A colleague of mine went on a website one day to send an electronic greeting card to a family member. As he browsed through the types of cards, he discovered that right next to the cards labeled “Birthday” and “Anniversary” was the category “Forgiveness.” According to this virtual card maker, forgiveness was considered an “occasion,” something that happens every once in a while, an occasion special enough to justify sending a card. (1)
Is this how we think of forgiveness? That from time to time someone does something so hurtful or offensive that we have to muster the strength to forgive?
The story of Nickel Mines would suggest otherwise. A few years ago, a man entered a one-room Amish schoolhouse and killed five young girls and wounded five others before killing himself. Within hours friends and family members of the victims reached out to the family of the shooter and extended forgiveness.
One Amish historian believes that the reason the Amish community of Nickel Mines was able to so quickly and genuinely extend forgiveness because forgiveness is deeply rooted in their culture. Forgiveness is something the Amish practice daily. It isn’t an occasion you buy a card for, it is something you do every day. Parents practice it in front of their children, neighbors practice it with one another, and siblings learn that they must practice it too. The Amish practice forgiveness daily, not because they transgress against each other more than the rest of us, but because it is how they live out their faith. Every day, they forgive the small things, and it is precisely this practice of forgiving everyday offenses that allowed them to extend forgiveness to one who had done something unforgivable.
If there is any question in our minds whether Jesus would have us practice forgiveness daily or save up our energy for the really big offenses, the answer is in the Lord’s Prayer. We have prayed to our intimate, heavenly Father to set the world right. We have asked that each day our bodies might be nourished with food, and we have acknowledged that the bread God provides us is not mine but ours. And then, having just asked God to give us each day what we need to survive physically, we ask God to provide what we need to survive spiritually. “Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our debts...” By linking these two petitions together, this prayer suggests that as bread is to our bodies, so forgiveness is to our souls. It is something we need, something we crave, every single day.
Up to this phrase in the Lord’s Prayer, we have been focused on God: who God is--our Father in heaven, what we want God to do for the world--set the world right, what we want God to provide for us--three square meals and the gift of forgiveness. But then with one tiny word--as--the camera turns on us, and here, in the middle of this prayer, we find out what it means to be a Christian, a child of an intimate, loving God, and a follower of Jesus Christ.
And what it means to be a Christian has everything to do with forgiveness: first, God’s forgiveness of us, and bound together with that, our forgiveness of others. “Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors.”
Before dawn on January 10, 1966, Sam Bowers drove out of Hattiesburg, Mississippi and went to the home of Vernon Dahmer. Bowers was the Imperial Wizard of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. Dahmer was a white grocery store owner. That night, while Dahmer and his family slept, Bowers and his fellow Klansman poured gasoline around the house and set it and Dahmer’s adjoining grocery store on fire. Dahmer and his ten year-old daughter were injured and Dahmer died later that day.
What was Dahmer’s crime? He allowed black people to pay their poll taxes at his grocery store.
In August 1998, after four mistrials, Sam Bowers was finally convicted of the vicious murder committed three decades before. The Reverend Will Campbell was in the courthouse for the trial. Campbell was a maverick Baptist preacher during the Civil Rights Movement, the only white person present for the establishment of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. He walked with the black students who first integrated Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas as they made their way through an angry mob. When he was the chaplain at the University of Mississippi, he knew Vernon Dahmer and worked closely with him on voting rights issues.
Everyone assumed that Campbell was at the trial to grieve the death of his friend Vernon Dahmer. But reporters were shocked when they saw Campbell embraced not only by Vernon’s widow, but also by the defendant, Klansman Sam Bowers.
When one of the reporters asked Campbell how he could possibly be so friendly with both the victim and the vicious monster who had murdered him, the salty-tonged Campbell replied, “Because, dammit--I am a Christian!” (2)
One thing Jesus’ first followers noticed was that when Jesus healed someone, whether physically or spiritually, the act of healing was nearly always accompanied by a declaration of forgiveness. So the disciples started to wonder: how exactly does Jesus expect us to forgive? At the time, the Israelites had what seems like very reasonable expectations of forgiveness. If someone repeatedly offended you, you should extend forgiveness three times, but not four. After three times, the offender was out of luck and you were off the forgiveness hook.
Now the disciple Peter was a good student and an astute observer. He knew that Jesus cared a lot about forgiveness and that his standards for his followers would be high. So Peter picked a number that more than doubled the rabbi’s proscription. “Lord, how often should I forgive? Seven times?” Surely, thought Peter, this would be more than enough, even for Jesus.
He thought wrong. “Not seven times,” responds Jesus, “seventy-seven times.” Some say the text reads, “Seventy times seven times,” which would be 490, others say seventy-seven, but either way, Jesus is saying that we are to forgive more than we think is reasonable or even possible. As one commentator puts it, Jesus is saying “forgive your brothers and sisters beyond your ability to keep track.” (3) Another says that the simplest meaning of this phrase goes beyond any number. What it means is that we followers of Jesus must “never give up on anyone.” (4)
Why would Jesus ask such a thing of us? Isn’t it possible that some people are just irredeemable? That there are people in this world and in our lives that truly do not deserve our forgiveness--today or any day--because of how they have deliberately hurt us and taken advantage of us time and time again?
