Proper 19, Year A
Genesis 50:15-21; Psalm 103:1-13; Romans 14:1-12; Matthew 18:21-35
O God, because without you we are not able to
please you, mercifully grant that your Holy Spirit may in all things
direct and rule our hearts; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and
reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
“I just can’t
do it. I know that Jesus tells us to forgive, but I just can’t!” That is the
anguished confession that I hear most often as a priest. And I understand. Many
years ago, I remember sitting in the adult ed circle at church and listening to
the group talk about the importance of forgiveness. I was a young mother in the
process of a painful divorce. I was seething with bitterness and resentment and
anger. I was praying every day for my husband to fall into a deep, dark hole
from which he would never emerge to bother me or my children again. Forgive
him? There was no way. “I just can’t do it,” I confessed to the group, deeply
ashamed at my lack of faith and Christian love. “I’m sorry, but I just can’t do
it.”
Our automatic response as humans is
to thirst for “justice” in the face of wrongdoing. In other words, we want the
guilty to pay for their crimes. Recent brain research has shown how thoughts of
revenge against those who have wronged us light up pleasure pathways in our
brains. Our brains actually reward us for seeking vengeance![1]
In today’s Gospel, the slave who has just been forgiven a million dollar debt
still can’t stomach that he hasn’t been paid the paltry sum that his fellow
slave owes him, and so he forgets his own tenuous position and goes after the
poor guy. Then the other slaves can’t stand to see him act in a way that they feel is unjust. So they run and
alert the king in order to get him in trouble. In our world, the justice we
seek is usually “retributive.” We want retribution; we want pay-back. Evil must
be punished, by us or by God, or the world becomes in our minds an unfair,
meaningless place. When we go after vengeance, we say to ourselves, “you did me
wrong, so I must do you wrong back; however, my wrong to you will be right
because you did it first and I am only seeking justice.”[2]
And our brains reward us, as if we had just won a prize.
In today’s Gospel, Jesus tells us
that we are to sacrifice the pleasure of rejoicing over the downfall of our enemy.
Instead, we are to offer unending mercy to our fellow human beings when they ask
to be forgiven. For Jesus, forgiveness is not opposed to justice. Rather, it is
related to another kind of justice than our “retributive justice.” Jesus is
operating out of God’s “restorative justice,” the kind of justice that repairs
relationships through love.[3]
A compassionate God who is constantly pouring out love onto all of God’s beloved
creatures, is a God who is constantly repairing, cleansing, and starting over
in God’s relationships with us. God’s forgiveness is beyond the logic of tit
for tat; it is a pure gift, a gift of “boundless, radical, overflowing,
excessive, incomprehensible love.”[4]
We see God’s restoring love in Jesus, God’s Son. When Jesus stops the stoning
of the woman taken in adultery, for example, he is showing us restorative
justice. He offers her unmerited forgiveness. He stops others from judging her.
He gives her a chance for reconciliation and the restoration of relationship
with God. When Jesus hangs dying on the cross and says “Father, forgive them,
for they know not what they do,” rather than, “Father, make them pay for this,”
then even his death becomes a sign of God’s restorative justice, a sign that we
are to live out in our own relationships. As God pours life-changing mercy upon
us, so we too pour out life-changing mercy upon others. We actually borrow this
biblical language of restoration in our St. Thomas mission statement. We
proclaim that we want to “restore” all people to unity with God and one another
in Christ. The first painful step in restoration is forgiveness.
There is a wonderful documentary on
forgiveness that I recommend to all of you. By Martin Doblmeier, it is called “The
Power of Forgiveness” and can be viewed for free on Amazon Prime. This
documentary is like today’s parable in that it does not try to lecture us or
shame us into forgiving. Like our parable, it bypasses our revenge-fueled
brains and goes straight into our hearts through the power of story. The
documentary is full of real-life stories about people who have tried to
forgive.
The story that moved me the most shows
us how forgiveness flows into God’s restorative justice. Azim Khamisa is a
wealthy international investment banker and a devout Sufi Muslim. Ples Felix is
an African-American Baptist from the projects in California. One night, Felix’s
14-year-old grandson Tony fatally shot Khamisa’s only son when he delivered a
pizza to Tony and his friends. Tony, who had been abandoned by both parents at
a young age, was caught up in a hopeless life of gangs and drugs. Now he had
killed a promising young man and was sitting in jail for a senseless, brutal
crime. As you can imagine, Khamisa was devastated over his son Tariq’s death
and even contemplated suicide. And yet his religion asked him to forgive.
Despite his great anguish, he was somehow able to reach out to Felix, Tony’s
grandfather and guardian. Both of our beloved children have been lost, he said.
One to death and one to prison. We need to stick together. Eventually, Khamisa
was even able to go into the prison and to meet young Tony, face to face. When
the boy expressed remorse, Khamisa forgave him for murdering his only child. In
turn, Tony was then able to forgive his parents for his abandonment and to
begin to heal from the wounds that had alienated him from society. Khamisa promised to give Tony a job when he is
eventually released from prison. Today, Khamisa and Felix, still friends, work together
in the schools through the Tariq Khamisa Foundation to stop other children from
killing children.
As I listened to this story, it was
impossible for me to tell which one of these men was being forgiven the greatest
debt. Crushing injustice was everywhere. Tony and Felix, crushed under the
injustice of poverty and racism. Azim, crushed under the injustice of losing
his only son. Tariq, crushed under the injustice of an unmerited death. For
God, who loves them all, there is only forgiveness. There is only the joy of burdens
lifted and the gift of freedom bestowed. Who are we to judge which sin should
be forgiven? All that matters is that the forgiveness that flows from God
continues to flow into the world. Who are we to block God’s forgiving power?
Who are we to tattle to the King? Forgiveness opens the door to restoration and
to life. Who are we to keep that door closed?
And yet, it is difficult to forgive.
In the film, the only story in which forgiveness was not achieved was the story
of several women who lost loved ones when the Twin Towers collapsed on
September 11. You might think that the women’s continued anger was directed
toward the terrorists who caused the disaster, but that wasn’t the problem for
them. The people whom they couldn’t
forgive were the US authorities who, in their hurry to clean up Ground Zero,
shoveled the ruins of the towers, along with the unidentified remains of their
loved ones, off to a distant landfill. “They put my son in the garbage!” cried
the mother of one of the lost firefighters as she wandered the landfill picking
up pieces of bone and twisted metal. “That I cannot forgive.” Somehow, that flat,
barren landfill seemed even more desolate to me than the image of the collapsed
towers. Broken lives, swept out of sight. Women picking angrily over the
discarded scraps of tragedy. God’s forgiveness blocked by expediency. God’s
image in those loved ones ignored. That landfill was as desolate as my soul
when I was unable to forgive my husband.
In the broken,
war-scarred city of Beirut, Lebanon, some wise people recently constructed a “garden
of forgiveness.” The garden is an oasis of green in between bullet-marked
buildings. Two of the angry 911 relatives from New York traveled all the way to
Lebanon in order to bury photos of their lost loved ones in this garden. “Now
at least they have a place,” one mother said. The bereaved were able to make a
journey, a long and difficult journey, to bury these fallen heroes of 911 in a
place of forgiveness. Healing could begin.
Forgiveness is
not something that we can control or manufacture. It takes time. It requires a
journey. It is a gift from God that we begin to receive when we gather the
courage to cherish even what is broken in others and in ourselves, rather than making sure that it is swept away to the nearest garbage dump.
No comments:
Post a Comment