stand tall like a man and not to draw the sword. Because it’s harder not to draw it, stronger not to draw it. If someone wrongs you and you neither flee nor fight, neither cut nor cower, then all the world around will say, “My God, there goes a Christian! There’s Jesus in that man!” Or woman—the women, after all, having proved themselves the bravest of Christ’s disciples.

There’s no magic formula. There’s no secret sauce. There’s just faith, just trust in Jesus. It takes humility, and fortitude, and grit. And you will fail, fall short. We all do. But we are all forgiven, and bidden, to get back up again. Following Jesus Christ always entails the Cross, always entails dying daily to ourselves; but that same death, in Christ, ever begets resurrection, ever begets new life.

It’s hard, but not impossible, to forgive all those who repent. But we must, because we have faith. And this is the life of faith, the very stuff of salvation: forgiveness, healing, peace, new life. We see it in Jesus; He would see it in us. We don’t do this in order to earn ourselves heaven; heaven we already have. We do it because this is what heaven, the Kingdom of God, looks like here on this earth.

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