Forgiveness as Judgment

 A Sermon preached by Dean Breidenthal 
on Sunday, September 15, 2002

  Text: Matthew 18:21-35

In today’s reading from Matthew’s Gospel, Peter asks Jesus how many times he must forgive one who has offended against him. Seven times? Seventy times seven, answers Jesus.

 This reminds me of the story of a little boy who was going to his first day of kindergarten. This was back in the days when nursery school was less common, so this really was to be the boy’s first experience of school. His mother took care to prepare him. For weeks beforehand they talked about the special clothes he would wear, the story circle he would sit in along with the other children, the time for playing, singing, eating and resting. The day before school started she took him to the room, and he met the teacher. On the big day he was so eager and ready he forgot to say goodbye to his mother. Back home that afternoon and evening, he could hardly stop talking about his day. The next morning, when his mother woke him and said “It’s time for school,” he stared at her in astonishment. “Does it happen again?”

Peter must have felt something like this boy’s astonishment to learn that forgiveness is not a one-time event. We are told by Jesus that forgiveness is a way of life. There is no limit to the number of times we are to forgive someone who asks for it. By implication, we are even to forgive those who have injured us and are not sorry.

Surely this will make most of us uncomfortable. We admire the grand gesture of forgiveness when it occurs once in awhile: Jesus on the cross saying, “Father forgive them, for they know not what they do.” But frequent and repeated forgiveness smacks of passivity and victim-hood, while pardon, when it replaces punishment too often, seems to dull the claim of justice. When post-apartheid South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Committee was pursuing its great experiment in amnesty for perpetrators who came clean, many complained that these proceedings deprived the tortured and the bereaved the judicial satisfaction that was coming to them. Can we blame them? Finally, there are crimes which strike us as inherently unforgivable – the abduction, abuse and murder of children; so-called ethnic cleansing; the events of 9/11.

 Hannah Arendt, a great twentieth-century political philosopher, argued that Jesus’ teachings on forgiveness were among the most important teachings on the political realm ever to be produced. For her, Jesus’ insistence on forgiveness went hand in hand with an appreciation of the value of civic life: a people who could not bury the hatchet was a people that could never achieve a stable and healthy public life. I believe she is right here, yet one cannot help but wonder if there are not stores of bitterness and woe that are too precious, too deeply a part of the fabric of injured dignity, that are not worth foregoing for the sake of civility.

The question, then, is this: What does the practice of constant and wide-ranging forgiveness offer that outweighs the claims of dignity, justice, and decency?

 Let’s look at the parable Jesus offers by way of explanation. He tells of a king who, determined to settle accounts with his servants, discovers one servant who owes him a huge sum. He orders that the man and his family be sold, so that the debt may be repaid. When the servant begs for time to make repayment, the king has a change of heart. He does not simply delay the deadline for collection; he cancels the debt – that is, he forgives it. On his way home, this same servant encounters a fellow servant who owes him a certain amount of money. He demands immediate repayment, and when this is not forthcoming, he throws him into prison, despite his pleas for mercy. When the king hears of it, he revokes his forgiveness and has the unmerciful servant thrown into the torture-chamber until the last penny has been repaid.

 At the most obvious level this parable warns its hearers to pattern their behavior after God’s. If God, like the king, has been merciful to us (and God certainly has been merciful), then we had better be merciful to one another: “So my heavenly Father will also do to every one of you, if you do not forgive your brother or sister from your heart.”

 But there is more going on here than that. Notice that the king undergoes a change of heart. He moves from settling accounts with his servants to canceling a debt outright. In essence, he shifts from one economic model to another – from an economy based on obligation and repayment to an economy based on freedom and generosity. He is able to do this, of course, because he is rich – rich, shall we say, beyond all human measure – and can therefore afford to cancel every debt. It’s hard to imagine even the richest individual or corporation today deciding to make such a shift. But of course Jesus is really talking about God here, and where God is concerned, it is perfectly easy to see how God, whose resources of creative power are infinite, might choose to establish an economy free from any need to worry about the bottom line.   It is as if Jesus were saying: ‘You may have thought (rightly or wrongly) that God was primarily concerned with the settling of accounts, but the fact is, that is not where God is now. God has freed you from everything you owe to God, so you are now free to operate in a new way with one another.’

