September 17, 2023

Pentecost 16A

Lectionary 24

Epiphany, Winnipeg

Matthew 18:21-35

Last week Jesus talked about forgiveness, and this week he’s on about it again, and it’s really really clear that forgiveness really matters. It matters for us in the church, it matters somehow for life in the world.

It’s in our Christian DNA, I guess. But forgiveness is hard.

This has happened many times: It’s Sunday morning and I’m in the car on the way to Epiphany where I’ll preach a gospel of healing and forgiveness and peace, and we’ll say a prayer we’ve said for thousands of years where we ask to be forgiven and we say that we’ll forgive, and then I’ll preside at a sacrament where Jesus feeds, really feeds us, the gift of forgiveness. I take the exit off Abinoji Meekanah – you know, what we’ll eventually say we used to call Bishop – and as I approach the stop light at Pembina I realize that for most of the drive I’ve been rehashing an argument I had with someone. Maybe earlier in the week, or maybe months ago, or maybe ten minutes ago when I dropped Val off at her church. I’ve been changing lanes at 85 and braking and accelerating and checking the mirrors and avoiding disaster but what’s really been on my mind is a conflict never addressed or an argument never resolved. And I pull up to the light and I realize that this is no way to drive, for sure, but it’s no way to be free, it’s no way to find joy in life, and it’s no way to live in community. Keeping score, keeping track of wrongs done, holding onto righteous, righteous anger. It’ll eat away at a person, it’ll eat away at me.

I’m getting better at it these days. I notice when it’s happening, and when I pull up to the red light I can imagine opening the passenger door and gently telling the old grudge to leave the car. It works, you know. And then a week or two or four later I might find the same thing happening.

Forgiveness is hard. But it’s worth doing again. And again. And again. It’s so much better than keeping score and trying to win and trying to be right at any cost. It’s worth doing. Again.

But it’s not easy.

Have any of you heard of or read the book “The Sunflower,” by Simon Wiesenthal? Wiesenthal was a Holocaust survivor who survived through four different concentration camps, and this book tells the story from just one day in one of those camps. A guard called him away from his day’s hard labour and drove him to a local hospital to hear the confession of a wounded and dying German soldier. The soldier told Wiesenthal the story of his life, including stories of atrocities that he had helped to commit against Jews, and his final request is that Wiesenthal, a Jew, forgive him for the things he had done to Jews throughout his lifetime. He insists that he will be unable to rest in peace if he does not hear that he is forgiven. Wiesenthal thinks for a moment, then turns and leaves the room in silence. That’s the end of his contact with the soldier. No yes or no. When he writes the book and tells the story he ends by asking the reader, “Should I have forgiven him?”

The final half of the book is filled with responses to that question, and in the most recent edition of the book there are responses from fifty-three people – scholars, authors, politicians, religious leaders, scientists, artists…Jews, Christians, Muslims, Buddhists…. There are people in the list like Desmond Tutu and the Dalai Lama, who always say the right thing, right? Some are academics, some are holocaust survivors, some have survived apartheid or attempted genocides in places like Bosnia or Cambodia, some have led charmed lives with no suffering like that. Weisenthal asks, “Should I have forgiven him?” Some of the people say, “forgive,” quite a few more say, “don’t forgive,” and quite a few more are simply uncertain.

Forgiveness is hard. It’s hard to do, and it’s hard to know what to do. Jesus is making it clear how important it is to forgive. But who of us can tell someone else how much to forgive? Can I tell a holocaust survivor to forgive? Should a residential school survivor just be told to forgive? Or someone who’s experienced violence or betrayal? Just forgive and move on? Can we just forgive, and not demand some kind of something in return? It’s a tricky thing, and who really knows how to test the limits or say much about how it should work?

Forgiveness is hard.

In this reading from Matthew today Peter asks Jesus a simple enough question: “If someone sins against me, how many times should I forgive?” Or “How many times will someone sin against me – because they will - and I’ll forgive them?” And Jesus as much as says, “Oh, lots and lots. Hundreds of times. You’re sure to lose count. Seventy seven times.” Or if you translate it the other way, “Seventy times seven times.” Four hundred and ninety times. I’m thinking that Jesus knows no one’s going to keep track of that. Or if they do, they’ll just make themselves miserable in the process.

Then Jesus tells a story that is filled with impossible numbers: There’s this slave who owes his king ten thousand talents. Like so many things in the Bible we can’t be entirely sure of all the specifics, but a talent is a unit of weight, estimated to be somewhere between 60 and 80 pounds. It also came to be a way of counting money – how much coin is worth how much? – and the estimates I’ve seen are that a talent – 60 to 80 pounds of cash – is what a labourer would make in fifteen years. So you might say that there was this slave who owed his master ten thousand talents or, you know, 600 or 800 thousand pounds of cash. Or about 150,000 years’ work. In other words, the numbers are impossible, but it makes a good story. And when the master threatens to sell the slave and his family and all he owns to pay the debt the slave says, “No! I’ll pay it all back! Really! I will.” Really? And then you can almost hear the master say to himself, “There’s no way he can pay it back.” So instead he just says, “The debt’s cancelled. You don’t owe me anything.”

Forgiveness is hard. But it’s something that can set us free. In this story the slave who’s forgiven is set free, and that crushing debt is just not there any more. But the master who writes off that debt is also set free. He won’t need to keep track and check the books and make sure the impossible repayment is still happening. He could have his own lifetime of making sure that he gets what he’s owed, but instead he just closes the accounting book and walks away; he’s set free from keeping score.

That’s maybe what it’s like when sins are forgiven. The books are closed, the guilt and shame columns are erased, cut out, pitched into the shredder. It’s not really forgive and forget, but it’s forgive and be free. Forgive and be free to figure out how to be at peace, or free to work together to make right what’s been wrong. And of course, free to enjoy the gift of life that’s given freely for us day after day after day.

You and I, all of us know that we’ll need to keep returning to that well of forgiveness again and again. That’s just the way life turns out to be, isn’t it? But that well of forgiveness never runs dry. God knows that it’s worth doing again and again. God knows that it’s worth the risk. God took a chance on it with some of Jesus’ last words on the cross – “God, forgive them, they don’t know what they’re doing”, and the risen Jesus took a chance on it by sending us out to give that same gift of forgiveness for one another and for the world.

The thing is, forgiveness isn’t going to be something that magically fixes everything. But it sets us free to try to make things right together instead of getting lost in working out guilt and shame and keeping score and demanding and demanding.

It’s important enough that it’s what Jesus calls us to do, it’s so much of what our life together is about. It’s important enough for us to make it a habit. It’s important enough to risk getting it wrong, it’s important enough to do it again. And again. And again.

Jesus tells this story about forgiveness before he takes his next steps into Jerusalem where he will find out how costly it can be to be the one who forgives. And he started out the story in that familiar way we’ve heard so often: “The reign of Heaven is like this,” and then he talks about being set free from impossible debts, and the gift of being set free from owing and being owed. Jesus opens the way to a world right here where the torture of always owing more than you can pay and always demanding payment for past hurts is over.

And he points us to what God is really at work doing in the world. God is at work in the world and among us to heal divisions, to make right what has gone wrong, to set free and to make alive. That’s what God is up to, that’s the gift God gives us to share.

We give that gift and receive it when someone – and not just a pastor – says “It’s OK, you’re forgiven. You’re free.” Today we taste it with some bread and wine and the Word of One who says, “This is all of me, given for you. And you’re forgiven. And you’re free.”

AMEN.