A sermon from The Rev. John G. Rights, preached September 14, 2008.
Seventy-seven times or seventy times seven … the point is not the number. The point is that whoever counts has not forgiven at all, but is only biding time. If you’re keeping score, then you’ve missed the point entirely. Don’t ever stop forgiving.
Forgiving Again, Again
Then Peter came and said to him, ‘Lord, if another member of the church sins against me, how often should I forgive? As many as seven times?’ Jesus said to him, ‘Not seven times, but, I tell you, seventy-seven times.
When we conclude meetings here, as in many other churches, often we end with what we call the Mizpah benediction, “May the Lord watch between me and thee, while we are absent, one from the other.” In my first sermon at my former church, which is called Mizpah, I mentioned how we intend that prayer to be a sign of comfort, an affirmation and a blessing to each other. But when you look at that scripture in its context in Genesis 31, it’s really a statement of mistrust and hard feelings.
The word Mizpah itself means “watchpost” or “watchtower,” and Jacob and Laban pray that benediction, which can be paraphrased as “May the Lord watch and make sure you keep your hand out of my back pocket while I can’t see you.” The Lord is watching, and the eyes of God see everything, so be careful what you do.
But in a sense, we’re all called to be a Mizpah, especially in a church, a community of faith. We’re all called to watch out for each other, love and nurture and support and encourage and instruct each other — when we take our call to faith seriously, we remember that we’re called to build up God’s community, the body of Christ.
At the end of last week’s scripture, Jesus said, “Where two or three are
gathered in my name, I am there among them.” Jesus was talking about reconciliation, essentially saying that the Lord will be watching to see that we keep our promises to one another. God will act as a keeper of fences and covenants. God will uphold the divine side of our covenants, and it’s up to us to uphold ours.
David Marcus preached on the first part of this passage last week, in how to confront conflict. He also preached on this second part a few months ago, when he preached about forgiveness. I preached about forgiveness last week during our worship at Laurel Ridge, and the subject comes up again this week … but I figured, since Jesus taught us to forgive over and over again, it must be a topic worth preaching about over and over again.
Simon Peter said to Jesus: “Master, if my brother sins against me, how many
times should I forgive him? Seven times?” And it seems, Peter asks this question, not expecting rebuke but praise. It’s likely he is expecting Jesus to say: “That’s wonderful, Peter. You go to the head of the class. Seven times is plenty of times, definitely enough times to forgive someone.” And Peter had the right to think that he had done something good. At that time, the law of the scribes said:
“If a man transgresses one time, forgive him. If a man transgresses two times, forgive him. If a man transgresses three times, forgive him. If a man transgresses four times, do not forgive him.” What Peter has done is to take this law of limited forgiveness, multiply it by two and add one, and thought, “isn’t that great? Seven is more than twice as much as three times, seven must be enough.” And he surely must have been taken aback when Christ said you must forgive seventy-seven times, or in other translations, seventy times seven.
Someone once said that the scariest, most sobering word in the entire New Testament is that tiny little word “as” in the Lord’s Prayer: “Forgive us our
trespasses AS we forgive those who trespass against us.” Or also, “Forgive
us our sins, AS we forgive those who sin against us.”
That small word, “as” … the vital connection between God’s abiding
forgiveness of us, and of our in turn forgiving others, tells us that we must forgive. This is not some strange demand on God’s part, however. This is not some hoop we must jump through, it’s not meant to be a burden upon us. No, the reason for the connection between God’s forgiving us and our forgiving others is because of the sheer power of God’s forgiveness. It is so great that it simply must, and will, change us. The reason God expects us to forgive as a result of our being forgiven is the same reason you can expect to be wet after jumping into a lake … water is wet and when you immerse yourself in it, you get wet. Being forgiven, we must be forgiving people.
Once I was looking for a greeting card at a store, and I noticed they had a separate category of cards devoted to “Forgiveness.” Since that’s an important theological category, I naturally was drawn to investigate those cards. Mostly they were humorous, and intended to be used for relatively minor hurts. They had messages such as “Forget about it” and “Don’t worry about it.” Another expressed forgiveness by saying, “Everybody is a work in progress.” But it also struck me that here, as in many stores, forgiveness cards were categorized right along with birthday and get well cards. That is, they were in the category called “Occasional Cards.” You don’t send a “Get Well” card just any old time, but occasionally you need that kind of sentiment and that’s when you purchase and send just such a card. So also you may not need a forgiveness card very often, but once in a while such a thing might come in handy.
Seen this way, forgiveness becomes a “now and then” matter. No doubt,
this reflects the way many people think. But it cuts against the grain of the New Testament and of a passage like Matthew 18 where Christ assures us that forgiveness is an ongoing, daily reality for each one of us. Not only are we ourselves forgiven on a regular basis by God and by others, we must then turn around and forgive those who have hurt us. It’s not an occasional reality. It’s every day.
Of course, in the Bible, the number seven is often used to signify perfection, completeness, or wholeness … there are seven days of creation, the seven pillars of Wisdom’s house, seven churches in the book of Revelation. Yet when it comes to forgiveness, seven is not complete enough for Jesus. “Not seven times, but seventy times seven.”
