How Many Times!?

"How Many Times!?"
Matthew 18:21-35


Peter’s question about being forgiving is a human one:  “Lord, how often shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him?  As many as seven times?”  What Peter is really asking is not how many times does he have to forgive someone.  Peter’s question is really, how many times do I have to forgive someone, so that then I don’t have to forgive them anymore?  What’s the limit?  And once I reach the limit, can I be done with the person?  No more Mr. Nice Guy.

Last week we looked at the the conversation Jesus had with the disciples about the times someone “sins against you.”  Jesus suggested a threefold plan to handle the times when a fellow believer does harm to you.  Go to them personally.  If that doesn’t work, take a couple of other believers with you as objective listeners.  If that doesn’t work, take it before the congregation.

Then Peter takes Jesus aside and basically asks, “How many times do I have to go through this process with my fellow believer?”  My guess is Peter had someone specific in mind.  Peter wasn’t a hypothetical kind of person.  Peter dealt with reality.  Peter was down-to-earth.  Peter liked the particular, not the general.  So when he asked Jesus his question, Peter must have had a fellow believer who was constantly sticking thorns in his craw.  How much is he going to have to put up with that, Peter wants to know.

We worked through some of this in last week’s message.  People can be really difficult to get along with.  Some of those people are our brothers and sisters in Christ.  How are we supposed to deal with that, the disciples want to know.  It’s the issue that’s at the very center of any group, organization, or congregation.  How can we get along?  How do we deal with the people who have made, or are making life difficult?  How do we hold together our sense of community and fellowship when there’s these people who are constantly annoying and hurtful?

Peter homes in on where Jesus is going with this.  Peter narrows the issue down.  Peter asks about forgiveness.  Jesus hadn’t said anything, in the previous conversation, about forgiving the person who has hurt you.  Jesus just outlined the three step process of trying to make things right between you and a fellow believer who had hurt you.  It’s Peter who perceptively takes things a step further in asking about forgiveness:  How many times must I forgive someone?

By throwing out the number seven, Peter is well within the limits of acceptability.  Seven is a holy number.  So it’s a good number in that respect.  It doesn’t sound like too many, and it doesn’t sound like too few.  It’s also the number of times the Rabbi’s had decided a person should forgive another.  So it seems Peter has picked a goodly number for the amount of times a person should be forgiving to another.  I’m sure he must have expected Jesus would reply with something like, “Yeah, that sounds like a good number of times to be forgiving to any certain person who keeps hurting you.”

But Jesus doesn’t do that.  Instead Jesus shocks Peter with the statement that he should be forgiving not seven times, but 77 times, or seventy times seven.  It’s not clear in the Greek which it really is.  But it doesn’t matter, does it, whether it’s 77 times or 490 times.  It’s a lot.  Basically, what Jesus is telling Peter is that forgiveness is a forever and always thing.  You don’t forgive 7 times.  You forgive all the time, every time.  If you are going to build any kind of relationship, fellowship, or community, forgiveness has to be a constant.

Brooke and Adam had to deal with this this past week.  A Mini-Cooper peddle car that belonged to Gracie was stolen out of their yard.  I’m sure Brooke and Adam know the world is not a nice or safe place.  They know things get stolen.  They know there are stupid people.  Even though they and we know that, it still really hurts to have it happen to you.  To your little daughter.  All of a sudden, Gracie, who is an open and welcoming and trusting child, found out that not everyone is like her.  Not everyone does nice things.  Her sense of faith and trust in community has taken a blow because someone chose to be a stupid thief.

Their response?  Cry.  You have to cry.  It hurts.  But then they gathered in a circle in their yard and prayed for forgiveness for the person who did this stupid act.  Certainly, Gracie, like Peter, is probably wondering how many times she is going to have to make that prayer for the people who disrupted her life.  How many times, Lord, do I have to be forgiving?  Seven enough?

This forgiveness stuff is tough.  We all know about forgiveness.  We all know we ought to do it.  We all know forgiveness and forgiving others is a sound principle.  Some of our better principles don’t quite make it into practice, though.  Forgiveness is especially hard on this 10th anniversary of 9/11.  Knowing we need to be forgiving, and then actually forgiving those who planned and perpetrated the atrocities of 9/11 may be two different things.  Can or should Christian Americans forgive al-Qaeda?  That will be one of our discussion questions in our Sunday School class after worship.

So we may wonder if perpetual, seventy-times-seven, forgiveness is even a sound principle.  Does constantly forgiving someone really end up just being enabling?  Does time-after-time forgiveness really build up the health of a relationship or community?  If we are constantly forgiving, are we just letting people off without calling them to personal responsibility?

And what about abusive situations?  Certainly experiencing ongoing abuse of any kind, and answering that abuse with a simple, “I forgive you,” doesn’t really solve anything.  What about repentance?  Shouldn’t forgiveness be a follow-up when someone said they were sorry, and repented?  Are we to constantly forgive someone who isn’t sorry?  Of course, forgiveness doesn’t mean you keep putting yourself in harms way, at the hands of some abusive person, whether they are sorry or not.  Jesus doesn’t seem to answer those questions.  Jesus just says to make forgiveness a constant, a part of who we are at the very core, both individually and as a community.

