Isaiah 53:4-6
Luke 7:36-50
I’m bad at forgiving people. Well, that’s not quite right. Sometimes, in certain situations, I find forgiveness relatively easy to accomplish. When my children, or my wife, or a dear friend, or a family member – when someone who I love deeply does something that hurts me, it is for sure not fun, but, once we work through it, I generally don’t find it too difficult to get over those things. Because I know that there’s something deeper than whatever upsetting or painful thing happened – there’s something deeper than the hurt I feel or the offense I’ve taken – there’s something deeper that holds us together. I know that our love for each other, our connection to each other, our relationship with each other, is deeper than whatever has upset me, and so, I’m able to forgive. Because, generally, the things we’re talking about – the things I have been asked to forgive these people – are, in the scheme of things, relatively small, relatively minor. I know that’s not the case in all families or with all friends – sometimes our loved ones betray us, abuse us, do us harm. I’ve experienced some of those deep hurts in the past – and that’s a very different story than what I’m talking about right now, those things are much harder to forgive – but, the day-to-day stuff, with the folks I love, forgiveness in those cases seems pretty simple.
But, what about with people who I don’t know? People with whom I don’t have a loving relationship? With those folks, forgiveness, well, it doesn’t come so easily. In particular, when someone hurts one of my people, when someone hurts a person who I love, I find it REALLY hard to forgive them. If my wife has an interaction with someone at work who is treating her like crap, I want to hunt that person down and tell them why they are the worst. Or, when someone treats my kids poorly, my reaction – well, let’s just say that I have a real hard time being “chill dad” or “that cool pastor down the street” when someone is a jerk to my family. In those cases, I tend to go a little bit crazy, and get all sorts of angry – and the last thing I want to do is forgive them.
Or think about the people doing awful things in the public realm: political leaders emboldening white supremacists, celebrity pastors using their power to take advantage of the people who they are supposed to be shepherding, TV personalities spreading conspiracy theories that get people killed, the powerful doing harm to the weak, all sorts of folks who multiply injustice and darkness in our world. I find it really hard to forgive those people, to see them as anything other than hateful, disgusting, monsters. I have a hard time looking at someone like that and saying “you are loved.”
And maybe that’s the core of my problem. I see those folks, folks who are distant from me who do harm, I see them as monsters. I define them, in my head, based on the wrong things they have done, and not really based on anything else. But, the folks who are close to me, when they do me wrong, I see them as people first – people who I love, people who have so much good in them – and the wrong thing isn’t definitive of their identity – it’s instead a mistake, or a miscalculation, or a bad decision. But it’s not who they are. The people who I struggle to forgive, perhaps the real problem is that I don’t really see them as people at all.
Over the next three weeks, we are going to be talking about forgiveness. We will be telling stories of forgiveness from the Bible, and asking what these stories have to teach us about forgiveness – and what it means to forgive those sins, those wrongs, that we can’t forget. We’re doing this because – and we’ll get to this more in a minute – because forgiveness is one of the central elements, the central ideas, in Christian faith.
But, as we get started here, it’s worth it for us to get a sense of what forgiveness is. Forgiveness is, on one level, a matter of restored relationship. When someone you love offends you, hurts you, forgiveness is a way of not letting that hurt, that harm, linger in the relationship, define the relationship – forgiveness is a way of letting go of what happened and starting fresh.
And as we get into this, I want to pause for a moment and say something really important: many times, across the history of Christianity, the idea of forgiveness has been used as a cudgel – Christian preachers have said “you have to forgive people who wrong you, no matter what!” And, as a general rule, I don’t think “you have to” is a healthy way to talk about faith – not when our God has promised to love us no matter what. But, more practically than that, too often the way that forcing forgiveness has worked out is that people have heard from preachers that it’s not OK to leave an abusive spouse, or a dangerous situation – or a marriage that’s full of unrepentant adultery – because “you just have to forgive them.” The command to forgive has kept people in abusive, dangerous, situations. And that’s not OK. So, I want you to hear me: Jesus calls us to forgive others. But that doesn’t mean we have to act like nothing happened. It doesn’t mean you have to stay in an abusive situation. If you are being abused, get out. If you are in a relationship where you are being treated like garbage, maybe it’s time to walk away. Now, listen, I can’t make that decision for you, and I can’t speak about all the complicated relationships in our world in broad strokes during a sermon, but I can say that, when we talk about forgiveness, we are not saying that you should keep letting harm be done to you – or to someone who you love – over and over again. I have read powerful stories about people forgiving the person who killed someone they loved. But, their forgiveness doesn’t mean they want that person to go on killing other people. You can forgive without letting harm continue.
Having said all of that, I want to ask the question: how does forgiveness happen? Because, forgiveness seems to be a big deal. Jesus tells his disciples to forgive “not just seven times, but seventy-seven times” – meaning, forgive people over and over, even if they don’t deserve it. And I know, from experience, that if I don’t forgive something, it can begin to eat me up on the inside. Have you ever been so mad at someone that you keep thinking about them, keep fuming about what they did or wishing you could give them a piece of your mind? I know that’s not healthy for me. It’s not who God calls me to be, and it’s not who I want to be. But, what can I do about it?
