The Business of Forgiveness

Matthew 18.21 Then Peter came to him and said to him, 'Lord, if another member of the church sins against me, how often should I forgive? As many as seven times?' You've got to hand it to ever-eager Peter. Jesus can't get through parable or a miracle or a sermon without Peter raising his hand with a question. 'Okay JC, I think I'm starting to see the bigger picture here but… if somebody sins against me, exactly how many times do I have to forgive them? Would seven times suffice?' 'No,' Jesus says, 'It's time to break out your multiplication tables Pete. I tell you: seventy times seven times.' Peter, the rock of the church (!), says, 'But Jesus, if we forgive that many times, we'll go to our graves forgiving.' And Jesus says, 'That's not a bad idea…' 'We can't do it Lord! Increase our faith!' One of my go-to expressions from the pulpit is that the church is in the forgiveness business. But the casual nature of such syntactic delivery often betrays the immensity of forgiveness; forgiveness always comes at a cost. Forgiveness costs the one offering it AND the one who receives it. To offer forgiveness implies a willingness to truly see those who have wronged us as fellow sheep in desperate need of a shepherd who will leave it all behind to find the one who is lost. And to receive forgiveness implies a willingness to admit that we are the very people who are no better than any of the other sheep. Jesus routinely criticizes the religious leaders of his day for all sorts of theological nonsense. They are hypocrites and slanderers and thieves and they keep heaping sins upon the backs of those who keep the faith. And then Jesus shows up and passes out forgiveness to those who ask for it and even to those who don't even know they need it. Incidentally, have you ever noticed that whenever someone asks Jesus to heal them (let me see; let me walk; cleanse my leprosy; etc.) Jesus almost always responds by forgiving their sins before doing anything about their present malady? Even still, we insist on holding our grudges, big and small, even though our Lord, the Good Shepherd, is forever out and about beating the bushes of life looking for some lost sheep, some cruel tax collector, or some religious do-gooder to bring them back into the fold. Perhaps we struggle with it so much simply because, again, forgiveness isn't easy. In the end we're all publicans and pharisees. We vacillate between lives of honesty and lives of denial. We hold onto our anger toward one another and we also foolishly assume that no one could ever be angry with us. The worst kind of lostness is not knowing how lost we are at all. The worst kind of sin is believing that we are without it. The worst kind of unforgiveness is to presume we don't need forgiveness. But we are, one and all, lost. We're stuck out in the bushes of life, far removed from our shepherd for the many things we've done or left undone. But God keeps insisting on meeting us where we are, rather than where we ought to be. God's forgiveness is staggering because God forgives long before we ever have a chance to repent. Consider the sheep; it's probably going to get lost again and again. The sheep doesn't say, 'Oh Good Shepherd, I promise to never get lost ever again.' No, the sheep just says, 'Baa!' And the shepherd comes searching. Consider the sower; scattering seeds all over the place is no way to run a farm. The whole point of the sower is that God doesn't wait for us to get our soil in shape before dropping grace upon us. Consider the publican; he walks away forgiven and we learn nothing about whether or not he mended his ways. He could go back into the sanctuary day after day, seventy times seven times, and he would walk away forgiven every time. If we ever confess, it is only ever a confession to waking up to what we already have. In other words, weareforgiven not because we make ourselves forgivable, but only because we have a Forgiver. - 'The one great sin from which we must escape is to exclude anyone from the 'yes' of God's mercy.' - Karl Barth