Matthew
18:21–35 How
many times must I forgive?
The answer
to the ultimate question of Life, the Universe and Everything, is, as every
well-educated hitchhiker knows, 42. If
you are not sure why the answer is 42, check out the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the
Galaxy. Hopefully it will give you a
chuckle. However, in today’s scripture
reading, it’s 490, way more than what Peter thought. Peter may have thought he was going above and
beyond in even suggesting 7.
Why 7? Well, how many days are there in a week?
7. How many animals did Noah bring into
the Ark in Genesis 7? Surprisingly, 7,
(the 2 by 2 is in Genesis 6, a good thing to toss out there if someone is
trying to prove that the bible has no contradictions in it). How many days did Jacob work so he could
marry Rachel? 7. How many days did Isaac grieve Abraham’s
death? 7. How many generations suffer
for the wrong doings of their family? 7 generations. How many years of famine brought Joseph’s
family to Egypt for reconciliation?
7. How many days did Noah wait
before sending out the dove to find dry land? 7. You get the picture. 7 was a special, almost magical number for
the Jewish people. It still is seen as a
lucky number by people. Also consider
that there are the Seven Wonders of the World, the seven dwarfs, seven colors
in the rainbow, seven notes on a musical scale, seven deadly sins, and we all
want to get into 7th heaven.
Buddhism believes 7 is the highest form of wisdom, and other faiths also
have special meanings they attach to 7.
A
mathematician explained that 7 is the only number that can be counted on the
fingers of two hands that can’t be multiplied or divided into the other numbers
on the hand. 2 can be multiplied, 5 can be doubled, 8 can be halved, but 7 is
the only one that sticks out, dare we say it, like a sore thumb.
So, Peter
may have thought he was onto something smart when he proposed seven. Rabbis suggested three, which if you blew
that, you were out of luck, just like a batter striking out in a baseball game. Peter was proposing a level of forgiveness
that was perfect in his eyes. Jesus went
even higher than that. Perfection
multiplied by infinity. Ouch!
For so many
of us, even one time seems impossible.
“I’ll never forgive Uncle So and So after that one time he did such and
such” is more our style. People don’t
forgive the oddest of things. I remember
a time when I put a “No Smoking please, baby lives here” sticker on my front
door and had an aunt and uncle tell me that they would never forgive me for my
inhospitality. And they would never
visit me or my babies either. Ouch! Forgiveness is a dirty word, one that our
society struggles to understand. How
many times have we heard, “I will never forgive you for that!” spoken in anger?
Then we
hear in the news tales of forgiveness that sound unbelievably naïve. The 2007 story of the Amish community who
forgave the man who had shot and killed their children. Or Reverend Dale Lang, an Anglican Priest in
Taber Alberta who forgave the shooter who killed his son in 1999. Or this week, Cheryl Uchytil, mother of
Nature Duperron of Athabasca, who was in court to hear the sentence for her
daughter’s killer, talked about how she needed to forgive what had
happened. Cheryl said that the anger made
her sick and did not help her with her grief.
Forgiveness was healing, but it wasn’t easy or fast.
Some of the
challenges we have with forgiveness is that we don’t know what it is. Forgiveness is not tolerance. Tolerance means we put up with bad behavior,
which leads to further resentment.
Tolerance is a way to justify avoiding conflict, and it tries to
strengthen us to continue to endure bad behavior.
Forgiveness
is not forgetfulness either. Rev. Lang
will never forget losing his son, nor would he want to.
Forgiveness
is not conflict resolution. Often people
seem to think that they would have to look their abuser in the face and have a
conversation with them that would lead to mutual understanding and peace. There are times when reconciliation can take
place, but there are times when reconciliation is not possible. Nor is forgiveness a weapon to shame someone
into admitting they were wrong and need to apologize to you. Although that can sometimes happen,
forgiveness doesn’t work like that except in daydreams and bad movies.
Forgiveness
is a work of our hearts. It is a
reminder that we cannot fully judge other people’s actions without a clear
understanding of why they did what they did.
Like an iceberg, their reasons for their actions are far below the
surface of public statements. Holding a
grudge makes us sick and fearful and easily triggered. Our reactions signal that we need to explore
our own icebergs to find out why we are resisting forgiveness. Did the event leave us feeling vulnerable?
Unsafe? Afraid? Anxious? What can we do
to strengthen our hearts so we will feel safer, braver, able to better protect
ourselves from future problems?
One thing
that we can do to strengthen our hearts is listen to Paul. He wrote that we are to stop passing judgment
on one another and resolve not to be stumbling blocks. In other words, when we judge that the other
person should have been better, smarter, kinder, calmer or more compassionate
to avoid the bad behavior they inflicted on us, we are putting a barrier
between ourselves and God. Like the
official who judges the servant and throws him in jail for an insignificant
debt, we are failing God’s holy math.
When we forgive, we free ourselves from the painful addiction to a bad
memory. Or as one Facebook post said,
“sometimes we are the collateral damage in someone else’s war against
themselves”.
When we pray that God forgives our trespasses
as we forgive others who trespass against us, we not only let go of the anger
and fear that the initial event triggered in us, we also commit to not
retraumatizing ourselves by revisiting the old pain. This can be just as damaging as the original
event. When we apply holy math and
practice letting go of that hurt, we can heal ourselves and our relationships. Brene Brown says that when we can accept that
most people are doing the best they can, we can become kinder and more
resilient. That’s the kind of math Jesus
wanted for us. A math that leads to
peace and compassion and kindness, a call to resilience and hope. May we find ways to live out that call.
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