Scripture: Mark 2:1-12.
Forgiveness…is one of those topics that’s way too big to talk about in a few minutes on a Sunday morning. Of course, that’s true of anything worth talking about; you can’t really say very much in a sermon space. So that’s a dilemma we’re sort of stuck with as far as sermons go. I realize that forgiveness is a good religious word, something you might expect to talk about in church. It’s in the Bible and all that, so I really don’t have to give any reasons for wanting to talk about forgiveness, but I want to give some anyway. Because I didn’t just arbitrarily pluck this topic off the shelf.
I have had in mind that my preaching this winter would focus on Jesus, and that I would try to be basic about this. Let’s step back and ask about this figure who is at the center of our faith, who he is, what he’s about, what we’re about in relationship to him. The topic is forgiveness this morning because I see it as absolutely central to who Jesus was, not because he said it was a good thing to do, not because it was a subject of his preaching, but because you can’t talk about Jesus without talking about forgiveness. It’s such a large and such a crucial part of who Jesus was…and is.
In the scripture today, we heard the story of the man who couldn’t get near to Jesus and so four of his friends lowered him through the roof while Jesus was talking. As it happens Jesus does tell the man that his sins are forgiven, which was sort of a strange thing to do since the man was not described as a sinner seeking forgiveness but as a paralyzed man wanting to walk. There are some issues about forgiveness raised in the story, but actually I didn’t choose this passage because it had any clear message about forgiveness. I chose it because of the image of this man coming down through the roof and disturbing this nice little religious gathering that was taking place. I’ll come back to this.
I need to tell you that I also have some reservations going into this. Week before last I attended a lecture by a man named Miroslav Volf, a professor at Yale, who was speaking at UVa. I forget the exact title of the lecture, but it had something to do with forgiveness and reconciliation, and I figured I ought to go. I knew at that time I was going to preach about forgiveness and Volf is pretty well known, even though I didn’t really know too much about him.
As it turned out I didn’t get to hear much of what he had to say because the room was full by the time I got there and people were being turned away. A few of us decided to just wait downstairs in the rotunda and see if anyone left so we could get in. One of us, fortunately, was an extrovert. (That would not be me.) But the extrovert said something like, well, they’re in there talking about forgiveness. Why don’t we have our own discussion out here—which we did.
In the course of the discussion we discovered that one of the four of us was a young woman from Croatia. She had been a student in a class taught by Volf in Croatia a few years ago. She explained that his concern with the subject of forgiveness was very personal, that he himself was Croatian and that he had been struggling very much with how any kind of reconciliation was possible in his homeland.
As she talked I realized that I had come to that lecture with a bit of an attitude. I came that day not wanting to hear someone preach to me about what a fine, wonderful, Christian thing forgiveness is. I didn’t want any sanitized words about forgiveness. When the woman talked about Volf’s own struggles with forgiveness and how he had dealt in her class with how forgiveness in a situation like Yugoslavia is possible at all, my attitude softened somewhat, but it was instructive to me to realize how hostile I had been to start with.
I think I had come with the secret hope that at least symbolically the dome of the rotunda would come crashing down and that someone would lower through the roof some of the people who had been victims of the violence in Yugoslavia, and that they would disturb this comfortable, academic discussion about forgiveness.
I come to the sermon this morning still with something of that same attitude I went to that lecture with. I find I am a little bit hostile to my own topic, and I need to say what I am not going to end up saying this morning. I am going to try very hard not to preach forgiveness at you. I am not going to tell you that forgiveness is a good thing and we ought to do it as often as we can. I am not going to tell you that when we find ourselves unable to forgive that this is some kind of a moral failure and we really ought to work harder at being a better person. I am going to try very hard not to mouth any platitudes about what a good thing forgiveness is. That’s what I was afraid the speaker was going to do that night. I didn’t want to hear it then, and I certainly don’t want to speak it this morning.
I start at a different place. I start with an assumption that forgiveness is not a simple thing. It’s not simple in the sense that it’s not straightforward. It’s not simple even to think about, there are so many angles, so many twists and turns and this kind of situation and that kind of situation and what if this and what if that. It’s also, as we all know, not simple to put into practice—and not just because we are stubborn, sinful creatures. I start with an assumption that forgiveness is not always the right thing to do. At least not in any simple sense. Forgiveness is not always a good thing.
For example, I have known women over the years who at some point in their lives had found themselves in situations of domestic violence. In more than one case, in many cases, in far too many cases, the woman had been advised in the midst of an ongoing abusive situation to be patient and forgiving and to keep trying to work things out. Sometimes when women told me about this years later, they were still struggling with feeling of inadequacy or guilt because they had failed to be patient or forgiving enough at the time and maybe were still finding forgiveness to be difficult many years later.
Sometimes I think for these women their difficulty with forgiveness was because of a tape that was playing somewhere inside that came from maybe a church upbringing and that had the message playing over and over that to forgive is the Christian thing to do, the loving thing to do, the virtuous thing to do. Sometimes they reported the message coming more directly, say from a pastor. When a woman first told me that a pastor had said that to her, that she ought to forgive her abuser and go back into the same situation and try harder, I remember having a sort of instinctive reaction of disbelief. Oh no, a pastor would never say such a thing. Then I began to hear the same story from other women. Then I began to hear other pastors say things in my presence that suggested that they could and probably would give that message themselves, at least indirectly, maybe directly. And my reaction gradually shifted from disbelief to sadness to anger.