Well, over the years, I’ve learned that while I’m not great at forgiving people on my own, I can bring them to God in prayer. Recently, I got mad at a couple of my neighbors for acting in a way that, to me, felt like they were being self-indulgent bullies. And that never sits well with me. I learned about it one evening and stewed about it all that night. I didn’t sleep well. So, the next morning, during my morning prayer, I prayed for them for about 15 minutes. I’ll admit, some of it was praying for them to be transformed and stop being jerks, but some of it was for them to find joy, and to live lives of love. And, I found that, after that time of prayer, the edge of my resentment wore off. I’m not exactly sure whether or not I forgave them. But I released at least a bit of my anger towards them – I gave it over to God, and let it be God’s problem.
And, in the midst of that time of prayer, or maybe after it, I was reminded of something – something I said earlier – that forgiveness happens most easily with people to whom we are connected. And I realized – maybe God reminded me – that those people with whom I was angry are much more like me than I’m willing to admit. I do things that upset people all the time, I’m sure, without realizing it. And, the thing is, at a fundamental level, from God’s perspective, we are the same: we are God’s beloved children, we are people for whom Christ died – Christ was nailed to a cross to save me and to save the people who I think are jerks and struggle to forgive – because we are, all of us, sinners who are given God’s love even though we don’t deserve it.
In the book of Romans, we read that “while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” In God’s plan, in God’s story, the center of this thing we call Christian faith is that we humans did something unforgiveable – we crucified the King of Kings, we murdered God’s son, we nailed God to the cross – we did the unforgiveable, and God forgave us anyway. That’s the passage we read from Isaiah: on the cross God, in Jesus Christ, absorbs the worst that humanity has to offer, and doesn’t respond with anger, or retribution, or punishment, or nursing a grudge – God responds to our worst, to our attack on God the Father’s beloved child – God responds to all of that with grace, with mercy, with forgiveness – with wiping our slate clean and giving us a fresh start.
Forgiveness, at a fundamental level, isn’t something that we can offer to other people; it’s not something that comes from a well of compassion or goodness deep within us. Forgiveness is something that comes from God. And we can only offer it to others when we are seeing with God’s eyes, when we learn to see people as God sees them – and as God sees us – as God’s beloved children, as brothers and sisters of Jesus, as people who have done wrong and are nevertheless given love – whether we deserve it or not.
In the story we read from Luke today, Jesus is at the house of a religious leader, having dinner. And a woman shows up – a woman of ill-repute, a well-known social outcast and undesirable – and she starts weeping at Jesus’ feet, bathing his feet with her tears. The host of the party, this religious leader, judges Jesus – if Jesus was a real prophet, the man thinks, surely Jesus would realize that this woman is dirty and wouldn’t let her touch him. But Jesus says, this woman is pouring out love to me – she is offering me hospitality and care that you, as the host, should have offered but never did. Is it possible that, because she knows her sins are great, and she sees that God has forgiven them, she’s overflowing with love, while you, who don’t think you need to be forgiven, are acting all pompous and high and mighty?
You see, when we realize just how much we ourselves need to be forgiven, we are much more likely to forgive others. When we realize just how amazing God’s love for us has been, we are way more likely to share that love, to offer care and hospitality and grace and forgiveness. It’s important to note, again, that forgiveness is not the same as saying that what someone did is OK, that it wasn’t bad, or letting someone continue to do harm. God forgives us our sin, but God does not say that sin is OK. God is against sin, and wants it to be stopped. Forgiveness is not an endorsement of wrongdoing – it is God saying that sin no longer gets to have the last word on our story. Forgiveness, God’s grace, means that we are no longer defined by our sin. We are defined, instead, by God’s grace, by God’s love for us – a love we could never earn, never deserve.
Forgiveness, in other words, is something that God does first. And, then, it’s something that God does through us. We can’t force it – in fact, when the worst happens, it can be harmful to try to force ourselves – or to force others – to forgive people who have harmed them. Trying to force forgiveness, to make ourselves forgive when we are still resentful, can tear us apart psychologically, can tie our spirits into knots. What we can do, instead, is offer the folks who have wronged us up to God in prayer, and hope that God can use that prayer to heal what needs healing – including ourselves. What we can do is remind ourselves, over and over, of just how freely and abundantly God has loved us. When we think we are perfect – like the religious leader in this story seems to think he is perfect and doesn’t need anyone to forgive him – it’s easy to be judgmental, it’s easy to look down on others, and it’s hard to forgive. But when we see ourselves honestly, as broken people, as people who have, maybe intentionally, maybe unintentionally – as people who have harmed others – when we see ourselves as broken people in need of forgiveness, it’s much easier to see others as broken people in need of forgiveness.
But, again, that’s not something we can do by sheer force of will. It is a gift from God. Forgiveness happens on the cross. Forgiveness happens in Jesus Christ, crucified and resurrected. Forgiveness is who Jesus is – he is the one who welcomes sinners at his table, and eats with them, who invites the outcasts and the pariahs and the notable sinners to join his community, and who says to them: your sin is not your identity. Your identity is as one of God’s people, as a beloved child of God, as part of my family. Jesus embodies forgiveness. He is grace in human form. And he calls us to reflect that way of living, to reflect who he is, to take the forgiveness we have received from him and share it with the whole world.
And even when we fail, even when we can’t forgive, God still forgives us. God embraces us, God defines us not by our failures, but by God’s success, by God’s victory, by the love and grace of Jesus Christ. We are forgiven, and so we get to – so it is possible – to forgive others. And even when we fail, we are forgiven anyway. That’s Good News. Thanks be to God.
