7/12 To Err Is Human, But to Forgive Is Godly.

A well known Shakespearean phrase is: “To be or not to be, that is the question.” But another question that goes to the heart of who we are as persons and children of God is: to forgive or not to forgive, is that the measure of who I am? When Peter asked Jesus (Matthew 18:21-22) how often we should forgive those who transgress against us, he sought to put a limit on the extent of forgiveness although he did go well beyond the Rabbinical limit of three times. Peter thought he was being more than generous by suggesting seven times. Jesus undoubtedly caught him off guard with his response, seventy times seven which was our Lords way of saying that love and compassion have no limits.. But Jesus had a way of catching people off guard or surprising them with his unexpected answers. Indeed one of the features in his use of parables was to use hyperbole or exaggeration in driving home a point. My favorite pithy statement of Jesus which has been classified by some as a mini-parable is the one where Jesus says, “..take the plank out of your own eye and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye. “ (Matt. 7:5)

Undoubtedly, self righteousness can be a big impediment to being willing to forgive others. When out of selfish ambition or vain conceit I consider myself better than others (see Philippians 2:3), I make myself vulnerable to judging the worth of others and condemning myself to the same fate which I consign to others who have offended me or someone else. When Jesus cautioned us not to judge others lest we too be judged he wasn’t kidding. When we refuse to forgive others, we are making a value judgment about them, namely, that they are not worthy of our forgiveness or that they are inferior to us as persons. In “The Parable of the unmerciful servant,” (Matt. 18:23ff) Jesus illustrates how we ourselves “can end up in the soup” if we withhold forgiveness and “throw people away.” He does it with the aid of hyperbole in that he tells the story of a man, probably a high ranking official in a kingdom, who owed, perhaps, billions (by today’s inflationary standards) to his king and was about to be sold into slavery along with his wife and children because the debt could never be repaid. Now, no individual could owe that much to anyone else at that time; so this is an exaggeration that Jesus uses to make a point. We too owe much more to God than we could possibly repay him for our grievances against his holiness and divine dignity (a prevalent theme in medieval Christian theology). We are hopeless sinners and deserve frightful punishment. But God forgives us even as the King in Jesus parable forgives the debtor after the latter pleads for mercy and more time to repay what he really can’t repay. In fact, the debt is entirely cancelled. This is another of Jesus’ devices in some of his parables. There is the element of surprise because no king would do that in Jesus’ day. But this effectively illustrates our heavenly Father’s desire to be merciful.

But then, the plot thickens because the forgiven debtor turns around and callously refuses to forgive an associate of his and brings ruin upon his debtor, who owed him 500,000 times less than what our forgiven official had owed. Well, this despicable outrage reaches the king’s ears and there is hell to pay for our ungrateful, unforgiving official. Through this parable, Jesus is telling us that we are ungrateful for God’s forgiveness when we withhold forgiveness from our brother or sister. We also run the risk of losing our humanity and right standing in the Kingdom of God when we are unmerciful. Unforgiveness hardens us and can become the basis for hatred and bitterness which in turn can make us sick and even terminally ill. But lest I overstate the case, not everyone who is sick has a grave, unresolved moral problem, but we are playing with fire if we develop tendencies to hold grudges, judge others harshly, and hatefully repay others for their sins against us. Finally, we would be remiss if we didn’t acknowledge that there is the need for discipline, correction in love, and even restitution where it is possible, but all this becomes redemptive in an environment or shall I say a community of trust and compassion for one another’s moral limitations.