We sometimes hear this passage as referring to a situation where a person is persisting in some sort of sin, causing harm again and again, leading us to forgive with each new occurrence. But it seems that Christ knew that in the life of the community, we will sometimes have to make multiple attempts to forgive a single act of harm. I suspect that Jesus knew well that forgiveness is an act, and an art, that we would have to work at. Again, and again. And again.
It was noted by a good friend that the most difficult person to forgive, at times, is yourself. Other than God, no one knows our own sins better than we do. And many people find it easier to grant forgiveness to others than to themselves. To forgive ourselves for the harm, conscious or otherwise, we cause others is perhaps the most difficult form of letting go. Time and grace, making amends if possible, being soothed by God’s mercy is a part of the process. Maybe each of us needs to forgive ourselves, along with others, not just seven times, but seventy times seven.
What exactly is forgiveness? We don’t hear it defined very often, but to break down the word “forgive” into parts, there is the word “for,” being a preposition, and the word “give,” a verb of action with the purpose of presenting an item, attitude, or action. To forgive is to give a gift to someone, even yourself … forgiveness is giving someone the opportunity to start all over again.
And yet, often for us that is a most difficult thing. For many of us, it’s in our nature that we can’t see anything good coming out of the harm that others have done us. We carry the wounds of the past with us, we remember the hurt done to us. We think about what might have been, instead of what could be.
But forgiveness is a choice we make. Forgiveness looks to the future, not the past.
As Paul wrote in Romans 14, “We do not live to ourselves, and we do not die to ourselves. We are accountable to God” … all of us. None of us can run and hide from our responsibility, and forgiveness is certainly part of that responsibility to God.
One pastor stated that forgiveness means that it finally becomes unimportant that you get revenge. The author Frederick Buechner (in Wishful Thinking: A Theological ABC) called forgiveness an issue of pride — the person who has been hurt must give up the right to hold a grudge, and the person who has done the hurting must admit they’ve done something worth forgiving … and “both parties must swallow the same thing: their pride.”
The Aramaic word for “forgive” is the same as “untie.” To forgive is to untie ourselves from the hatred and anger we have carried.
Seventy-seven times or seventy times seven … the point is not the number. The point is that whoever counts has not forgiven at all, but is only biding time. If you’re keeping score, then you’ve missed the point entirely. Don’t ever stop forgiving.
Years ago, there was a millionaire who owned an unusual lot in a wealthy neighborhood in New York City. It was only a couple of yards wide and nearly 100 feet long. There was nothing he could do with such an oddly proportioned piece of property except sell it to his neighbor. He went to his neighbor to see if he was interested in buying it. The neighbor gave him a tiny offer and said, essentially, “Look, I’ve got you over a barrel here. You can’t sell that lot to anyone else and you can’t build on it. So there is my offer – take it or leave it.”
The millionaire was beside himself with rage. Within a few days he hired an architect and a contractor to build one of the strangest houses ever conceived. Only five feet wide and running the length of his property, his house was little more than a row of tiny rooms, each barely able to accommodate a stick of furniture. When it was finished, the millionaire moved into his uncomfortable and impractical house. There he stayed until his death. The house, which became known in the neighborhood as
the “Spite House,” stood for many years as a monument to one man’s hatred. (Built in 1882 and demolished in 1915, it stood at Lexington Ave. and 82nd Street.)
Sometimes, many of us construct spite houses of our own by our unwillingness to forgive those who have wronged us. While our spite house is constructed of anger and hurt feelings, hatred and self-pity, it is every bit as uncomfortable as the one the millionaire built with brick and mortar.
William Willimon writes: “the human animal is not supposed to be good at forgiveness. Forgiveness is not some innate, natural human emotion. Vengeance, retribution, violence, these are natural human qualities. It is natural for the human animal to defend itself, to snarl and crouch into a defensive position when attacked, to howl when wronged, to bite back when bitten. Forgiveness is not natural. It is not a universal human virtue.”
But seventy times seven, we’re told.
The point is that God doesn’t keep track with us. And neither should we with others. Keeping track, keeping a list of the sins of others and our forgiveness is not the Gospel and it is not good for us. Neither is it healthy.
The Gospel is that we can come to God over and over again, that we can have a fresh start each day, through God’s mercy made new each morning. And the Gospel is that when we remember the mercy of God towards us it becomes, at least, easier to show the mercy of God towards others.
A fresh start, a new beginning, is possible. And God gives us one … seventy times seventy times seventy times seventy times seven times; and when we ask God, He will help us to do the same thing for others. The assurance we have is that God will help us to forgive and make us whole, even through the prayer “Father, forgive our sins, as we forgive those who sin against us.”
Let us pray.
Lord God, who guides us into the fullness of truth and who sustains all who call upon your name, help us to be your true disciples, enable us to serve you and to keep the word you give to us, and grant to us an awareness of the urging of your Holy Spirit. Forgive us, O God, for the deeds we have done and left undone, and may our words, and actions, and lives, be pleasing unto you. We ask it in Jesus’ name. Amen.
May Jesus Christ our Lord be near us to defend us, within us to refresh us, beside us to guide us, behind us to justify us, and above us to bless us; the One who lives and reigns with the Father and the Holy Spirit, God forevermore. Amen.
The Rev. John G. Rights
john@newphilly.org
New Philadelphia Moravian Church
4440 Country Club Road
Winston-Salem, N.C. 27104
336-765-2331