September 17, 2023, Is Forgiveness More Than Self-Care? Matthew 18:21-35 – Mtr. Kathryn Boswell

saintphilipsnorwood ♦ September 17, 2023 ♦ 4 Comments

To listen to this sermon, click the link above. The text of the sermon is below.

The popular wisdom about forgiveness these days is that we ought to forgive because it is good for us. I’m sure most of you know the saying from AA that refusing to forgive someone who has hurt you is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die. Scientifically, it has been proven: unforgiveness is hazardous to your health. Not just your mental health, either, but your physical health as well. Unforgiveness breeds stress, and stress wreaks all kinds of havoc with our minds and bodies both. This is all true, and it’s a pretty good motivation for us to offer forgiveness – but it’s not the whole truth, and it’s not really what the Bible, or Jesus, teaches us about forgiveness.

First of all, it’s important to note that there are things that we can’t forgive – specifically, we can’t forgive a sin committed against another person – we can’t forgive someone else’s abusive spouse or parent, we can’t forgive the Nazis for slaughtering the Jews, we can’t forgive Dylann Roof for murdering the people of Mother Emmanuel Church. We can offer grace to everyone; we are commanded to love everyone; and we are commanded to forgive those who trespass against us, but we can’t offer forgiveness to those who have trespassed against our brother or sister.

We can’t do any of those things, because of what forgiveness is. Forgiveness is not a generic attitude; forgiveness isn’t kindness or turning a blind eye to sin; forgiveness is a concrete personalresponse to someone who has hurt us. And, it is sometimes very, very hard to do.

And that’s why it’s so important for us to understand what the Bible does tell us about forgiveness:

1. Forgiveness can change a narrative; it can re-cast a story in a whole new light. We see that today in the story about Joseph forgiving his brothers. Joseph was the favored child, his father’s pet, and his brothers had hated him so much that they had sold him into slavery and had told their father he was dead. Joseph ends up not only a slave, but spending a long time languishing in prison before God rescues him and things finally begin to look up. Now, here, years later, when they meet again, Joseph refuses to condemn his brothers for the very real evil they had done. He forgives them, saying, “Am I in the place of God?”

These are the irrefutable facts: Joseph was a spoiled brat; his brothers did something horrendously cruel and heartless to him; Joseph suffered for years before God rescued him

But this is the bigger reality: God wove this story of dysfunction and suffering and evil into a blessing for his people. Because Joseph had been sold into slavery, he was in a position to save the lives of thousands of people, including his own family, when a time of famine swept over the land.

Joseph was able to get a God’s-eye view of his life, to see beyond the harm his brothers had done to him. And that set him free to forgive.

We all have stories, and some of our stories are stories of cruelty or betrayal or neglect. Those facts matter. Forgiveness doesn’t put a coat of whitewash over the truth; it doesn’t turn the clock back or undo what evil has been done. What forgiveness can do, though, is it can make our story bigger; it can give us new perspective; it can let us see the God’s-eye view of our lives.

2. And even more than giving us new perspective, forgiveness has real power to change lives. On the night of the Resurrection, Jesus came to his disciples in the upper room. “As the Father has sent me, even so I am sending you.” And when he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit.If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you withhold forgiveness from any, it is withheld.”

And he said to Peter, “you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth shall have been bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall have been loosed in heaven.”

Forgiveness is the super power of those in whom the Spirit dwells. By some mystery of God’s gracious will, our human act of forgiveness releases the person who hurt us from the bondage of their sin. Jesus, on the cross, set his abusers and tormentors and betrayers and mockers free – released them from the condemnation they deserved – when he prayed, “Father, forgive them, they don’t know what they are doing.”

We don’t have any way of knowing what all those people did with the freedom Jesus offered them at that moment. We know that at the moment of Christ’s death, the centurion recognized him as the Son of God. We know that Peter and the disciples were able to move on from their cowardice and betrayal to become fearless witnesses to the Good News. How many more lives were transformed that day by those words of forgiveness? And we have been given that same power, by the Spirit of Christ that lives within us.

3. There is a cartoon where Jesus is telling his disciples “I tell you, not seven times, but seventy times seven.” And Peter, with his head in his hands, is saying. “Oh great. Not only do I have to forgive my brother; now I have to do math!” And the caption underneath the picture says, “Forgive! Because it’s easier than math. Math is hard.” But of course we all know the truth about that – that forgiveness is even harder. Some manuscripts say that Jesus says seventy times seven, and others say seventy-seven times, but it doesn’t actually make any difference, because all those numbers aren’t there for the purpose of keeping track of how many times our enemy has left before they have exhausted our supply of pardons; they are just a way of expressing that there is no upper limit to forgiveness. It isn’t about the math. Jesus is telling Peter that there is no “enough” when it comes to forgiveness.

4. Which might sound like bad news – but it is actually the best news, because the thing about forgiveness is that it all begins with God offering forgiveness to us. And the good news is that God never runs out of forgiveness for us. Psalm 103 says, “He forgives ALL our sins” Jeremiah tells us, “His mercies are new every morning.” God never runs out of patience like an exasperated parent; he never tells us, “This is the last straw!”

The bottom line about forgiveness, is that forgiveness is the overflow of a thankful heart. And that is the message of Jesus’s parable, about the unforgiving servant. He begins, “The kingdom of heaven is like this….” In the story, the fellow servants of the unforgiving servant are shocked and grieved by his behavior, shocked and grieved that someone who has been forgiven such an enormous debt– a debt far beyond anything he could possibly repay – would refuse to forgive the small debt that was owed to him.. Jesus uses such ridiculous numbers that we know he is being hyperbolic here to make his point. The first servant owes the equivalent of 200,000 years wages, while his fellow servant only owes him a few months’ wages. It is unthinkable that anyone would refuse to forgive when he had been shown such overwhelming grace. The kingdom of heaven works like this, Jesus says: forgiveness overflows in gratitude, and gratitude overflows in the grace of more forgiveness.

We should forgive because Jesus tells us to forgive; we should forgive because it has real power to re-write narratives and change people’s lives; we should definitely forgive because it can save us from heart attacks and panic attacks and ulcers and nightmares. But ultimately, the reason we ought to forgive is because we know how much, and we know how often, and we know how generously we have been forgiven.

“Freely we have received. Now, we can freely give.”