Hard Forgiveness




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.

“Love your enemies,” Jesus said. “Do good to those who hate you. Bless those who curse you. Pray for those who mistreat you.” And we all stared back in uncomfortable silence.

Worshipping Jesus is in some sense the easy part. Worship comes naturally to human beings; we have no irreligious iteration of our species. Everyone bows the knee to something. The question isn’t whether one believes in God; it’s, which gods are we already reverencing? No, the difficult part is trusting Christ by doing what He says. “It is simply absurd,” wrote the Rev’d George MacDonald of our Lord Jesus Christ, “to say you believe, or even want to believe, in Him, if you do not do anything He tells you.”

Acknowledging Jesus as Lord is relatively painless, here for us. Walking with Him, however, involves the carrying of the Cross. And that’s the bit we rather would avoid.

Keep in mind, such isn’t the cost of earning one’s salvation. Christianity was never pay-to-play. Rather, if you would be freed from sin and death and hell; if you would be raised to eternal life in the here and now; then this is what it looks like. It looks like Jesus Christ. To be met by Christ in Word and Sacrament, to be united as His Body in His Spirit, is to know the union of God and Man, the conquest of death, the liberation of the damned, the Passover of Our Lord, already and not yet. This is the mystic heart of Christianity.

Being Jesus for the world is our salvation. We are called to be the beachhead of His Kingdom, the vanguard of eternity in time. Together we are Jesus for a world in need of Him. And yes, we are very bad at that. We are, after all, sinners called by grace to serve as saints. We’re going to screw up. Yet every time we fall, He shall raise us up again. Here Jesus forgives us, quickens us, teaches us, feeds us, blesses us, and sends us out again, every Sunday, every week, in every generation. We are the resurrection flame sent forth.

It is an impossible blessing, and an impossible burden. Yet in it we have never been alone. We are called to be Christ together, as a people, as a Church. And He is ever with us: before us when we go, among us when we gather, within us for our neighbor in her need. It isn’t easy, trying to be Jesus, even collectively, even as a community. But this is what we wanted; this is what we need. This is what it’s like to have the love of God inside us, revitalizing everything we do. To know the love of God is to live the love of neighbor.

And that looks like a Man upon a Cross.

To love our enemies is the hardest thing to do; at least we tend to think it is. Yet Christ would not command it were it not the best for us. In approaching this, let us first attempt to put emotion to the side; because love, and forgiveness, these are not emotions. They’re not about how we feel toward someone; rather, they deal with how we act toward someone. Love is not a passion, not the same thing as feeling in love. Love is the choice to put the good of another before our own, to love our neighbors as ourselves.

So this command to love is the command to do what is right, to do what is beautiful, good, and true, regardless of how we feel. If someone hurts us, if someone wrongs us, we do what is right both for us and for them. And that might mean correction. That might mean justice. That might mean walking away. It certainly necessitates honesty, being truthful, being true. Love cannot pretend; for there is no love without truth, and no truth without love. When Jesus says to love our enemies, He means for us to keep in mind both their good and our own.

This relates to forgiveness. Love always relates to forgiveness. But again, forgiveness cannot be merely emotion. Emotions are fickle, ephemeral, tempestuous things. Strictly speaking, biblical forgiveness is simply the renunciation of vengeance. That’s it. You did evil to me, and so I might think that I have the right to do evil to you, but I won’t. I will not double the wrong; yet neither shall I abandon the right! I will speak the truth. I will demand that you recognize my basic human dignity, our fundamental equality, both of us fashioned in the image of our God.

Forgiveness doesn’t mean that we pretend it didn’t happen. Forgiveness means that we strive to find a way forward, to set things right, even if it means that we must go our separate ways. Abandoning vengeance necessitates justice. And justice ever culminates in mercy.

This, my friends, is our Cross. To bear the Cross of Christ is not an act of masochism. We do not go out eagerly seeking pain and persecution. Rather, to bear the Cross of Christ is to always seek the right, regardless of the cost or consequences. Jesus spoke truth to power, and comfort to the poor. He fed the hungry, healed the sick, instructed the ignorant, rebuked the sinner, and raised up the dead from their graves. In all of this He loved us, putting our good before His own.

And we killed Him for it; because of course we did. That’s what we do; that’s who we are. He might well have been justified to wipe out all the world. But that’s not who He is. Jesus pronounced our forgiveness even as we murdered Him for it. He renounced the sword of vengeance, using only the sword of His Word. He bore the Cross because we were the ones who gave it to Him. Yet even our betrayal could not kill His deathless love. That, by God, is worthy of our worship, and infinitely more.

We read His admonitions to turn the other cheek, go the extra mile, give to a thief the shirt from off your back, and we think, “What a pushover. What a doormat. What a weenie.” Right? Yet the Gospel confronts us with the bravest Man of all: a King who fights His own battles, who wrestles with death and with hell, who never backs down, never surrenders, never lies, never does wrong, when everyone around Him wants the Christ to burn the world.

His love is a power which we’ve no defense against. He reject Him, yet He loves us. We strike Him, yet He loves us. We scourge His back with the lash, His brow with thorns, His limbs with nails; we run run a spear up and under His ribcage, right into His heart; we murder Him in the worst way we know how, hurling Him headlong into the deepest pits of hell—and none of it does a damn lick of good, because three days later He’s right back up again, having severed Satan’s spine, forgiving us and bringing us to life.

How do you stop a Man like that, a God like that, a love like that? You don’t. You can’t. All that we can do is fall upon our knees and weep.

Turning the other cheek is an act of defiance and of dignity. Going the extra mile forces a violation of Roman law. Hurling your shirt at someone who steals your cloak lays bare their shame before the world and so their soul. Every one of these examples is of nonviolent active resistance, the very tactics taken on by Gandhi and by Martin Luther King. Were those men cowards, when they stood up for the oppressed, defied empires, responded to violence with songs of thanksgiving and praise?

By God, no. When they did those things, they were Christ before the world, Christ for all the world, and because of that they changed the arc of history. They bore the Cross and won the Crown. But they didn’t do it alone. None of us can be the Christ alone. Jesus addresses His teachings in the plural, to the community, to the Church. Together we love our enemies. Together we bless those who curse us. Together we do good unto the very ones who hate us. Thus we are one in Jesus Christ, walking His Way, bearing His Cross.

And so I declare unto you, that this is your salvation: “Be brave and upright that God may love thee. Speak the truth always, even if it leads to your death. Safeguard the helpless and do no wrong.” Show mercy to the wicked, for God forgives the wicked in you. Be strong and loving and fearless in everything you do. And remember Christ is with us, unto the end of the age.

That is the promise of your Baptism. That is the risen life of Jesus Christ in you.

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






Pertinent Links

RDG Stout
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St Peter’s Lutheran
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Nidaros Lutheran
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