 The forgiven servant should have realized that all the rules had changed. Anyone who has ever been part of a reporting structure knows that the demands of one’s superiors shape what one demands of one’s subordinates. If the CEO says ‘tighten your belt,’ you will make sure that those who report to you spend less. If the CEO says ‘think outside the box, be creative, don’t be afraid to make some mistakes, money is no object,’ you will give pass that expansiveness on. The forgiven servant failed to appreciate that the policy had changed, and that he was therefore free to be generous. He no longer needed to call in his chips in order to satisfy an exacting master, and yet he continued to behave as if he was operating in a climate of exactitude and the settling of accounts.

 Here, then, is the point of this passage for us. Forgiveness is not a form of passivity, nor is it a backing-away from the claims of justice – if by justice we mean clarity about what is right and what is wrong, acknowledgement of the reality of injury and a firm grasp on the fact that many injuries are beyond the possibility of adequate redress. For the Christian, forgiveness is a practice that witnesses to God’s expressed intention to spare no cost (or, put otherwise, to deploy God’s inexhaustible abundance) to make God’s sun rise on the just and the unjust alike (Matthew 5:45). Anyone who shows mercy (Matthew 25: 31-46), anyone who demands mercy (Matthew 15:21-28) , anyone who is willing to step into the light of truth (Matthew 9: 9-13) is welcome into the kingdom of God. To forgive is to ally oneself with God’s intention, to witness to it, and to invite the forgiven to new life.

 When we forgive our enemies, then, we are not acquiescing in what they have done to us. Nor are we soft-pedaling the claims of justice. We are responding to their cruelty with a clear demonstration of our own faith in – and agreement with – God’s intent to make disciples of everyone, even the most despicable.   Paul puts this very well in the passage that was read at Opening Exercises last Wednesday: “If your enemies are hungry, feed them; if they are thirsty, give them something to drink; for by doing this you will heap burning coals on their heads” (Romans 12: 20). Paul is not talking here about making our enemies feel bad by treating them kindly. Rather, our witness brings those who have harmed us into the presence of God, whose judgment, harnessed as it is to forgiveness, is a transforming and purging fire for those who will receive it (Isaiah 6: 1-7).

 Forgiveness is, then, a form of judgment. But it is only judgment if we ourselves are included under the judgment, and if we are willing, in the end, to be in fellowship with those who have hurt us most. I say “in the end” deliberately. Forgiveness usually must begin when fellowship is not possible: it is a down-payment on a reconciliation which may now be unimaginable. Yet we forgive in our hearts, aware that we too are forgiven sinners, and ready, when the time comes, to act on willingness to forgive.

 Horace Bushnell, a Congregationalist minister and one of the leading American theologians of the nineteenth century, tells a story that illustrates vividly the dynamic of forgiveness in the Christian life. (I am borrowing here from James McClendon’s account in his Systematic Theology: Ethics [Abingdon: 1986], pp. 225-7.) A Christian businessman was betrayed by his partner, and their company was ruined. He was able to start over, and eventually prospered. The offending partner went from worse to worse, until he was destitute and unable to afford medical care for his sick child. The now prosperous former partner, who had struggled daily to forgive his old friend – even though he still could not bear to meet him on the street, and would cross over to avoid it – reasoned that his forgiveness had better issue in action. So he sent anonymous checks to cover the cost of the sick child’s cure. But when a serious infectious disease hit the family of the offending partner, there was no one willing to take the risk of helping. So the businessman himself went to the home of his enemy, where he cooked, and cleaned and nursed, until the danger was passed.