Proper 19 A - September 17, 2023

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Robert Leo Sevensky OHC

The Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 19 A, September 17, 2023

 

Genesis 50:15-21
Romans 14:1-12
Matthew 18:21-35

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   The themes of forgiveness and reconciliation feature prominently in today's scripture readings, particularly in the Old Testament story of Joseph's encounter with his brothers who had tried to kill him and Jesus’ teaching in Matthew's gospel about forgiveness.  Like all scripture, these passages occur within a particular context and story. This is especially true of the gospel passage which presents an ethic for the emerging Christian community as it struggles to understand and distinguish itself as it develops in and out of the rich soil of Jewish practice and the surrounding pagan classical culture.

    What makes Christian forgiveness distinct? How different is it from so-called run-of-the-mill human forgiveness? It's not easy to say. There is a growing interest among psychologists, philosophers and theologians in the process and possibility of forgiveness, and it turns out to be very complex indeed. Just this past week I was passing our sales table outside the bookstore and spotted a volume written by a Jesuit priest and scholar titled: “Rethinking Christian Forgiveness: Theological, Philosophical, and Psychological Explorations.” It looks like a great study, but at over 400 pages it did not turn out to be very helpful, at least in the short term. And yet all these dimensions--theology, philosophy, and psychology along with so much more--are part of the experience and challenge of forgiveness human and divine.   Given this richness and complexity, this may sound more like a lecture than a sermon, and I ask in advance for your pardon and patience. Because all I can offer are some thoughts, not terribly original and rather unrelated, but that I think important as we hear these scripture lessons and think together about forgiveness.
    In today's gospel Matthew presents Jesus as the new Moses, and his gospel has five sections of teaching which correspond in a way to the five books of Moses. And what Jesus does in today’s passage, as he so often does, is to turn the tables on our customary thinking about such things as forgiveness. Last week we heard him talking about fraternal correction and mutual accountability and how that might take shape in the Christian setting. Peter, wanting clarity and definition, immediately steps up and asks how often he should forgive his brother or sister, meaning a member of the Christian community. As many as seven times?  Peter, I imagine, thinks he's being quite generous here, perhaps even radical. But Jesus answers: not seven times but I tell you seventy-seven times or, as some manuscripts have it, seventy times seven. What kind of answer is that? Well perhaps it's an answer which says: there's no limit. Or better: perhaps it's an answer which says that forgiveness is not a numbers game at all. Forgiveness is not about arithmetic or counting but about conversion. If there is repentance and apology on the part of the wrongdoer--and I think we must acknowledge that condition in the text--then we must enter a process of availability and exploration that can lead to reconciliation and the healing of a ruptured relationship.
    But again, this is a Kingdom ethic and is specifically directed to the members of the early Christian community in their dealings with each other. Can we expand it to include our families, our friends, our community, our world? And should we? I don't know. I'd like to think we can and should, but here I truly don't know. What I do know is that this teaching of Jesus is not a formula for exploitation or for avoiding accountability or for excusing intentional harms as if they did not happen. Dean Andrew McGowan of Berkeley Divinity School, put it well in his recent reflection on today's Gospel:
“Jesus is not offering a formula for codependence, but for relations in the church community itself, and he is not allowing for a longer chain of repeated misbehavior than Peter, but suggesting that Peter and we consider the issue altogether differently.”
I'm also certain that this is not advice from the Ancient Near East to forgive so that we can, as we say today, get on with our lives, though that is how we often hear forgiveness spoken of in our current therapeutic culture. There is a truth in it, but not the main point as I see it.
