Matthew 18:21-35

Forgiveness is to a community what breathing is to a body. Just as we need to breathe in and out repeatedly, so we need to forgive and be forgiven repeatedly.

There was a time in church history when some people waited until they were near death to be baptized. They thought that post-baptismal sins—at least the worst of them—couldn't be forgiven. Popular belief was that forgiveness was a one-time event. Baptism was to cut like a knife between one's past and present behavior. So, some people waited until they had done most of the sinning they thought they might have in them before they got baptized for the forgiveness of sins. For some, that meant waiting for the death bed.

This popular belief about baptism and forgiveness was mistaken, of course, but it was there. It’s certainly true that a profound spiritual transition happens in baptism. In it, we are moved into the new life of God's forgiving grace. But just as this baptismal grace does not mean that we are now free to sin, so it does not mean that we will never sin again; nor that we are lost if and when we do sin again.

The road of Christ's forgiveness is always open and clearly marked. Forgiveness characterizes the Christian life, not just the initial moment of transition into it. Or, that is to say, forgiveness is a one-time event that lasts forever. As long as there is sin, and repentance for sin, there will be forgiveness. Indeed, this is one aspect of God's victory over sin in Christ: God forgives it in him, and so ends sin's power to determine our relationship with God and so our lives.

"Against thee only have I sinned," a popular psalm confesses to God. I don't think the psalmist means by this that he had not sinned against his fellow human beings. Rather, he means that in all his sinning against his fellow human beings, he also, initially and primarily sins against God. If God's desire is that human beings love their neighbors as themselves, then not loving the neighbor as oneself—that is, sinning against them—is also sinning against, disobeying God. We disobey God when we mistreat our neighbor. The two are inseparable.

Scripture often talks of sin as a debt. When we sin against someone by not loving them as ourselves, we don’t give them what we owe them and so in that manner of speaking, we put ourselves into their debt. There are two ways to get free of a debt, whether financial or spiritual: we can pay it off, of course, or we can be forgiven of it. Some people are offended by the idea of forgiving debts, and that for several reasons. One reason is that it doesn't seem fair. And they have a point. But on the other hand, if the person offering the forgiveness is the one who’s owed the debt, what's unfair about that? He or she owns the debt, so to speak; in fairness, he or she can do whatever with it; including canceling and forgetting it.

When it comes to the debt incurred by sin, the only way out from under is forgiveness. When we fail to love God or our neighbors, we incur a debt that we cannot ultimately pay off. For we cannot go back to that point in time when we failed to offer the particular help that someone needed from us or refrain from the particular wrong that they didn't need from us. We can't go back in time and do it right, as much as we may wish we could. Because we can't, we become moral debtors; we owe them and we cannot pay. For example, if I didn't love my kids like I should have when they were young, I can't make that debt up to them now. They can only forgive me, and I can try again. In other words, time itself makes it impossible to pay off these debts of life. To be free of them requires forgiveness; only the mercy of the ones we owe can cancel them.

We don't like to be forgiven or even hear about it. We don't like the idea of forgiveness because it, obviously, implies that we've done wrong. Most of us don't like to admit that we have made, and do make, significant moral mistakes. It's humbling.

But a funny thing about humility—real humility, not the Eor, I'll never be any good kind of thing—real humility empowers us; while false humility, like false pride, weakens us. Real humility, the kind that acknowledges real mistakes and thankfully—not cravenly—accepts forgiveness, empowers us because it frees us from carrying around the burden of guilt that had been consuming our energy.

Forgiveness may seem too easy sometimes. It may feel like we're getting away with something. In a sense we are. We are getting away from the guilt of what we've done, but we are not getting away from the fact that we did it. That still has to be faced. Accepting release from our debt, we’re forced to see ourselves as the debtors our mistakes have made us. That is not easy. But in the accompanying power and continuing promise of forgiveness, we can face ourselves in that mirror.

In any case, as soon as we equate forgiveness with getting away with it, we lose the incentive to forgive others. We don't want them to get away with what they have done to us, and if that is what forgiveness means, then I'm not interested. Not only am I personally not going to let them get away with it; to do so would be wrong. Forgiveness seems like justice denied.

At St. Peter's, one of the churches I served in California, we had a woman whose daughter was murdered. During a Lenten study, we were discussing the Lord's Prayer. When we came to the part about forgiving our debtors, she told us that she would never forgive her daughter's murderer.

Thankfully, none of us in the group that night were so insensitive to insist that she should. We knew, of course, the various connections in scripture between being forgiven and forgiving. And yet we knew that there was none among us worthy to remind her of them. None of us could throw that stone. None of us had forgiven all the incomparably lesser debts owed us. None of us had suffered as she had. None but God, of course, whose only begotten son was also murdered.

"To err is human, to forgive is divine." That line is sometimes quoted with the intent of the much lesser sentiment: "Forgiving is God's business." As cheaply as the fact may be stated, it nevertheless remains true. Forgiveness is no less than a divine miracle. Indeed, perhaps the greatest miracle there could be.

We have sinned against God in all our sinning. It is his life poured out on the cross, poured into us by the Spirit that is the power of forgiveness, the power in us to participate in the miracle of forgiveness. Indeed, forgiveness is, like nothing else, the death and life of the Son of God in us. The power by which we forgive is the life that forgives us. It is the holy of holies. It is the Lord.

Comments? Reflections? Questions? Please e-mail: tpce@ipa.net