Forgive ME while I consider the other ...

Matthew 18:21-35

I once had a parishioner declare to me that if she heard one more sermon about “forgiveness”, she just could not be held responsible for what she may do next!

I don’t think the issue of “forgiveness” itself was the problem my beloved parishioner was dealing with. Instead, it had become a rather redundant “issue” that had been beaten into the ground. For her, it was time to move on to other things. After all, she said, it’s a pretty big Bible that covers a lot of ground. Surely we don’t have to repeat ourselves in order to be faithful to the Lord.

Maybe not but faithfulness is directly related to the task at hand and if our mission in faithfulness to the Lord is to tell His story and proclaim the Good News, forgiveness is itself the central theme of our faith and must surely be the greatest hope for a new convert as well as for those still seeking some meaning to their existence: how to embrace this God who would do such a thing. It is the greatest of all mysteries, and without it the life of Christ’s Holy Church is reduced to nothing more than a social club.

Still, I can see where my beloved parishioner was having some difficulty with feeling as if forgiveness were being forced upon her because there is an element involved that we don’t often talk about: our sense of justice. Justice demands that a wrong be made right and that some sort of penalty be invoked so as to discourage future acts of injustice.

We Americans are nothing if not a people of justice and while we might say the same thing about Christians, the truth is we Christians – by virtue of the Lord’s mighty act of forgiveness – have been excused from paying the price for our sins, the price having already been paid IN FULL. True justice would demand that we would have suffered the penalty; instead, the penalty was paid in our stead – and this is incomprehensible to many.

Here is something else to consider. We know when we’ve done wrong and we reasonably know that this wrong must be made right; WE KNOW THIS. But we don’t want to pay a penalty, do we? We would rather right a wrong in our own time and according to our own desires. Don’t we often remind ourselves that if we do not repent of such behavior that is not pleasing to the Lord, we will sooner or later answer for it?

However, if someone does US a wrong, then we want them to pay and pay dearly!! We are not typically as forgiving of them as we are of ourselves. And I think it must be the lack of genuine perspective, a perspective that is absent a genuine experience of having suffered in a very real way for our sins.

Maybe it is not possible for us. Maybe it is that there will always linger just beneath the surface the reality that we had been wronged. There is another reality, however, that we must consider and ultimately come to embrace, according to Kenneth J. Collins, professor of Wesley Studies at Asbury in Wilmore, KY. He wrote recently in Good News magazine: “The genius of the Christian faith is that it sees evil for what it is and not as an illusion as in some other religions. It then triumphs over this darkness and transcends it through its central fact of loving forgiveness.”

In other words, we acknowledge the reality what has been done to us while we also acknowledge the humanity of the person or persons who had wronged us. We give them the same break we give ourselves. We acknowledge the possibility that there were extenuating circumstances that we may never be aware of. Even as we acknowledge such realities we must also be aware that whether we choose to avenge ourselves or simply move on, the certain reality will never change. We cannot “undo” what has been done. What we can do is adjust our attitude and refocus our energy while recognizing that such negative energy and hatefulness will harm no one but ourselves. Our “enemy” may never know or care how we once felt, so what’s it to him if we choose to move along?

In the midst of the most intense suffering imaginable, Jesus prayed: “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.” This was not only a sincere prayer from One fully possessed of true and genuine godly love; it was also a lesson from which we are called not only to learn but to live. The central theme of our faith is, indeed, forgiveness and forgiveness is central to life eternal. To carry any sort of grudge or resentment against someone is to suffer a slow and painful death. To forgive is to embrace divine life. To truly live is to forgive as we have been forgiven.