THE POWER OF FORGIVENESS

The secret is to stand before cross and feel the love

Editor’s note: Look for a sermon or lesson from Houston’s diverse faiths every week in Belief.

I forgive you — those three words often are the hardest to say. Countless times I have heard people say: “I know I need to forgive, but I can’t.” People often feel that forgiveness is something completely beyond them — impossible.

In one sense, they are right. The phrase “to err is human, to forgive divine” has a lot of value. To forgive, we must leave one worldview behind and move into another. How? Jesus gives us an example. In the gospel of Matthew (18:21-35) Jesus contrasts two very different approaches to forgiveness.

Jesus first presents an idea which seems to us completely ludicrous: a master forgiv- ing a debt that presently would amount to millions of dollars. The craziness of this idea is a dead giveaway that it is a parable, talking about the Kingdom of Heaven, far beyond our everyday experience. However, Jesus then quickly shifts into a second, much more familiar story: cruelty and greed. Unlike the wonderful, fairy-tale quality of the first example, this tale of someone choking another person, threatening him and casting him into prison for the sake of a bit of money is sadly something very well known to us — either in our own experience, or at least on TV. Most of us feel trapped and oppressed in this petty way of looking at the world, in which people do terrible things to each other over trifling things.

The worst consequence of being caught up in this world is that “to forgive” literally becomes something impossible, completely out of our reach. Much as we detest the action of the wicked servant, we understand it. And the only way we can think of to respond to such greed is to denounce the evildoer, as the other servants did.

Most of us cannot conceive of a third option — we feel we have to choose between doing evil and denouncing it. And our willingness to punish is so great that, by the end of the parable, it turns our idea of the master from a merciful, kind person into a strict judge.

This willingness to punish, which is so powerful that it can change a loving, merciful God into a strict judge (at least in our imagination; we cannot, of course, prevent God from being merciful, but we can choose an image of another vengeful God any time we want), makes it difficult for us to understand how forgiveness can possibly work.

When I hear that sad refrain, “I know I need to forgive, but I can’t,” it sounds to me like “I know I need to go on a diet, but I just can’t,” or “I know I need to stop drinking, but I can’t.” In the back of my mind I am thinking “of course, you can, but you don’t want to pay the price.”

These pathetic statements illustrate how we are trapped in this small, petty world of the second half of the parable, in which one man sends another to jail for a trifling amount of debt.

However, Jesus does not leave us in this small world. He gives us in the first part of this parable another, beautiful, vast vision of forgiveness — because the master in this parable, of course, is not a real-life person forgiving a million-dollar debt. The parable has a spiritual meaning. In the spiritual sense, of course, the master represents God, who in his Son, Jesus, offered his life to forgive our sins. This is the true world, the Kingdom of God, a world much better than the world in which people not only insult and hurt each other, but even kill each other for pennies, for small insults. This is why we come here to church, to receive forgiveness for our sins.

When people ask me, “What is the best place you have ever been?” I want to say to them, “The place where I really belong, where I want to be, is kneeling down at the foot of the cross, receiving Jesus’ forgiveness. That is where I really want to be, where I need to be.”

So when someone comes to talk to me about all the terrible things that have happened in their lives, in their families, I invite them to gaze at the cross until they can feel that love, that forgiveness, in their hearts. Life will never get fixed by grabbing someone by the throat, like the man in the parable, shouting “Pay what you owe me!” That is a vicious circle. We can only be healed of that pettiness by gazing upon the cross and feeling the love which forgives us our sins.

Then, after I have invited that person to stand before the cross, feeling that forgiveness, I then ask them to imagine who else is standing beside them. And right beside them is the person they need to forgive! That person also is standing in need of the love and forgiveness of Jesus. By myself, I cannot break out of that cycle of pettiness and revenge; none of us can. But if we both stand in the love and forgiveness of God, we can both feel the joy of forgiveness, and feel the power to forgive.