and a New Way of Being
Proper 19A | Matthew 18:21-35
I left home as the sun was coming up on my right, traversing the back roads of Georgia by GPS. It was about an hour and a half’s drive from Newnan to Rome. They had one service at 9:30 am at the Episcopal Church of the Transfiguration and I wanted to get there before nine. It was my first Sunday supplying for them, so I wanted to be there early to tour the place, ask about the service and expectations; then, to settlein and pray before the service started.
The drive was easy. Almost nobody on the road. Typical Sunday in that way. But there was nothing typical about this Sunday fifteen years ago this weekend.
I usually listened to podcasts then (still do!) or the NPR app on my phone, which provided newsfeeds when I couldn’t get a signal. But that Sunday, I had the radio on and the signal was strong. So I could hear the broadcaster describe the events in New York, announcing the speakers, a speech by president Obama, and the moment of silence at 8:46 am.
Fifteen minutes later, I got out of the car, carrying with me the vocational responsibility to preach forgiveness with God’s people.
The Assignment
A month earlier, when I was called about doing supply, I was eager to take the opportunity. And when they said it was four weeks from then, Sunday, September 11th, I just shook my head. 2011. The tenth anniversary. On a Sunday. I couldn’t say no, even if I had no idea what to do about it.
As I hung up the phone, I put the time in my calendar. Then I opened up The Lectionary Page to see what the lessons would be for that Sunday. These lessons. Peter’s question about forgiveness and Jesus responding with a number so high, it may as well be infinity.
Now, I can’t tell you I was hyped. I wallowed for a minute because, I don’t know if you remember, but this was Georgia. And I didn’t know these people. But this was the day. We’d all be thinking about it. It was unavoidable. And the gospel has a way of wrecking our convenient excuses. Especially the selfish ones.
Forgiveness, then. That’s the story for that auspicious anniversary as it is for this one. Twenty-five years later. The question the gospel still gives us comes from Peter, the everyman, like the question we want to ask each time. When it comes to something that affects us personally: “how often should I forgive?”
And the response may as well be You should probably stop keeping track.
Making it Personal
Remember, Peter isn’t asking this out of the blue. This isn’t a random question about forgiving a random person. Jesus has just been talking about forgiving, giving the disciples a kind of restoration framework. Go to the person who has sinned and try to make it right, he tells them. Then try to take a couple of witnesses with you. Then bring the whole community. The purpose is reconciliation.
So Peter’s question makes it personal. Like he wants Jesus to cut to the chase. Like he wants to fast forward past the practice of forgiveness, of reconciliation, of making a community whole again and just get to what he needs to do. As if he wants Jesus to make it personal. To tell him what to do when it happens to him. And not just the first time or the second time, but the seventh time, the Sabbath time, when the fisherman is ready to cut bait and let the line go and say “I’ve had enough of this.”
And we all know that feeling. When we’ve tried and tried or when we are still so angry. There has to be a limit! Right? We can’t do this forever, we think. We want limits to our forgiveness. Limits of time or of scope. That’s why we come up with edge cases. Not the normal or the regular kind. The kind we experience 98% of the time. No, the extremes, the severe, or the utterly abnormal. And we run with those and make those the first thing we go to. But what if he takes advantage! What if he’ll do it again!
How many of us have turned to the edge cases already this morning, to the terrorism and the murder. Or coverups of the toxins and asbestos in the atmosphere at Ground Zero that has now killed more people than died in the towers or in planes or at the Pentagon that day. How many of us have started with the pain and the rage and the hatred and said to ourselves There must be limits to forgiveness.
And the gospel reminds us that the answer, ultimately, is No. There are no limits.
It Isn’t About You
The reason the teaching works is that Jesus makes it super personal. He knows that’s what we’re worried about. How we’re going to take it all. And yet, this is also where people are likely to get hung up. In the personal.
One of the things about this hyper-personal perspective is that it limits our vision of impact, of the wider community, and how we all actually can and do work together. And, I’m ever more convinced that it limits what people can do, preventing any kind of tide from lifting any boats at all.
Jesus gave them teaching about the concepts of forgiveness. He taught it as a command. He then taught it as part of God’s nature to forgive everyone. Then he gave a framework for seeking reconciliation with people to help them and the whole community come to a place of forgiveness together. And in response, Peter’s like, Tell me when I can give up on it. And Jesus responds with something that may as well be “never” and a teaching about a person who was only concerned with his own safety. Who begged for forgiveness from God and got it. And then used that forgiveness to exploit the lives of those around him.
