Romans 14:1-12; Matthew 18:15-20
September 11, 2011
I first looked at the text assigned for this Sunday about two months ago. Ever since, I’ve been asking myself, “What do you say about forgiveness on the 10th anniversary of September 11th?” The juxtaposition, while I know it’s not possible that it was intentional, seems provocative. At the very least, to talk about forgiveness this morning is to certainly come up against some of the most complicated aspects of forgiveness: a concept that plays a starring role in pretty much every world religion.
Last week I began a two part series on forgiveness and accountability. I said these two things should never be talked about separately. Forgiveness without accountability is empty and can lead people to tolerate abuse and injustice in the name of being a good Jew, or Christian, or Buddhist or whatever. And accountability without forgiveness becomes rigid legalism void of empathy and compassion.
Last week’s passage from Matthew was about how the Christian community should respond when someone has done something to hurt another person or the community. We looked at how, in a church community, we can hold one another accountable only if we remember that the goal is always reconciliation and forgiveness. But, for the sake of that discussion, we set aside dealing with the most egregious and heinous sins people commit, recognizing that such things need a discussion all their own.
September 11th reminds us that there are some actions which can make forgiveness seem, if not impossible, then inadequate. As we remember those who died in that attack, as we remember the families, friends, and colleagues that still grieve, as the terrible images of the day reappear in our minds’ eye, is it even appropriate to talk about forgiveness? Is it even appropriate to talk about what it might look like for us to forgive such a thing when most, if not all, of us were not directly affected? Do we have the right to forgive? Who exactly are we forgiving and to what end?
I read a book a few months ago called, “The Sunflower.” Simon Wiesenthal wrote this book as an attempt to work through issues of repentance, forgiveness, and justice in light of his experiences as a Jew who lived in the concentration camps of Nazi, Germany. Wiesenthal begins his book describing what happened to him during his time of living hell in the camps. We know the stories, and they horrify us.
He then describes the events of one day, when he and other prisoners had been taken to a hospital to work. One of the patients in the hospital was an SS guard, named Karl, who was within hours of dying. Karl asked a nurse to bring a Jew to his room – any Jew. Wiesenthal was selected randomly from the group. He was led to the guard’s room. The guard then proceeded to describe to Wiesenthal his participation in a great atrocity; he told Wiesenthal about standing by, watching, doing nothing while local Nazis locked hundreds of Jews, including children, in a house, and then set the house on fire.
The man was obviously, by Wiesenthal’s account, tormented by his actions. He expressed sincere remorse. He was facing death, he was Christian, and he was looking for absolution. He believed it was the right, moral, thing to do to ask a Jew for this absolution since it was Jews he so egregiously wronged. He asked Wiesenthal, as a Jew standing in for those who lost their lives, to offer him forgiveness before he died. Wiesenthal was unable to do so.
The questions raised by this terrible, real, and thought provoking experience are numerous, to say the least: What is the relationship between justice and forgiveness? Who has a right to ask for forgiveness? Who has the right to forgive? What is required before someone can be forgiven? Are there some things that can never be forgiven?
This experience haunted Wiesenthal for years and years. After he wrote his book describing his experiences in Nazi Germany and the event with the SS guard, he sent the manuscript to over 50 people asking them the same question: “What would you have done?” Then he published the whole thing with their responses. These people are well known ethicists, religious leaders, theologians, justice workers, Christians, Jews, Buddhists, people from countries all over the world. People like Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu, Dorothee Soelle, Martin Marty.
One thing that is clear from reading this book, or even just contemplating scenarios like this, is that forgiveness seems infinitely complicated. There was widespread agreement among the writers that the Nazi committed another sin by even asking Wiesenthal for forgiveness – he was totally unaware of how unfair and unjust is request was. But beyond this agreement, each author had a different take, different and conflicting thoughts, different answers.
“If God chooses to forgive Karl,” Henry Cargas writes, “that’s God’s affair. Simon Wiesenthal could not; I cannot. For me Karl dies unforgiven.”
“The question of whether there is a limit to forgiveness,” writes Cardinal Franz Konig, “has been emphatically answered by Christ in the negative.”
And Harold Kushner writes, “I’m not sure there is such a thing as forgiving another person, though I know there’s such a thing as being forgiven.”
Given the extreme nature of Wiesenthal’s experience, it shouldn’t surprise us that the answers were so different. But even in less extreme situations, many of us have experienced the complexities of forgiveness, even as we believe forgiveness to be a basic Christian virtue we are morally obligated to practice.
And our passage from Matthew today doesn’t necessarily simplify things much. It is packed full of hyperbole – extreme exaggeration – which alone makes it difficult to know exactly how to apply it to complicated situations in our lives. Jesus first says forgive not just as much as the religious law requires, but more times than you can imagine forgiving. Seven is the number for everything, infinite, complete, whole. Seventy-seven times means countless, no end in sight.
