So my heavenly Father will also do to every one of you, if you do not forgive your brother or sister from your heart.
Jesus has just told a parable where a slave goes to his lord, explaining he cannot repay his debts. Have patience with me, lord, and I will pay everything. So the lord does. That same slave runs into someone who owes him money, and the second slave asks the first for patience. Instead the slave, whose debts had just been forgiven, ordered his debtor into jail. When the lord heard that, he handed the first slave over to be tortured until his debts were paid. Jesus concludes by saying that the heavenly Father will do to you, if you do not forgive your brother or sister from the heart.
Forgiveness is a tricky thing. On a strictly human level, it’s so much easier to see and feel the wrongs that we need to forgive in others, than it is to see the wrongs we’ve caused that mean someone else needs to forgive us. I know who’s wronged me. I can hold those hurts, with a deep sense of ‘justice’ that needs to be righted. And while I might be able to recognize when I’ve wronged someone else, it’s highly unlikely I’d hold on to that wrong, in my master balance sheet of who owes who. I think that means we all walk around with an undisclosed but ever-present running tally sheet of forgiveness sought, and forgiveness given. The problem is that because we’re blinder to our own foibles, our own scoresheet is probably empirically accurate. Even bigger is the problem that we’re all running around with our own biased balance sheet. Writing these words, I’m struck how this is particularly true with the people we love the most.
All of that forgiveness complication – who needs to be forgiven and who needs to forgive, gets more complicated when you introduce the Divine. Because I believe in an all-loving, all-merciful God, God is forgiving me every hour of every day. God would have to considering all of the big and little ways I hurt others, or the earth or the Divine. As our confession say, all things known and unknown, things done and left undone. There is nothing that God doesn’t forgive, and there is nothing that I can do that separates me from that all-merciful love.
So according to Jesus, we are called to forgive others, just like that first slave, because we have been forgiven by God. That I can understand. The part I wrestle with this morning, is the suggestion that “God will do to you”, coming right after hearing that the slave owner tortured the unforgiving slave. I cannot imagine that God will do that, because I don’t believe God is a tortuous God.
But here’s what that might be. It might be self-imposed. In the Dalai Lama’s book on happiness he talks about how sometimes we make our own unhappiness, and he gives several reasons, and one of the reasons is holding on to wrongs. When we feel slighted or wronged by someone else, we use the phrase, ‘wounded’. When we hold on to that, we hold on to that wound. I have met people so riddled with bitterness over past unforgiven wrongs, that they do seem tortured.
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