Context: At our Wednesday healing service at Christ Church Easton this week, the Gospel reading was Matthew 18:21-35, the Parable of the Unforgiving Servant. At the end of the parable, the unforgiven servant (who had been forgiven by his master, but wouldn’t forgive his fellow slave, was being tortured for his unforgiveness. The following is a brief homily and discussion question we had on forgiveness.
Forgiveness
Remember, parables are stories that are meant to make a point. They aren’t to be taken 100 percent literally. To say that you are going to be tortured until you learn forgiveness sounds a little ridiculous.
But I am going to say to you that in this case, that’s actually true. Every one of us is tortured until we learn how to forgive.
When we hold resentment and unforgiveness in our hearts against someone, that feeling takes control over us. Kessler Bickford, who sometimes joins us at the healing service has given programs on forgiveness and she used the analogy of not forgiving someone being like having a huge fish on a fishing line, that we can’t pull in, and it’s digging into your hands and pulling the boat, and the fish is determining the direction you go and becomes the only thing you can focus on. And the only way forward is to cut the line, to forgive, so you can get back to living your own life.
Another famous analogy is that not forgiving someone and holding onto hate and resentment is like drinking poison and waiting for the other person to die.
Not only does it not work, it kills you in the process.
Archbishop Desmond Tutu, in “The Book of Forgiving” put it as eloquently and effectively as you can:
“Until we can forgive, we remain locked in our pain and locked out of experiencing healing and freedom, locked out of the possibility of being at peace.
“Without forgiveness, we remain tethered to the person who harmed us. We are bound with chains of bitterness, tied together, trapped. Until we can forgive the person who harmed us, that person holds the keys to our happiness; that person is our jailor. When we forgive, we take back control of our own fate and our feelings. We become our own liberators.”
It’s in that sense that the parable hits home: we are tortured when and while we don’t forgive. And that torture is self-inflicted.
Forgiveness is the way forward for Jesus and our way forward with Jesus.
The Lord’s Prayer is the prayer Jesus taught his disciples. Every time we pray it, we say:
“And forgive us our trespasses,
as we forgive those who trespass against us.“
And though we prefer the language that we know, the more accurate translation of those lines is:
“Forgive us our sins
as we forgive those who sin against us.“
If we ourselves ask for and know we need forgiveness when we slip up, what sense does it make to deny forgiveness to someone else? That’s what this parable tries to make clear—the hypocrisy of that kind of stance.
We’ve got not forgiving as being tortured. We have forgiveness as the way forward that Jesus asks us to take.
I also maintain that forgiveness is the only, or at least the main thing that will change the world. It’s hard to disprove the saying, “An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.”
On a national and global scale, unforgiveness, resentment, anger lead to wars, crimes against humanity, you name it. And the only direction it goes when unchecked is to get worse. Give someone more resources or more weapons, conflict continues and elevates.
In Luke’s Gospel, as Jesus is being tortured and killed on the cross, he says, “Father forgive them for they don’t know what they’re doing.”
Often when people react or act in violence and hatred, they don’t know what they are doing. They are seeing only through those limited lenses.
If you want to know if we have a forgiving God: in the Resurrection, when Jesus overcomes the death that humans gave him, we don’t see God looking for vengeance or retribution, instead we see Jesus doubling down on everything he had been saying, showing, modeling—love God and love your neighbor; if you are my disciples, they will know you by your love.
If we are going to get ourselves from the kingdom of the world to the kingdom of heaven, it’s going to be on the road of love and forgiveness.
How do we get there from here? What does it take in our lives, in your life, to more fully embrace forgiveness?
In some cases, it can be seeing the person or people who we need to forgive as human beings who make mistakes. It is realizing that it is often hurt people who hurt people.
Archbishop Tutu, in his book, explains a fourfold path of:
Telling the story
Naming the hurt
Granting forgiveness
Renewing or releasing the relationship
It’s an important thing to remember that forgiving someone doesn’t mean becoming best friends with them or even having them in your life.
Of course for some of us, the person we most need to forgive is ourselves, and that is a process as well.
Since Desmond Tutu has literally written the book on forgiveness, let’s give him the last word:
“When I cultivate forgiveness in my small everyday encounters, I am preparing for the time when a much larger act of forgiveness will be asked of me, as it almost certainly will. It seems none of us journeys through life unscathed by tragedy, disappointment, betrayal, or heartbreak, but each of us has at his or her disposal a most powerful skill that lessens and can even transmute the pain. This skill can, when given the chance, win over an enemy, heal a marriage, stop a fight, and—on a global scale—even end a war. When you set out to change the world, the job seems insurmountable. But each of us can do his or her small part to effect change. We can change the world when we choose to create a world of forgiveness in our own hearts and minds.”