    Today's gospel reading is mostly a parable about forgiveness and the refusal to forgive in turn. Despite its somewhat gruesome ending, the parable reminds us that we have been forgiven by God and probably also by many others and that we are invited, encouraged, and maybe even required to mirror that action in our daily lives. To conform our lives to God's model is to act according to our own deepest identity. It is to forgive as God forgives, which is rather indiscriminately. I think of an antiphon which we sing during the season of Lent: “If we forgive others the wrongs they have done, God in heaven will also forgive us.” But let’s be clear: we're not talking about arithmetic, we're not talking about give and take, we're not even talking about effort and reward.  We're talking about relationships and we're talking about reaching deeper within ourselves to touch that of God within us, whether we think we have it in us or not.
    Indeed, sometimes forgiveness can seem to be impossibly supernatural. Many of us are familiar with the recent incident when a white supremacist named Dylann Roof entered the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston SC and murdered nine church members. Though Roof displayed no obvious repentance, many of the victims’ family members offered Roof forgiveness. Similarly, in 2006 members of an Amish community in Pennsylvania rallied in support of the family of a man who had killed five young Amish girls, wounded five others, and then killed himself.  It sounds and looks like a miracle. But is it possible for us, and is it good for us or our society? Would I, would we be able to do that? My fear is that frequently our religious traditions push us to places where we're not ready to be, refusing to recognize that grace is more often a process, a very long process, sometimes a lifelong process rather than something that happens overnight.
    And beyond that, in the political realm, what does forgiveness mean? And who has the right to forgive? Can I forgive Hitler for the Holocaust? Or Pol Pot? Or Vladimir Putin? No, I cannot. Or at least not formally, largely because I don't have skin in that game. I don't have standing, as we might say in courts of law, as one who had been directly harmed by these people. We need to be careful that in our desire to make things nice we don't stifle the voices and the agency of those who have been grievously harmed. I cannot and should not speak for them unless they have commissioned me to do so.  Nor can I forgive on their behalf.
    So, where does this take us, where does it take me and you as Christians? First, it takes us to the recognition that forgiveness, unilateral or mutual, is rarely easy. It is hard work, it can be scary, and it can and often does leave scars. It is rarely, if ever: “Forgive and forget.” Rather it is and should be: “Forgive and remember” without holding the offense against the other whom we forgive but letting them and us become freer and more able to enter into a new relationship, even with those who have departed from us. After all, as we say in our creeds: we believe in the communion of saints. Forgiveness and reconciliation are still possible. Even after many years.
    My final word may sound a bit shocking. Aside from today’s teaching about the Christian community, Jesus never asks us to forgive our enemies. Yes, you heard that correctly: Jesus never asks us to forgive our enemies. But what he does ask of us is something even more revolutionary and paradoxically perhaps even easier.  Nicholas Wolterstorff writes in his book “Journey Toward Justice”:
“Nowhere in the New Testament is Jesus reported as enjoining his listeners to forgive unrepentant wrongdoers. We are instructed to love our enemies, including those who have wronged us and are unrepentant. We are not instructed to forgive our enemies.”
Not forgive but love. Even those who are unrepentant. Even those who continue in their harmful ways. Even those in the household of Faith. To love, to listen, to remain open to the possibility of a breakthrough, to welcome the smallest light that comes through the crack which leads to conversion of heart and mind and behavior.  Love is different from forgiveness, to be sure, but it is the ground and the soil from which the mystery of forgiveness can sprout and grow and flower and bear fruit.
    Unlikely? Maybe. Impossible? As a Christian I must say no. With God all things are possible. We live in hope. Daily we pray: “Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us.” And daily I pray for those whom I hate, people such as Vladimir Putin who continues to wreak such havoc on the land of my ancestors. I pray for him and for all the Vladimir Putin’s of this world so that my hatred might be turned to some kind of love, a love that wills the true and deepest well-being of the other, and that this love, tiny as it may be, can lead to the conversion of hearts, theirs and mine. I can hope for no less. 
    “Listen, listen, love, love.” That’s the motto of the Kairos prison ministry, a type of Cursillo for the incarcerated that our brother Allan Smith was deeply involved in until his passing in 2006.  He lived that motto.  And I think that that may be the perfect summary of Jesus’ teaching today: “Listen, listen, love, love.”  Perhaps forgiveness and reconciliation and salvation begin there for us all.  In fact, I’m pretty certain of it. 
Amen.