Seventy
times seven
Philippians
1:3-11
Matthew
18:21-35
In the novel “Love in the time of Cholera”, Gabrielle Garcia Marquez
portrays a marriage that disintegrates over a bar of soap. It was the wife’s job to keep the house in
order, including provision of towels, toilet paper, and soap in the
bathroom. One day she forgot to replace
the soap, an oversight that her husband mentioned in an exaggerated way
("I've been bathing for almost a week without any soap"), and that
she vigorously denied. Although it
turned out that she had indeed forgotten, her pride was at stake and she would
not back down. For the next seven
months they slept in separate rooms and ate in silence. "Even when they were old and
placid," writes Marquez, "they were very careful about bringing it
up, for the barely healed wounds could begin to bleed again as if they had been
inflicted only yesterday." How can
a bar of soap ruin a marriage? Because
neither partner would say, "Stop.
This cannot go on. I'm
sorry. Forgive me."
Resentment means literally
"to feel again": resentment clings to the past, relives it over and
over, picks each fresh scab so that the wound never heals. This pattern doubtless began with the very
first couple on earth. "Think of
all the squabbles Adam and Eve must have had in the course of 900 years,"
wrote Martin Luther. "Eve would
say, "You ate the apple," and Adam would retort, "You gave it to
me."
This kind of resentment and
conflict is not unfortunately restricted to those outside the body of
Christ. There are people in our
churches who will not talk to each other because of some slight
misunderstanding, there are people who will not give others a second chance
because they have already blown it, or because they are not fitting in with the
way they think things should be.
Bitterness, resentment, and unforgiveness can hold us all in a cycle, a
prison, which ruins our lives and creates hard heartedness in us. And all because no one will take the
initiative in saying “Stop, this cannot go on, I'm sorry, forgive me."
Of course when I feel
wronged, I can come up with 100 reasons why I should not forgive. “She needs to learn a lesson. I don't want to encourage irresponsible
behaviour. I’ll let him sttew for a
while, it will do him good. She needs
to learn that actions have consequences.
I was the wronged party-it's not up to me to make the first move. How can I forgive if he's not even
sorry?” We can build up all these
arguments into our defence, so that if we do finally make a decision to forgive
it feels like a kind of capitulation, a kind of abandonment of reason and a
weakness, a sentimentality
Some people think of Christianity as a bit wimpish in this way, a bit
weak. But the reality is that the kind
of love God calls us to is very hard
headed- “May your love abound yet more and more in knowledge and in all
judgement”, Paul wrote, or as another version puts it, "You need to use
your head and test your feelings so that your love is sincere, not sentimental
gush."
There is little of
sentimental gush about forgiveness-it's one of the hardest tasks in life. But the reality is that if we are unable to
forgive, we remain locked in as much of a prison as the person who wronged us,
like the servant in the story. One
writer tells of an uncle who remained married to his wife but did not speak to
her for 40 years after a fight over how much money she spent on sugar. One day he took out a lumber saw and sawed
their house exactly in half. He nailed
up planks to cover the raw sides and moved one of the halves behind a copse of
scruffy pine trees on the same acre of ground.
There the two, husband and wife, lived out the rest of their days in
separate half houses. It's an exaggerated
story, but maybe it's a picture of the way we sometimes fenced ourselves off
from our brothers and sisters because we are unable to forgive. Perhaps there are people who have moved
away, or even died, who still hold our lives.
The most common Greek word in the New Testament for forgiveness means
literally, to release, to hurl away, to free yourself. If we do not transcend nature, we remained
bound to the people we cannot forgive, held in their vice grip. The only thing harder than forgiveness is
the alternative.
Jesus told us to forgive
unconditionally. It's a command, not an
option. Peter thought he was being
reasonable by suggesting that we should forgive people seven times. After all, this was more than the Old
Testament law had suggested-a good paraphrase of Rabbis’ teaching on
forgiveness would be a familiar phrase today: "Three strikes and you're
out". But Jesus says real
forgiveness is unconditional, because that is the way God forgives. The first servant in the story owed his master
10,000 talents-that was the equivalent of 2 1/2 million pounds. An incredible debt, more than the total
budget of an ordinary province at the time.
That, says Jesus is the equivalent of imagining how much God has
forgiven us. The debt which the fellow
servant owed to the other servant was 100 denarii-worth about five pounds. God's unconditional forgiveness is far
beyond anything, yes anything that we have to forgive. There is the command, but there is also the
motivation, the example.
This kind of unconditional
forgiveness is deeply unfair for sure, but from the Gospels’ accounts, it seems
forgiveness was not easy for God either.
"If it is possible, may this cup be taken away from me." Jesus
prayed as blood rolled from his brow.
“Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do." It is not as if forgiving us did not cost
God everything. Forgiveness does not
settle all questions of blame and fairness- often it pointedly pervades those
questions-but it does allow our relationship to start again, and it does allow
us to live as human beings. In that
way, said Solzhenitsyn, we differ from all animals. Not our capacity to think, but a capacity to repent and to
forgive makes us different. God does it
for us. And only by performing this
unnatural act, can we begin to be like him.