SunApr32011
LORD’S PRAYER SERIES
Scripture-MATTHEW 6:12
Little Bobbie Marie asks for the huge 64-color box of crayons for her eighth birthday. Living in a home with few resources, when she gets it, she is so enamored of it that she continually opens and closes the box just to stare at and sniff those marvelous sticks. She especially delights in the silver crayon. It’s absolutely beautiful to her. The following Sunday, she takes the box to her Sunday School class and proudly uses it to color the lesson for the day. Janey, her nemesis, grabs the silver crayon when the teacher isn’t looking, and intentionally colors so hard with it that the crayon snaps in two. Bobbie Marie is shattered. The teacher tells Janey to apologize, which, with an annoying smirk, she does in that fake sing-songy way—“Sorry.” And then the teacher looks at Bobbie Marie and says, “She’s told you she’s sorry. Now tell her you forgive her and you want to be her friend” (Roberta C. Bondi, A Place to Pray: Reflections on the Lord’s Prayer, pp. 88-90).
Your 22-year-old daughter has a rare and fatal genetic blood disorder. She goes in to the hospital for a bone marrow transplant. While she’s there, she suffers a stroke when the doctors mistakenly insert and then remove a catheter in an artery. Two years later, the stroke has killed her. You’ve lost your precious daughter. How do you move on healthily; what’s your response to the hospital and the surgeons (Patrick Henry, The Ironic Christian’s Companion, p. 231)?
You’ve been married, happily, you thought, for over twenty years. One day you discover that your wife has been having an affair with a neighbor. You are so livid and so hurt that you can’t see straight. Not only that, but you wonder whether either or both of you now has a sexually transmitted disease. You come to church the next week and pray that grating line from the Lord’s Prayer: “And forgive us our sins, as we forgive those who sin against us.” How do you forgive such a terrible betrayal?
Is there anything more difficult than real forgiveness? Especially when you’ve been cut to the quick, when something precious has been taken from you, how can you possibly forgive? And when the life has been sucked out of you like that, why would you even want to?
There aren’t any easy answers, of course. In fact, the more I think about forgiveness, the less clear it seems. Almost anything you can say about forgiveness, you can also say, “But that’s not quite it, either.” For example, we really ought to forgive. But if it feels compelled, it’s not genuine; it won’t take. Or we might say, “To forgive is to let go of a wrong that’s been done to you.” But if that’s the case, does that mean the wrongdoer shouldn’t be punished or held accountable? Doesn’t forgiveness just let the perpetrator off the hook? Real forgiveness can literally let a person get away with murder. There have to be consequences. We have to try to prevent the wrong from happening again. Don’t we?
“Forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors,” is the way Matthew’s text reads. There’s certainly an admonition there to forgive the financial, material debts we owe each other. My guess, though, is that the word “debts” has more than a literal meaning there, as well, that it represents all the things we owe to others—the mistakes we’ve made, the ways we’ve hurt each other, the moral sins we’ve committed. Whether the debt is financial, though, or a broken crayon, or a lost life, or a wrecked marriage, the whole notion of forgiveness is immensely difficult.
Will Willimon and Stanley Hauerwas, in their book on the Lord’s Prayer, say that forgiveness is an “outrageous” act (Lord, Teach Us: The Lord’s Prayer and Christian Life, p. 78). Some members of our study group didn’t like that word, and I can see why—it makes forgiveness sound inappropriate somehow. So let’s say instead that forgiveness is a wildly difficult and counter-intuitive thing to do. It goes incredibly against the grain.
So why do it? One way to look at forgiveness is as a gesture that puts an end to the cycle of revenge and mutual destruction. In Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, the Capulets and the Montagues can’t let go of past animosities and they stay stuck in the prison of their resentments. Contemporary urban gangs do the same thing. Ireland; the Middle East; Rwanda’s Tutsis and Hutus several years ago; the people of the former Yugoslavia; rebel and loyalist Libyans; basketball fans in Cleveland and Miami; many marriages, sibling, and parent-child relationships: we don’t have to look far to see the cycle of grudges held onto and forgiveness not practiced.
The thing is, if we’re in the middle of those grudges, if we’ve had something taken from us, they all seem legitimate. We have been hurt. Someone did wrong us. The silver crayon was broken, the daughter did die by malpractice, the spouse did cheat. We have been victimized. We’re justified in feeling resentful.
Willimon and Hauerwas eloquently state the other side of the matter, though. In urging forgiveness, “Jesus is refusing to let sin have the last word.” In offering mercy, we have the opportunity, they say, “to turn the world around, to throw a monkey wrench in the eternal wheel of retribution and vengeance” (p. 84).
That we do. When an Amish community forgives a mass murderer on the very day of the shootings, as happened in a celebrated case several years ago, the world turns around. When a girl lets go of her classmates’ vicious teasing, the world turns around. When a man can forgive his brother’s lifelong cruelty, the world turns around.
None of this can be compelled. If you try to make me forgive, I will dig in my heels and say, “Never.” But if I can come to it on my own, if I can desire it for myself, then there’s a possibility of something new and gracious happening.
