14 September 2008

The Rev'd Lloyd Prator

New York City

Peter is one of the great figures in the gospels and he is especially appealing because he represents so much of us, we find so many aspects of ourselves in this early apostle. When Jesus says that he will build his church on Peter the Rock, I don’t think he is so much talking about the primacy of Peter’s Apostolic office, as he is recognizing that Peter represents the kind of raw human material that Jesus knows he has to work with. In today’s story, Peter came to Jesus to talk about forgiveness. In fact, he came to talk to Jesus about what a wonderful, forgiving fellow he had become and wanted, I suppose, to have Jesus pat him on the back and congratulate him.

Peter explains that he thinks maybe he should forgive others as many as seven times. And, in fact, this was, by the theological standards of the day, a fairly generous proposal. The standard number was, we re told, three times. There is a line in the prophecy of Amos in which the prophet says that a certain people stand condemned for three transgressions, and for four. So, maybe that was the cut-off point. So Peter was proud of himself, he was doing better than Amos, he was smarter and more pious than the Bible itself, and so Jesus surely should commend him.

But that is not what happens. Jesus says that he should forgive seventy times seven times. Four hundred ninety times. Except that seventy times seven is a Hebrew euphemism for a number beyond imagination. And to drive the point home, he tells the parable of the unforgiving servant. There was this servant who had been forgiven a very great debt and went out and dealt without mercy to someone who owed him just a tiny debt.

The story is meant to drive home a couple of points essential to understanding jesus.

The first is that Christians stand in what we might call a dialogue of forgiveness. A dialogue of forgiveness. God forgives us; we pass on the forgiveness to others. Forgiveness flows like a living word from the Father to us then to those around us. In fact, when Jesus got around to teaching us the Our Father, there is that very same idea right in the middle of the prayer we will (sing) (say) in just a few minutes: Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us.

The second is that we should try to get away from a bookkeeper’s mentality when it comes to sins – both our own and others. Helmut Thielicke, the great German New Testament theologian worked a lot on the parables, including this one. He said that the main human problem is the desire to keep track of the ways in which our neighbors have been unjust. A record keeping mentality. He goes on to say that our main effort should be in making ourselves ready to forgive him when he asks.

You know the kind of attitude that breeds: It goes like this: “If so and so comes to me and really, really grovels, then I will give in and forgive him.” The more Christ-like attitude, Thielicke goes on to say, involves taking the initiative – just as Christ did. God, in Christ, chose to come live among us and place himself close enough to hear our repentance when w e want forgiveness. Similarly, taking the initiative in starting to forgive involves staying close, hanging in there with another person, being willing and prepared to respond.

Don’t be so focused on keeping records of sins and offenses that you are unable to hear the murmurings of the heart which may be the first words of repentance. Such is the vocation of the Christian man or woman.

And, then finally, there is a terrible burden to being the aggrieved or offended person. We all know people who are so narrow that their only identity is that of the offended person. The continual song is “He done me wrong!” Unable to participate in any of the joys of life, unable to see any hope in any event however modest, such people are walking lists of grievances that have been done against them. Their inability to let go has deprived them of their humanity, their community, and most of all, any sense of hope for the future. They are victims of their past, captives of wrongs done to them.

A writer named Simone Tugwell wrote, in a book called Prayer: Living With God, a story about two Buddhist monks, Tanzan and Ekido, living in Japan, I think it was. They were traveling down a muddy road and when they came out into a cleaing, there was a fast-moving river, swollen by the rains that were still falling. And waiting by the riverside in a little shanty, was this exceptionally beautiful young girl, unable to cross the river. Tanzan looked at her, and immediately picked her up and carried her across the river in his arms. Ekido sulked the whole rest of the day until they returned to their monastery. Finally, he could no longer contain himself and blurted out, “We are monks under vows! We never even go near females! Especially not young and lovely ones. It is dangerous – why did you do that?” Tanzan thought about it for a moment and then replied, “I left that girl back there hours ago. Are you still carrying her?”

What are you still carrying? Is there some burden, perhaps an offense committed against you years ago, which you still carry to this day? How much power do you want to give to those who offended you? How long do you want to live under their sway?

An unforgiven sin is an unshed burden. That can be true whether you are the sinner or the one sinned against. Forgiveness stands at the heart of the Christian faith in order that we may put down those burdens and move on. Freedom — freedom from sin, from limitations, even from death – is the central hope of the Christian faith, and that freedom comes in little bits and pieces, which we can lay hands on whenever we are prepared to forgive those who sin against us. That freedom is the heart of the gospel and it is our today.