I’m convinced Jesus is right.  Humor me for a moment.  I want you to close your eyes.  Take a deep breath.  Relax your shoulders.  I want you to slowly picture someone in your mind.  I want you to see the face of someone you have not forgiven, or have had a hard time coming to forgiveness about.  Maybe you don’t have anyone like that in your life right now.  If not, just continue relaxing and meditating on the power of the practice of being a forgiving person.

For the rest of you, you have a face looking at you in your minds eye, a face you would rather not look at.  Imagine you two standing, a short distance apart, facing each other, looking into each others eyes.  You might feel your blood pressure rising.  Your heart quickening.  Your anger beginning to boil.  Sense what you are feeling for a moment.

Now another person approaches the two of you.  You know it’s Jesus.  How do you react?  How does your body react?  Jesus turns to this other person and says something.  What do you imagine Jesus saying?  And then Jesus turns to you.  He tells you something.  What does he say to you?  You take a deep breath, and smile at Jesus.  He smiles back.  Then you look into the face of the one who has been hard to forgive.  You know what you need to do.

Let the image fade.  Take a couple of deep breaths and come back to the sanctuary.  Open your eyes when you are ready.

Fellow Presbyterian pastor and author Marjorie Thompson wrote in a recent article:
To forgive is to make a conscious choice to release the person who has wounded us from the sentence of our judgment, however justified that judgment may be...Forgiveness represents a choice to leave behind our resentment and desire for retribution however fair such punishment may seem...Forgiveness means the power of the original wound to hold us trapped is broken.

I hope that is part of what you heard from Christ in the little guided imagery.  To make a choice to release judgment, leave behind resentment, and break the trap open that being unforgiving becomes.  Being unforgiving is a trap.  Two army buddies, who had been prisoners of war together, were talking, now that they were civilians.  One said to the other, “Have you forgiven our captors yet?”
“I will never do that,” the second one answered.
“Then they still have you in prison, don’t they?” the first one replied.

That’s how being unforgiving is a trap.  It holds YOU in an emotional and spiritual prison, not the one who hurt you.  As an individual, the more we are unforgiving, the stronger that prison becomes.  Until it can become our own death sentence.

We need to remember the conversation Jesus had just before this private conversation with Peter.  It was about the health of the community of believers.  How to keep the health of that community strong, when two people are at odds.  So really, what we see to be true for individuals who are unforgiving is operative in communities as well.  In groups of people, like congregations or nations, where an unforgiving spirit resides, there is also a prison.  They also need to hear a word from the Lord.

Let me tell you about the Leoti Presbyterian Church where I was at before I came here.  A number of years ago, it was a good sized congregation.  But it had a string of awful, destructive, charismatic pastors.  One of those pastors eventually split the congregation, convincing a majority of the members to follow him in making a new congregation in town.  Which is what they did.

One of the members of the Session at that time was a lawyer in town.  He was part of the split off group.  Somehow, he got into the church’s saving account and stole somewhere between $40-50,000, and transferred it over to the new, split off congregation.  It was the seed money they used to build the new church, that allied itself with the Evangelical Presbyterian denomination.

A large part of the membership was gone.  Hugely hurt feelings all around.  A savings account liquidated in a nearly criminal way.  Hurt and unforgiveness abounded in the small number of members who remained in the original Presbyterian church.  Bitterness and unforgiveness were what bound the remaining member together.

But, by the time I got there, forgiveness had set them free.  Even to the point that the members who have remained strong in the original congregation feel like they are the better for it, are so glad to be free of all the contention that existed for so many years, and are proud for they way they have become a forgiving and faithful people.  They were a tremendously fun congregation of folks to be a part of.  And I am convinced it is because they decided to live their forgiveness.

One final story--a story told by Rabbi Harold Kushner in his book, Letting Go of the Role of Victim.
A woman in my congregation comes to see me.  She is a single mother, divorced, working to support herself and three young children.  She says to me, “Since my husband walked out on us, every month is a struggle to pay our bills.  I have to tell my kids we have no money to go to the movies, while he’s living it up with his new wife in another state.  How can you tell me to forgive him?”
I answer her, “I’m not asking you to forgive him because what he did was acceptable.  It wasn’t; it was mean and selfish.  I’m asking you to forgive because he doesn’t deserve the power to live in your head and turn you into a bitter, angry woman.  I’d like to see him out of your life emotionally as completely as he is out of it physically.  But you keep holding on to him.  You’re not hurting him by holding on to that resentment, but you are hurting yourself.”

Maybe you’ve been like Peter.  You want to know what the upper limit of your forgiving has to be, so you know when you get to stop.  You may think that when you stop forgiving that somehow that will be more freeing.  Thinking like that is a subtle trap.

Or maybe you’ve been like this woman in Rabbi Kushner’s office.  You don’t want to stop being unforgiving.  It feels too good.  It feels like if you do forgive, then you won’t be you any more.  You’ll have to be someone else.  You have come to define yourself by your unforgiveness.  To let go of that is too scary.

Whichever of these has been your experience, Jesus says, “Seventy times seven.”  I don’t know what Jesus said to the other person you imaged.  I don’t know what Jesus said to you in that imagery.  But I think you do know what you need to do.  It’s time.  It’s time.  That’s what Jesus said.  It’s time.