A possibility, we say. One of the stranger aspects of forgiving is that not only can it not be compelled by someone else, but I can’t even make it happen for myself. Hard as I try, a resentment may hang on for an entire life. There’s no magic button to push to suddenly generate forgiveness. I do indeed have to want it. But my wanting it is not sufficient, by itself, to make it happen. Two things make all the difference: patience and God. Without patience and God, forgiveness is incredibly difficult.
When I was in my twenties and just out of college, I lived in the Brighton area of Boston. For a time, I had a roommate named Harry, who was a jazz drummer. Eventually Harry moved to another apartment, but when he did, he stiffed me for $750 in rent.
I suspect I’ve never really let that go. As soon as I began reflecting on this phrase from the Lord’s Prayer this week, his image came into my mind. In fact, I Googled him and found him right away. And I had this fantasy about writing him a note saying I wanted the $750 back, plus interest. You who are bankers could tell me how much I’d have now—a pretty little pile, I’d bet!
It’s striking that, some thirty years later, I’m still acutely aware of the wrong he did me, and that I still want him to make good on it. So you might think it’s time to say, “Get over it, Hammy! You’re not going to get the money back. Let it go!” And you’d be exactly right. Except that I’ve tried that many times in the intervening years, and it hasn’t worked.
Because, as I say, it’s not a matter of will power alone. I do have to want to let it go. But merely wishing my resentment away doesn’t make it happen, as so many of us know. And that’s because there are at least those two other crucial factors. One is that forgiveness is not something that happens overnight, like the flip of a switch. When we were reflecting on this part of the prayer at our weekly staff meeting on Wednesday, and I asked for a word association about the word “forgiveness,” Mark Simone said “process.” That’s a critical part of forgiveness. No matter how badly we want it, it can take years, even decades, to get over various hurts. Like a river wearing a path through rocky terrain, that’s what forgiveness may be like with any number of slights and abuses: it may take ages and ages. The important thing is not to cut off the current, not to give up on that wearing away. The movement, the progress, is what matters.
And this is where the God part comes in. And the other part of that phrase, the phrase we often don’t think too much about. Remember what Jesus says? The first thing that gets mentioned isn’t the sins of all those people who have done me wrong. The first thing mentioned is not their sins, but mine: forgive us our sins.
I bet if we polled the congregation this morning, most of us, including me, would say that we were much more often the victim than the perpetrator of wrong. If we’re having a struggle at work, we can tell you in great detail why our position is right and that of our antagonists is wrong. If we’ve been through a divorce, our partner’s failings are much more obvious than our own. I bet all of us could enumerate many more ways we’ve been hurt than ways we’ve hurt others. And it’s not just here in this congregation, either. We could extend that to the whole world. My guess is that everyone feels more the victim of wrongs than their perpetrators.
But when we put it that way, we can see that the math just doesn’t add up. It can’t possibly be the case that everyone, everywhere is more just and loving than the people with whom they live and work. Someone clearly is causing the problems that plague us. And what the words of Jesus’ prayer remind us is that it’s not just those others. We’re all guilty of hurting each other. Hard as it sometimes is to admit, we all contribute to the world’s pain. We all let each other down. We simply can’t avoid it.
So when I think back to my old roommate, Harry, and the money he neglected to pay me, I’m reminded that he’s not the only one who owes. I owe. Big time. I owe my parents an incalculable financial and emotional debt. How could I ever repay the food and clothing and toys and education and support they provided me? One website says that if you had a child born in 2000, in roughly our family circumstances, the cost of raising that child, including college, would be over $500,000. Certainly it was less than that in the ’50s and ’60s. But it was still something I will never remotely be able to repay. What about friends who have shared dinners or lunches, who have bought me gifts, who have treated me to a round of golf or a Cavs or Indians game? What’s $750 when you’ve been the recipient of countless gifts? If I’m more aware of what people owe me than what I myself owe to others, that’s part of the problem.
The same is true when we extend this whole dynamic beyond the financial realm. I’m not the only one who’s been wronged in life. I surely have done my share of wronging. I’m guessing there are a number of you who can attest to that—especially Mary! And when I recognize that, it helps me let go of the wrongs that have been done to me. We’re all part of this flawed, wonderful, sinning, beautiful world. We all both suffer and harm. Acknowledging this, confessing this, helps me be considerably less self-righteous about my own sense of having been wronged.
And once I get that, I can go to God. I can accept that God has forgiven me my slights and cruelties and insensitivities. And God has done the same thing with those who have hurt me. And if God has forgiven them, maybe there’s power there for me to do the same. What I can’t do for myself—muster the wherewithal to forgive those who have apparently wronged me—God can do with me. That very power that is greater than I can ask or imagine is able to do for and with me what I cannot do by myself. And so we say to God: come into my life. Grant me peace. Allow me to forgive those who have wronged me. Take away my resentments. Crack open that lush, beautiful world you promise to all who trust you. For with you, all things are possible. By your grace and power, make it so!