For this and other reasons I have become suspicious of forgiveness as a generalized concept to be applied in the same way in all situations. Forgiveness is not a self-evident truth. In the case of situations of domestic violence, forgiveness has been used as a tool to convince people to stay in a situation where they will be subjected to continued abuse and increasing danger. It has contributed to the emotional distress of the person already being abused and has reinforced the psychology of blaming the victim. It has minimized both the seriousness of what the offender is doing and the pain of the person being hurt. The whole concept of forgiveness can be and has been used as a weapon of oppression.
And so often when I hear the word forgiveness, I immediately see faces, faces of people who have been hurt, who many years later may still need healing, who deserve something from me—recognition, respect, admiration, compassion—whatever it is that I owe to the people I see in my mind, it is not a lecture on forgiveness. And I am not really thrilled either about hearing one more perspective on why forgiveness is a good thing.
For me, the first thing that has to be said about forgiveness is that it can be extremely hard, and that there are real issues, and we need to acknowledge this not only as a general principle that may be true for others, but as something that is true for ourselves. If we either deny the difficulty of forgiving within ourselves and pretend it is not there, or if we insist on seeing ourselves as somehow “bad” because we have that difficulty, then we are probably not going to deal with it very well. This is not just a matter of a kind of passing acknowledgment either—“Oh, yes, forgiveness can sometimes be hard, but we need to do it anyway.” Both the difficulty and the moral ambiguity need to be dwelt upon and not dismissed and not forgotten. That’s why I have spent what will amount to more than half of this sermon in this vein.
Nevertheless…You knew there was going to be a nevertheless, and there is, but I need to make clear that I am speaking now for myself. Nevertheless, there are words, words spoken by Jesus that make a claim on me. They make a claim not so much as words spoken by Jesus but more like words spoken through Jesus that somewhere deep down inside I cannot help but believe come from the soul of God. Some of them are words that I have repeated many times: “Forgive us our trespasses…forgive us our debts…forgive us our sins, as we forgive those who have sinned against us.” And other words I have read and heard many times: “God, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” “I don’t say to you that you should forgive as many as seven times, but seventy times seven times.”
I don’t hear these words as finger wagging kinds of words—“You know you really ought to forgive.” They are less clear than that, and they are deeper than that.” What they say to me I cannot say fully this morning, but the beginning of what those words from Jesus say to me is something like this:
You don’t need to pretend that forgiveness is any easier than it really is, or any less morally ambiguous. You don’t need to patch up that hole in the roof so you can give a nice little well-constructed, uninterrupted sermon of forgiveness. You don’t need to shut out those people who come crashing through the roof to disturb the neatness of our house and our theology. Let those people be there who cause us to question the meaning and the purpose of forgiveness. Let the plaster fall and the light fixtures hang cockeyed. Let all the messiness be there. But don’t give up on forgiveness either. There’s all sorts of legitimate questions to be asked, but don’t give up on forgiveness. I hear Jesus tell me to forgive seven times seventy times, and I think maybe what he means is not so much that we are to passively endure and forgive the same offense 490 times but rather that sometimes forgiveness will consist of taking 490 small steps, but that I should not lose heart after the first seven, and I should not lose sight of where I am headed, even though it might seem a distant goal.
Somewhere I remember reading a statement that resonated with me. It said that the question that forgiveness poses to us is whether, finally, we want to live in a world that is like a courtroom, dominated by accusations, defenses, guilt, innocence, punishments or whether we want to live in a world that is like home, like a home where people are safe, and cared for, and treated with respect, and accepted, and forgiven.
For me that statement is helpful and points me in the right direction. It does say to me that when I find myself getting hard inside, when I find myself unable to give up wanting to be right in some situation, when I find myself replaying certain scenarios and finding the same person guilty over and over again in my mind, when I find myself unable to let go of some hurt that happened long ago, then I need to ask myself whether I want to live in a world that is like a courtroom, because that is the world I have in fact created for myself and chosen to live in. I am capable of doing that—creating a courtroom for myself to live in, and sometimes I just need to go home.
But that statement also recognizes that forgiveness is just a part of the world I want to live in. It is not an end in itself. Considered in isolation, considered just by itself, forgiveness may or may not be a good thing. We don’t just pluck forgiveness down off a shelf as some virtue that we are supposed to put into practice. It is only for sure a good thing when it is part of a changed situation, and ultimately part of a new creation, what Jesus calls the reign of God.
A quick example from far away. South Africa. Since the end of apartheid as a rigid social system, there has been an effort to somehow deal with the evils and the nightmares left from the past. Part of bringing into being a new South Africa has been the initiation of a process called “truth and reconciliation” in which the horrors of apartheid are told and reconciliation is sought. It is recognized that in order for there even to be a South Africa in any meaningful sense there will have to be forgiveness. But it is also recognized that for forgiveness to have any meaning, the story, the countless stories, must be told with honesty. And none of this process would be even conceivable except for the fact that there has been a change of government and a shifting of power in South Africa. For the apartheid government while it was still in power to have urged black South Africans to practice forgiveness would have been to make a mockery of forgiveness. For forgiveness to be possible, to be in any way thinkable, requires that the truth be told and that forgiveness be seen as one part of the effort to build a new society.
In the scripture, Jesus has the seminar he was teaching interrupted, invaded by a man whose needs turn out to be great. I read the story and I find myself praying that our worship too might be disturbed, that our lives and our consciousnesses and our consciences be disturbed—perhaps by the faces and spirits of people who need our forgiveness, perhaps by the faces and spirits of people who do not need to be told that they should forgive but who do need to have their stories told and heard and honored, perhaps by images of situations that need to be changed in order to make forgiveness possible. May we be disturbed in all these ways, but may we also be called once again to take up a journey toward a land where forgiveness is joined to justice, a land we may call home. Amen.
Jim Bundy
February 18, 2001