Well, in response to such questions, Jesus told a story. It was a fish tale of sorts, a story filled with ridiculous exaggerations and hyperboles. It started with a king who decided to meet with each of his slaves and call in their debts. And a slave came before him who owed him ten thousand talents. Now in these days of trillion dollar deficits and billion dollar bailouts, ten thousand of anything doesn’t impress us much, but if you lived back when talents were a currency, you’d know that this is a sum so large it’s almost absurd -- like if the IRS sent you a letter saying you owed the government a “gazillion” dollars. The sum is astronomical, unfathomable, one that you couldn’t even begin to repay in one lifetime, and probably not in seventy-seven lifetimes either.
Knowing this, the servant throws himself down before the king and begs for mercy. In a surprising turn, the king has mercy on him, erasing this astronomical debt, wiping away any record of the money the servant owed. The king forgives the debt and gives the man a fresh start, even though he had every right to throw the servant in prison for defaulting on the loan.
The servant’s debt was forgiven, but Jesus wasn’t done with the story. He wasn’t done with the exaggerations, either, although his next exaggeration was in the other direction. The debt-free servant leaves the palace and the first thing he does is find a co-worker who had borrowed money from him a few days before. And even though the first servant had borrowed a gazillion dollars from the king, his friend hadn’t asked for a billion or even a million. He’d borrowed a few bucks. They were in the lunch line at the palace cafeteria and he didn’t have his wallet so he asked his friend to cover his burger and fries. Now, this servant whose massive debt had just been erased has the nerve to grab his debtor by the neck and demand repayment for what amounted to a handful of quarters. (5)
This parable certainly seems to suggest that the Amish have it right: if we don’t practice forgiving the small things, it’s going to be nearly impossible for us to forgive the little things. The parable suggests that Rev. Campbell was right too. We forgive, because it is what Christians are commanded to do.
“Forgive us our sins as we forgive our debtors.” One commentator says that “as” this might just be the scariest, most sobering word in the entire New Testament.
The theologian Miroslav Volf says that there are three ways to understand this link in the Lord’s Prayer between our forgiveness and God’s, but that only one of them is right. The first and most obvious is that God will forgive us because we forgive others. In other words, God’s forgiveness is not a freely given gift of grace, but a payment in return for our right actions.
The other way to look at it, which the parable of the debtor supports, is that God’s forgiveness is a free gift, but if we fail to forgive others, then God will take that forgiveness away. Indeed, this is exactly what the king in the parable does. When he hears about the servant’s behavior toward his debtor, the king throws the servant into prison until he repays that gazillion dollar debt; in other words, for the rest of his life. This story makes it pretty straightforward: God’s forgiveness is conditional on our actions. We can’t earn God’s forgiveness, but we can un-earn it.
Volf says that if we read this parable this way, we have taken it too literally. These stories aren’t meant to illustrate exactly who God is or precisely how God’s kingdom works. Instead, this story simply shows that God’s forgiveness and our forgiveness go hand in hand.6
Volf knew firsthand both the power and pain of forgiveness. One day his five year-old brother, Daniel, took advantage of their nanny’s preoccupation with a younger sibling and slipped out the courtyard gate. He walked to a small military base down the road where he liked to play with the soldiers there who enjoyed playing with him to ease their own boredom. On this fateful day, one of them put Daniel on a horse-drawn bread wagon. As the wagon passed through a gate, Daniel leaned sideways and got his head stuck between the door post and the wagon as the horses kept going. He died on the way to he hospital. Volf’s parents extended forgiveness both to the nanny who had not watched Daniel carefully enough and to the soldier who put him on that wagon. They refused to press charges against the soldier and Volf’s father, himself heartbroken, visited the soldier, who was so upset and guilt-ridden that he had to be hospitalized. Later, Volf’s parents explained to their son why they forgave in the face of their grief. “The Word of God tells us to forgive as God in Christ has forgiven us,” they told him, “and so we decided to forgive.” In other words, they forgave, even this excruciatingly painful offense, because they were Christian.
There were two things Jesus gave away with abandon: food and forgiveness. He fed thousands with just a few loaves and fishes, he hung out with people who lived in shame because they had broken all the rules, he forgave the sins of everyone who asked for forgiveness and many who didn’t. Jesus knew that we human beings have two basic needs: to have our physical hunger satisfied and our broken spirits made whole. So he did that, and in this prayer, he teaches us that we can do it to. We can forgive as God has forgiven us. We can forgive because God forgives us.
We forgive because--dammit--it’s just what Christians do. Amen.
Endnotes:
1. Scott Hoezee in a commentary on Matthew 18:21-35 online.
2. from the sermon “Extravagance,” by the Rev. Mark Ramsey, Grace Covenant Presbyterian Church, Asheville, NC, October 4, 2009.
3. Arthur DeKruyter in a commentary on Matthew 18:21-35 at workingpreacher.com.
4. Frederick Dale Bruner, Matthew: A Commentary, Volume 2,Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1990, p. 235.
5. Scott Hoezee, ibid.
6. Miroslav Volf, Free of Charge: Giving and Forgiving in a Culture Stripped of Grace. Zondervan, 2005, p. 156.
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