“ON FORGIVENESS”
“Peter came and said to Jesus, “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 times seven.”
– Matthew 18:21-22
If I was one of those traveling caravan preachers who pitched a tent in one town after another… you can bet I’d stand in front of the crowd with confidence and say with all my might… “there’s someone in this crowd who hasn’t practiced forgiveness… you know who you are… you’ve been that way all your life… you just won’t do it…” because they carry the anger inside day and night and they are just like old Frederick Buechner said… ‘engaging in the feast… smacking their lips and rolling over their tongue to the last toothsome morsel… both the pain they’ve been given and the pain they love to give back… it’s a feast fit for a king… but the chief drawback is what they are wolfing down is themself… the skeleton at the feast looks familiar’… so yeah… I know you are out there… and yes… I could go on… ‘there is someone here today who needs to be forgiven… not just 7 times… but 77 times or in the old way we used to translate this passage… 70 x 7…’ which is actually a hint about 490 years… the number of years the prophet Daniel said would unfold before the temple in Jerusalem would be restored and that if you keep pressing forward from that great moment it was just about 490 more years before the birth of Jesus the Messiah who would arrive… bringing forgiveness of sins to all of God’s people… here, there and everywhere!
We all need forgiveness. We all need to practice being forgiving… the human behavior which is… the persistent … consistent graciousness we need to surround us when we’ve opened our mouths to say what we shouldn’t have or to have acted in a way which brings harm to another or has compromised the reputations we think we have created…. and is a most powerful tool to have in one’s faith life arsenal… because… when we get right down to it… forgiveness is always about the forgiver… the one granting forgiveness rather than the receiver of said grace and mercy…
Peter does ask Jesus an interesting question. This 18th chapter of St. Matthew is the classic place Christians go to when it comes to conflict management answering the whys and the hows of the act of forgiveness. But… Peter was being generous in his asking… knowing that Jesus said if someone offends you… go and tell that person… do it face to face and do your best to mend the broken relationship because forgiveness is always about putting back together that thing which gets broken… and in those days… the rabbi would tell you that you should try that three times and if the person still won’t budge to make things right… well that’s enough of that… so when Peter asked Jesus how many times should one seek forgiveness… he should have asked… ‘three’ but instead doubled down and added one by asking if seven times was enough.
Jesus’ answer was one Peter did not expect and when we give this a good look we realize that Jesus not only exaggerated the number of times forgiveness should be granted… he exposed all of our vulnerabilities pointing out that all of us sin way more than we give ourselves credit for or own up to… and that it would take an incredible amount of forgiving to counter the endless charting of our brokenness.
St. Paul wrote to his friends in Rome… “the wages of sin is death…” a reminder that it was God’s loving way to fix this mess… as Jesus died on the cross… saying … “Father forgive them for they know not what they do…” a prayer that lingers in the air even today and as Jesus shouted… “it is finished” we trust this was God’s way of paying the debt… as the wages of our sins accomplished through the death of Jesus… and nothing more would be required. So… we all need forgiveness. We all need to practice being forgiving… Faith matters!
The Rev. Dr. Brian K. Gigee is a long-time resident of Pearland, having pastored four churches over the last four decades in Texas and Louisiana. Read more following Brian’s blog ‘murmurings’ at https://briangigee.wordpress.com/. Send comments and/or questions to godworks247365@gmail.com.