Jesus gives Peter the edge case because only forgiveness can lead to reconciliation. And more than that, the story is never just about Peter and his own exhaustion and whether other people deserve it and whether we want punishment more than reconciliation and whether the wrong sorts of people might get forgiven too and whether innocent people have suffered and if we’ve ever gotten over it and even whether there is a lesson to be learned here. It isn’t about you.
The Lost Sheep
Jesus said that God goes after the lost sheep and said that’s our job, too. And when we frame the question around the limits of our own forgiveness or even more narrowly, whether or not I as an individual can forgive any one other person in one particular situation and pretend that all of life just stops moving, as if time doesn’t keep moving, as if eight billion other people don’t surround us we are missing the proverbial forest for that one blessed tree.
And the danger is to flip this, crafting a rhetorical binary out of it, so that it is either I thinking about one encounter with one other person or I pull all of the humanity out of it and speak in vague forever terms like “always” and “never” and see the command to forgive without any heart or humanity at all. As if this isn’t about the people around us. People who mill and drive and meander and line-up and bump into and sit at tables around us.
Remember, sin isn’t just an action, but a transgression between people. People who live in a wider community. A community that is affected by every act of virtue or vice. That is strong enough to handle difference and diversity but has to set limits at murder and theft and oppression. And we figure out how to live and survive together because we need to be safe. And we need to protect one another. But it isn’t just freedom at stake. It’s our capacity to love and forgive and reconcile with one another. And a lot of those actions we use to protect the community foster harm. They celebrate war or excuse genocide. They make us feel vindicated for bombing other countries and obliterating communities, hospitals, water supplies, starving children, killing the sick, doctors, journalists!
Anything but reconciliation.
The Stakes
This is why Peter is our voice in the text. Because we struggle with this in the exact same way, don’t we? All of us. We want limits to the command to forgive and Jesus says no. And we’ll still come up with ways to justify ourselves rather than come up with better ideas. This is why our carceral system rates so poorly by international standards. It is more focused on punishment than rehabilitation and reconciliation.
And that question comes back again. How many times? Yeah, keep going. We don’t give up. Not on forgiveness alone, but our methods and systems that depend on this very command. Those places in our world that need people to work toward reconciliation with other people.
It isn’t just whether or not we forgive a handful of terrorists for their sin twenty-five years ago. It is how we become people more likely to forgive because the whole community needs more people forgiving other people. And we need this for the very reason we can’t fight fire with more fire. That literally puts everything on fire. It’s the dumbest idea ever conceived of! If your stove’s on fire, you smother it. Baking soda! You don’t start another fire!
When we spread love and reconciliation and peace, we have less violence and exploitation to deal with. It isn’t just the urgent cases, it’s our very way of life.
Becoming a Forgiving People
I preached about some of this fifteen years ago. But most of it focused on forgiveness and turning our hearts. I wanted those people to know that it is OK to get mad and to want to do something and that this isn’t a partisan thing, but it is political. Because we are asked to go against the popular opinion on forgiveness. That we do need to stand up to the moment we’re in. That we can grieve the loss of lives and still need to learn to forgive. That this isn’t just about us and them but all of us together.
And as much as I worried about how it would land, I was convinced by the gospel itself. That this is that important.
After the service, a woman came up to me and thanked me for my message. And with some trepidation, she started to confess to her anger and frustration with her daughter, an adult with kids of her own, and how she was so mad at her daughter and convinced of how right she was that she hadn’t spoken to her in two years. Then the woman looked me in the eye and asked for confirmation: “I have to call her, don’t I?”
She worked through it. I’m the parent, she said. Which makes a kind of sense we all know, but isn’t the whole of it, either.
I don’t know what happened next. If she ever called. I want to believe that the mom called her daughter to forgive her and, given time, the daughter forgave her mom for the silence. But knowing isn’t the point. It’s about the people we are. About the way we are together. Who we choose to be as a people. People who choose love over being right. Who wage reconciliation. Who make Shalom our heart and our command, to bring wholeness, justice, peace in all things. With joy and hope that we one day will.