“To practice forgiveness daily according to our Lord’s teaching”

A frail black woman stands slowly to her feet. She is something over 70 years of age. Facing her from across the room are several white police officers, one of whom, a Mr. Van der Broek, has just been tried and found guilty in the murders of both the woman's son and her husband some years before.

It was established that Mr. Van der Broek had come to the woman's home, taken her only child, shot him at point -blank range and then burned the young man's body in a fire while he and the other officers partied nearby.

Several years later, Van der Broek and his cohorts returned to take away her husband as well. For many months she heard nothing of his whereabouts. Then, almost two years after her husband's disappearance, the hate-filled Van der Broek came back to abduct the woman herself. How vividly she remembers that evening, going to a place beside a river where she was shown her husband, bound and beaten, but still strong in spirit, lying on a pile of wood. The last words she heard from his swollen lips as the officers poured gasoline over his body and set him aflame were, "Father, forgive them..."

And now the elderly widow stands in the courtroom and listens to the confession offered by Mr. Van der Broek. A member of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission turns to her and asks, "So, what do you want now? How should justice be done to this man who has so brutally destroyed your loved ones??"

"I want three things," begins the old woman, calmly, but confidently. "I want first to be taken to the place where my husband's body was burned so that I can gather up the dust and give his remains a decent burial." She pauses, then continues. "My husband and son were my only family. I want, secondly, therefore, for Mr. Van der Broek to become my adopted son. I would like for him to come twice a month to the ghetto and spend a day with me, so that I can pour out on him whatever love I still have remaining within me, for the rest of my years."

"And, finally," she says with tears welling in her eyes, "I want a third thing. I would like Mr. Van der Broek to know that I offer him my forgiveness because Jesus Christ died to forgive. This was also the wish of my husband. And so I would kindly ask someone to come to my side and lead me across the courtroom so that I can take Mr. Van der Broek in my arms, embrace him, and let him know that he is truly forgiven." As the court assistants come to lead the elderly woman across the room, Mr. van der Broek, overwhelmed by what he has just heard, faints. And as he does, those in the courtroom, friends, family, neighbors -all victims of decades of oppression and injustice--begin to sing softly, but assuredly, "Amazing grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me....” (based on a story posted on www.present-truth.org).

What courageous forgiveness! It’s the kind of forgiveness the world just can’t understand. The world looks at such forgiveness as not only reckless and foolish, but as boarding on insanity. Who in their right mind could ever forgive, much less adopt, such a monster who terrorized and destroyed her whole family, burning her husband to death before her own eyes? In such a case isn’t a person just not to forgive? Sometimes even we Christians identify better with a person like the wife of a slain police officer who also got her chance to stand at the end of the trial process and confront her husband’s murder, but said, “I don’t forgive you. I will never forgive you. And I will be there when you die, just like you were there when my husband died. I will never forgive you.” Put in that situation it’s hard to know how any of us would respond.

But if Jesus taught us anything it is that we should love our enemies; that we should bless those who curse us, do good to those who hate us, pray for those who spitefully use us and persecute us, that we might be the sons and daughter of our Father in heaven, for He does the same. But Jesus didn’t just teach us these things; He lived them, and He died practicing what He preached. As the man in the flames reminded his wife, Jesus chose to expend some of the last of his tormented breath pleading on behalf of his tormentors that His Father would forgive them, for they knew not what they did.

The sixth of the ten duties the Anglican Church in North America expects of all of its members is “To practice forgiveness daily according to our Lord’s teaching.”

Now this is a duty that we all know is part and parcel of our acceptance of the Gospel. Jesus taught that if we would receive forgiveness, we must practice forgiveness. “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.” And He went on to say, “For if you forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses” (Mt. 6:14-15). Not that Jesus was teaching that our forgiveness of others earns our forgiveness from God, but that if we receive God’s forgiveness, how is it possible for us not to forgive one another? It’s not possible, is it? Jesus is saying it’s not possible. The only way it could be possible is if we were to assume that our sins against God are somehow less offensive than our brother’s sins against us. But that would be insane, wouldn’t it? Could your brother or sister ever owe a debt of sin to you as you owe to God? So if you accept God’s forgiveness, how could you not give it

But this is just what we do. Somehow or other we believe that God should be able to forgive us with just the slightest acknowledgement of our sins on our parts, but it someone should sin against us, they damn well better grovel on their knees and writhe on the ground before we forgive them. Or we think that if God should be able to instantly forgive and forget our sins, casting them away from us as far as the east is from the west, we ought to be able to hold on to offenses against us for a little while, and maybe even bring them out at a opportune moment in the future. Don’t we do that?

