[Epiphany 4] forgiveness -- letting go and moving forward?

Then Peter came to Jesus and asked, "Lord, how many times shall I forgive my brother or sister or sibling who sins against me? Up to seven times?"

Jesus answered, "I tell you, not seven times, but seventy times seven."

Matthew 18: 21-22 (NIV, alt.)

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"Therefore, if you are offering your gift at the altar and there remember that your brother or sister or sibling has something against you, leave your gift there in front of the altar. First go and be reconciled to them; then come and offer your gift."

Matthew 5:23-24 (NIV, alt.)

Rev. Jerry Troyer preached about forgiveness and whole-hearted living, reflecting briefly on these passages in particular.

He noted that it's so much easier to be compassionate to others than to ourselves.

Honestly, I'd just as soon drop the mic there. But that's not much of a blog post.

When I looked on TextWeek for commentaries on these passages, I was reminded that they didn't come to us in isolation.

Matthew 18 begins with the disciples asking Jesus, "Who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?"

Jesus responds: become humble like children; if anything causes you to stumble, rip it out of you and kill it with fire; the shepherd will leave 99 sheep to find the one that has gone astray and rejoice over it; if another member of the Body of Christ sins against you, confront them directly and privately, escalating as necessary; also, whatever you bind/loose on earth will be bound/loosed in heaven, and wherever two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them, so if two of you agree on earth about anything you ask, God will grant it.

Jesus has said all that when Peter asks this question about whether there's a cap on how many times you have to forgive someone. Yup, I'm not too worried about the early church banding together and getting God to grant outrageous requests. It's kinda like Jesus hasn't said anything at all and we're back to the opening question of, "What about me?"

Jesus answered the initial question of "Who is the greatest?" with an assertion that we need to be humble -- and then goes on to talk about taking strong measures to ensure that one is following the Way, emphasizing aspects of being in community, being in relationship (as various commentators have noted).

Matthew 5 is the first chapter of Jesus' Sermon on the Mount, part of a series of statements in the structure of, "You have heard this rule, but I tell you that if you even think this terrible thing it's as bad as if you had done it."

I don't think of the Sermon on the Mount as being about community life particularly, but David Lose on Working Preacher commented (emphasis mine):

we think the law is about, well, being legal – you know, it's about doing the right thing, staying in the lines, keeping your nose clean. But the law is actually concerned with relationships.

Take the Ten Commandments, for instance: the first table is about our relationship with God and the second with our relationships with each other. Understood this way, the whole law is actually a way of pointing us toward ways to honor those with whom we are in relationship. But somehow we forget that, and so get caught up in keeping the law for the law's sake. Which is why Jesus intensifies the law – not to force us to take it more seriously or less seriously, but instead to push us to imagine what it would actually be like to live in a world where we honor each other as persons who are truly blessed and beloved of God. [...]

Law understood primarily in legal terms, you see, ends up being a moral and all-too-often self-justifying check list: No murder today; check! No adultery; check! Jesus wants more from us. Actually, Jesus wants more for us. He wants us to regard each other as God regards us and thereby to treat each other accordingly. Jesus is getting radical about the law precisely by calling us to look beyond the law it see its goal and end: the life and health of our neighbor! In this way Jesus calls us to envision life in God's kingdom as constituted not by obeying laws but rather by holding the welfare of our neighbors close to our hearts while trusting that they are doing the same for us.

So I wonder what would it be like, Working Preacher, if we took a leaf from Jesus' notebook and asked our members to think with us this week about what kind of community we want to inhabit.

Which brings us back to the passages Jerry read -- these exhortations from Jesus about forgiveness.

What does it mean to forgive?

It does NOT mean saying that the wrongdoer's behavior was acceptable, let's be clear.

Part of what it means to forgive is to let the past be the past -- not to excuse the wrongdoing of the past but to let it stop defining the present.

While it is true that forgiveness can be be a significant gift to grant another, the element of forgiveness that resonates most with me is how freeing it is to the one who is forgiving.

There is a popular quotation along the lines of: "Holding onto anger is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die." Oftentimes people neither know nor care that we haven't forgiven them (sometimes they don't even know they've done something to hurt us). We are the ones who carry around this anger, this resentment. And I am the first to endorse externally-directed anger (it can be a powerful force for positive change, and I think it is frequently preferable to beating up on ourselves), but even I know that it's not always healthy or helpful.

And certainly Jesus doesn't endorse that kind of living. Externally-directed anger is appealing to me because it makes me feel powerful and superior, but those aren't the kinds of adjectives that Jesus encourages us to aspire to. Sure, I can point to Jesus turning over the tables of the moneychangers in the Temple (John's Gospel even brings in a whip), and I am in no way saying that Jesus is opposed to righteous anger. But Jesus' priority is the vulnerable -- lifting them up not in the way the world would, to just reverse positions while maintaining a broken and hurtful system, but transforming the system, reorienting our priorities.

William Loader says, "The reduction of the gospel to forgiveness of sins misses the point of the gospel which is about making people whole."

Which brings us back to community and relationship.

Jerry quoted Mary Morrissey that when a person can walk the streets of your mind and not be attacked, then you have truly forgiven them.

How many people do we attack in our minds? How can we build a community together if we're attacking each other? (Which brings us back to Jesus' Sermon on the Mount -- if we attack people in the streets of our minds, it may not be as immediately harmful to them as attacking them on the streets of their own lives, but ultimately some of the destruction is the same.)

Sure, not everyone is someone we're going to reconcile with -- sometimes the healthiest choice is to cease to be in relationship with someone -- but how can we transform our relationships with those who have harmed us so that we are no longer attacking them in the streets of our minds?

Jerry told the parable of a woman who is drowning but won't let go of a rock she's holding because, she says, "It's mine."

Are there things we hold on to because we don't know who we would be without them, even if we also know that they're killing us?

Are there ways we can release these resentments, hand them over to God?

I think "forgiveness" is a difficult (and fraught) word for many, but I wonder if loosening our grasp on old resentments could be a baby step toward living into the Beloved Community that God desires for all Creation.

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What about you, Beloved? What do these passages bring up for you?

You're invited to continue the conversation in the comments -- responding to any of the questions I've asked or raising questions of your own, or simply sharing some thoughts.

As always, you're welcome to comment anonymously/pseudonymously if you prefer.