Then he tells a parable in which he indicates that you should not only forgive someone over and over and over, even though presumably they are repeating the same offense, he says you should forgive the huge things – things beyond our imagination. In the first example, where the ruler was owed money by a slave, the amount owed is so big it is clearly meant to symbolize an unforgiveable amount. One talent is the equivalent of 15 years wages for the typical laborer of that day. And here we’re talking about 10,000 talents: 150,000 year’s wages. This was a debt the slave would never be able to accrue, much less pay off. It’s a metaphor for debt to large to imagine.
If we take this exaggerated situation as an allegory, the debt represents the biggest deepest darkest sins, and God, represented by the ruler, forgives even those. As the parable goes on, we are shown that since God forgives all of our sins, we are to forgive others theirs as well.
But this parable, this allegory, leaves us with more questions than answers. The disparity in the size of the two debts might mean that we are to forgive lesser things, but not required to forgive the unimaginable – only God can do that. We might wonder if debts are, in fact, analogous to sins.
As one person in our Friday noon bible study pointed out, maybe the whole message of this passage is less about how we should forgive sins and more about the impossibility of forgiveness when the system itself is so broken: slaves indebted to masters and one another with debts they could never pay off in a system that didn’t allow them fair wages, that exploited them, and they had no control or ability to change the system. Maybe this is Jesus excoriating those who benefit from the economic system of his day.
And of course there’s the disturbing end of this passage, which confronts us with a difficult question: Will God forgive us if we don’t forgive another person – no matter what the offense? Is not forgiving the unforgiveable sin? These aren’t easy things to figure out.
This parable doesn’t seem to begin to answer something like Wiesenthal’s question, or the question of forgiveness in the face of something like 9/11. Read all by itself, we might think the moral imperative in this passage is to forgive anything anytime, no matter what. But in the face of some things, that just doesn’t work. Or, if we make the mistake of reading this passage in a vacuum, without seeing it in the context of the whole gospel, or bible or that matter, we run the risk of concluding the God of love is also the God who tortures those who fall short of an ideal.
To answer the complicated questions, we have to draw on far more than just one passage in the bible. We have to remind ourselves yet again that this passage sits in the midst of passages that are constantly balancing accountability and forgiveness, and ultimately sits in an entire chapter devoted to the idea that reconciliation should be a relentless, never-ending pursuit of Christians. And this is all based on God’s relentless, never ending grace offered to us.
Can we forgive September 11th? Should we? No one is really asking, are they? What does forgiveness even look like, or feel like? Certainly in this case, offering any kind of forgiveness without accountability is inadequate, if not immoral. But forgiveness must enter in if we take the bible seriously – and I think the place it enters in is in how we hold people accountable. Or more precisely in why we hold people accountable…what is the goal?
It seems to me a spirit of forgiveness – relentless forgiveness – shifts the goal of holding people accountable from vengeance to reconciliation. And this shift affects our decisions and actions. We hold people accountable for their actions, but not to punish them. Rather we hold people accountable to offer a path to reconciliation, which is an act of extreme generosity – in some cases certainly generosity beyond what someone deserves by any equation of moral accounting. This may not work – reconciliation cannot be one sided. If someone is not willing to walk the path with us, to take responsibility, feel remorse, change their ways, convert their hearts, they continue to thwart reconciliation. Forgiveness is sometimes not possible, even if we are willing to go that route. But offering it is always possible.
I honestly don’t know how I would answer Wiesenthal’s question – I’m not sure I have the right to given my experiences don’t even approach the reality he endured. But as a Christian I do need to contemplate the limits of forgiveness. And such contemplation yields some bottom lines for me:
First, we live as forgiven people. God forgives beyond what we can imagine, beyond what we deserve;
Second, because we’re forgiven, we’re asked to mediate that same grace to others – to forgive past any limit we might try to lay down. We’re asked to offer paths to reconciliation that include loving accountability, even when reconciliation is the last thing we want with someone;
Finally, we’re asked to resist vengeance in any form and witness to another way – not of cheap grace, but also not punishment for its own sake.
In response to Wiesenthal, Martin Marty, a Christian ethicist, writes, “I am in search of grace in this world. We have to see potentials in the lives of even the worst people, and we have to see that it is we who can dam the flow of grace.”
So on this Sunday, I find myself reflecting not just on September 11, 2001, but also on the days, weeks, months and years following that. In response to the attacks, we saw, I think, the best of humanity, and the worst. Compassion for those most affected by the terrorist attack gave way to a spirit of vengeance. Any notion of accountability turned to punishment, revenge, torture, war.
We made decisions not in an effort to allow for some future reconciliation, but to assuage our anger, hurt, pain and indignity. It’s totally understandable. How can we ask people to do anything different when their pain is so huge and so appropriate? Yet it seems we are asked to take a different route – a hard one, a counter-intuitive one, a more complicated one – one that balances accountability and forgiveness, and one that is infused with a relentless pursuit of grace and reconciliation in this world. Amen.