But Jesus taught a little parable on just this issue, didn’t He? We call it the Parable of the Unforgiving Servant. We’ll be going through that parable in a couple of weeks in our Sunday school class, so I won’t go into all the details now. But you know the story. A man owed a certain king 10, 000 talents – a sum equivalent to 60 million days wages, more than all the gold contained in Solomon’s temple, which was right around 8000 talents. And so of course the man was not able to pay what he owed. The point Jesus is making is that our debt of sin to God is just like this man’s unpayable debt to the king. But the king was moved with compassion for the man, and released him, and forgave him all the debt, simply because the man asked him – not because he had sufficiently groveled or suffered enough to earn the king’s forgiveness, but simply because the king had pity on him. But you know what happened next. The man went out and found someone who owed him a hundred denarii – a pittance in comparison to what he owed the king - and had him thrown into debtors’ prison until he paid back every last cent. But then the king found out about. And when he called the man back into his presence he said, “You wicked servant! I forgave you all that debt because you begged me. Should you not also have had compassion on your fellow servant, just as I had pity on you?” And he handed the man over to the torturers till he should pay back all that he owed. And Jesus concludes His parable with some of the most sober words He ever spoke: “So My heavenly Father will do to you if each of you, from his heart, does not forgive his brother” (Matt. 18:23-35).

But how do we do forgiveness? What is the process? What are the ways we go about forgiving one another our offences? Well, Jesus gives us two options, and only two options. We may first choose to forgive unilaterally – that means, one-sidedly, without any efforts or deserving on the side of the offending person. That’s the way the king forgave his servant. That’s the way the elderly woman in South Africa forgave her husband’s and son’s murderers. They didn’t do anything, they didn’t say anything to earn or deserve the woman’s forgiveness. What could they have done or said to earn her forgiveness? She simply chose to forgive them. And her husband simply chose to forgive them, even as they were pouring gasoline on him, because that’s the way his Lord chose to forgive his murderers – unilaterally, one-sidedly, without any sort of payment or deserving from the other side. That’s the first option Jesus gives to us, and the option he exemplifies for us on the cross. And it’s the option we ought to be willing to choose most often.

The second option is the option of confrontation – the option of going to the person who has sinned against you, telling him of his sin, and calling for his repentance. On another occasion Jesus said, “Take heed to yourselves. If a brother sins against you, rebuke him; and if he repents, forgive him.” But He didn’t stop there. He said, “And if he sins against you seven times in a day, and seven times in a day returns to you, saying, “I repent,’ you shall forgive him” (Lk. 17:3-4).

We have to pause and ask first of all, Who would ever do such a thing? Who would ever sin the same sin seven times in a day against the same person? Well, how about you for starters? How many times have you sinned the same sin against God and gone back and asked His forgiveness, and then turned right around and committed it again, and then came back and asked for forgiveness again? And how many times has your heavenly Father forgiven you? Every time! So until you can stop being a habitual sinner, you must practice habitual forgiveness.

But if you choose this second option – the option of confrontation – if you choose it all the time, let me tell you this: you will be wearing yourself out, and you will wear out everyone around you. And it will be apparent to everyone, except maybe yourself, that you aren’t forgiving, that what you looking for is payment, reparations, penance paid to you before you’re willing to forgive. But you see the problem with that is that’s not the way you heavenly Father forgave you. You see, the key principle in the Scriptures is that you are to be forgiving of others “even as God in Christ forgave you” (Eph. 4:32). Well how did God forgive you? The Bible tells us that God demonstrated His love for us “in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us (Rom. 5:8). St. Paul says that it was while were still His enemies that God reconciled us to Himself through the death of His Son (Rom. 5:10). In other words, God chose to forgive us unilaterally, without any earning or deserving on our part. Does God call us to repentance so we can truly receive His forgiveness? Absolutely! But not as some kind of payment for our sins. God did everything necessary to pay for our sins by sending His Son to die on a cross, even before we ever repented. So we ought to have forgiveness in our hearts for our fellow sinners even before they repent.

So when should you choose the second option – the option of confrontation? When the offense is such a barrier to the relationship that there cannot be peace without confronting it and working towards reconciliation. But that ought to be the goal of any confrontation: reconciliation, not telling the other person what we think of them; not rubbing their noses in their sin; not making them pay penance for their sins, but seeking reconciliation.

These are the two options Christ has given us: unilateral forgiveness, or confrontation for the purpose of reconciliation. He did not give us a third. He did not give us the option of holding a grudge. He did not give us the option of broadcasting our issues with a person to everybody we know except that person. As a matter of fact, in Matthew chapter 18 He said if we want to go the way of confrontation we are to go to the person who offended us, and to him alone, and tell him of his fault. And if he repents, Jesus says, we’ve won our brother. And nobody else has to know there was ever a problem. If he doesn’t repent we’re to take one or two others with us as witnesses and confront him again. And if he repents, great! Again we’ve won our brother. If he doesn’t repent, then and only then are we to bring it to the church. And then if he doesn’t repent, we’re to treat him as heathen and a tax collector. We may not skip steps one and two and go straight to the end of the process. And if we’re not willing to take it to the end of the process, then the only option left to us is to forgive unilaterally. We may not choose to hang on to the offense.

This is the way things are supposed to work in the Church. We are to practice forgiveness daily according to our Lord’s teaching. And that means we are to practice it in one of only two ways: to forgiven unilaterally without any earning or deserving on the other’s part, or to confront for the purpose of bring the person to repentance so there can be reconciliation.

So let us strive with everything in our being to forgive as we have been forgiven, for this is the responsibility laid upon us by our acceptance of the gospel. “Lord, forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.” +