Reconciling Hearts of Stone

Sermon for Sept. 17, 2023
Matthew 18:21-35

I’m going to ask you a couple of questions, but please don’t put up your hands in response.  Have you ever been badly hurt by someone you really care about?  And by the same token: Have you ever badly hurt someone you really care about?  Now, if we had raised our hands, what do you suppose we would have seen?  If we were honest, I think everybody in the room, and everyone at home, would have had their hands up twice.

And that’s why Jesus has a lot to say about forgiveness.  What he says today flows from his teaching last week about resolving conflicts among people of faith.  His best practice would go like this:  First, confront the offender directly and individually.  If that doesn’t work, confront the offender with the concurring testimony of one or two others.  If that doesn’t work, take the conflict to the whole church community.  And why?  The desired outcome is not a confrontation to throw someone out but a reconciliation to bring someone back.  The point is repentance and return to community.  

So, today, Peter asks Jesus, how often do we have to do this?  Is it three strikes and you’re out?  Or seven strikes and you’re out?  No, Jesus says, it’s seventy-seven strikes; and if you’re still counting by that point, you’ve lost the game anyway.  Forgiveness, Jesus says, is to be boundless.  Just as the Father has forgiven you, so you also must forgive.

Can we handle that?  The simple answer is, no.  I mean, if this came naturally to us, Jesus wouldn’t have bothered to include it in our daily prayer:  “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us” (BCP 364).  I think the reason we don’t forgive easily is because we misunderstand what Jesus is asking for.  When someone harms us and we’re called to forgive, I think we hear that as a feeling – that we supposed to return to the emotional place we were before we got hurt and feel the way we used to feel about the person who hurt us.  If you’ve ever been really hurt, you know that doesn’t happen.  And if we wait for that loving feeling to come back before we return to relationship with someone who’s hurt us, we’ll be waiting a very long time.  

The problem is that we get the order backwards.  Forgiveness doesn’t flow from a mended and gentle heart; a mended and gentle heart grows from forgiveness.  It’s like love: Forgiveness is an act that becomes a feeling, not a feeling that spurs us to act.  My hunch is that this is where Jesus’ words to Peter are coming from.  “How many times must I forgive someone who’s hurt me?” Peter asks.  “As many times as it takes,” Jesus says.  That number isn’t about setting the parameters of justice for the offender.  It’s about healing our own wounded hearts.

And speaking of justice … our desire for justice can be another roadblock to forgiveness.  We think, “I can’t forgive this person who’s hurt me unless and until that person gets what’s coming to him.  Once the scales are balanced, there might be room for relationship – but not until then.”  Well, there are a couple of problems with that.  One is remembering that God is God and we are not; and as we heard from Romans a couple of weeks ago: “Vengeance is mine,” God says; “I will repay!” – not you.  But the more personal problem with demanding justice before forgiving someone is that we’d have to be willing to face the same standard ourselves.  If we want the grace that God offers – love freely given, especially when we fail – if we want that grace for ourselves when we fail, we can’t deny it when others fail us.

And then there’s the question of consequences.  Look at the parable Jesus offers today about the unforgiving servant.  The servant owes his boss an unimaginable sum, ten thousand talents.  For a laborer in Jesus’ time, it took 15 years to earn a single talent, so this servant owes thousands of lifetimes of pay.  Well, the demands of justice require the servant to make whatever restitution is possible.  But the boss releases the servant and forgives him the debt. 

Then the servant, freshly blessed by grace, turns around and withholds that grace when he finds himself injured by a fellow servant’s failure.  So, having demanded justice, the first servant receives it.  And the boss drives the point home: “Should you not have had mercy on your fellow [servant], as I had mercy on you?” (Matt 18:33).  So, the first servant finds himself being tortured, and we hear that the same experience will come our way if we don’t forgive those who hurt us.

The parable says the consequences of holding a grudge will be much worse, and far longer lasting, for the grudge-holder than for the person who committed the offense in the first place.  I think that’s true in our lived experience, too – not directly from God but from the cancer of bitterness that grows within us when we don’t forgive. That doesn’t mean it’s easy to let our grudges go.  You release the anger, but before long you find there’s still more that you’re carrying.  That’s because the anger isn’t a single burden on our backs that we can toss off a cliff when we finally choose.  Instead, the anger is a backpack full of small rocks that weigh us down, and we have to toss them off the cliff one by one.  Again, it’s not seven times but seventy-seven times….

But each time we let that resentment go, we make space for God to create something new.  I got a glimpse of this on my pilgrimage to Israel and Palestine this summer when our group heard two men tell their stories of forgiveness in a setting where conflict and hatred are baked into the culture as hard as any ancient stone. 

One of the men is named Rami.  Rami is an Israeli Jew who fought in the Yom Kippur War in 1973.  From that experience, watching friends die at the hands of Arab enemies, he turned inward and grew bitter.  But 10 years later, Rami got married; and they had a daughter, his “princess,” he said – a little girl named Smadar.  With his wife and daughter, Rami lived in a what he called a “beautiful bubble” … until, at 14, she was killed at school by a Palestinian suicide bomber.  Rami saw no way to recover, no way out of his grief and rage.

The other man who spoke to our group is named Bassam.  He’s a Palestinian.  When he was 12, his family’s community became occupied by Israeli soldiers.  Little boys taunting soldiers grew into teenagers throwing grenades; and by 17, he was in prison for seven years, where, he said, “they tried to kill our humanity.”  But after his release, Bassam married, and he and his wife had six children … until, in 2007, border police killed their 10-year-old daughter at school.

The two long stories short: Rami and Bassam found each other in their grief.  Initially, they wanted to kill each other as representatives of the evil that had killed their daughters.  But instead, they chose to work toward peace through a group called The Parents Circle.¹  It’s brought together more than 600 Israeli and Palestinian families who’ve lost immediate-family members to the violence there.  The group gathers families to heal, and it tells their stories of forgiveness to advocate for reconciliation among Israelis and Palestinians generally. 

For Rami and Bassam, who sat at the same table to tell their stories, the conflict between Israel and Palestine will be resolved only when individuals come together as partners for peace and, eventually, as friends.  As Bassam said, “We kill each other for Jerusalem.  What’s more important?  Our lives, or holy stones?  Any political solution comes from this,” he said: “knowing each other’s narrative, history, and pain.  Respect is the key.”

For us, the stakes may not be as high.  The people we need to forgive may not have harmed our family members or sent us to prison.  Or maybe they have.  But either way, there’s a reason Jesus taught us, “When you pray, say … ‘Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.’”  It is about following Jesus faithfully and finding healing, but it’s also about more than that.  Forgiveness isn’t just about being good.  It’s not even just about being made whole.  It’s about making space for God to bring new life to a world filled with hearts of stone.

1.     https://www.theparentscircle.org/en/pcff-home-page-en/