The Jailor Is The Jailed: Relationships Skills from the Bible for Today
Matt 18:21-35 May 30, 2010
Intro:
Once upon a time there was a man to whom a great harm had been done. The exact nature is of no consequence, as long as we know the hurt went deep. He felt it continually, the pain was searing and relentless, and even the most basic tasks of life were exceedingly difficult. In his mind, heart, and spirit this harm was ever present; it whispered, it screamed, it cluttered every thought, interpreted every word heard, and manipulated every decision. The man was deeply wounded, yet believed he had to carry on. He believed he had to make do, be tough, keep going; so he held his head high, pulled himself up by his bootstraps, and walked through life as best he could.
Over time, he learned to cope. He learned to ignore the hurt that had been done – the voices were still there, he just stopped listening – sort of – and believed he was “fine”. The defences got stronger, the walls got thicker, and the man thought “This is a good thing – I am protecting myself from other, new hurts, and I am containing the old ones where they can’t get out, where no one else will see, and so I can continue through life with everyone looking at me and admiring me for how strong and tough I am.”
Meanwhile, the one who had hurt him lived on. This one knew that their actions weren’t the best, and (deep inside) regretted them. In fleeting moments of honesty, they recognized they had been in the wrong; but then their own voices spoke up – “it’s not your fault, really…”; “he had it coming you know, he isn’t perfect either…”; and, most devious of all, “look at him, he’s doing fine, it obviously wasn’t a big deal…”. And so this person balled this same experience up like a piece of used scrap paper and threw it away.
The one who had been hurt became withdrawn, cautious, guarded. He could never really trust – that requires vulnerability, honesty, letting someone behind the wall. And so he kept his relationships shallow, temporary, fleeting. If someone got too close, he backed away. And the walls grew thicker still. He became extremely safe, like a nuclear bunker a mile below the ground, and extremely alone. The other person suffered none of this – they were free to engage, they tried hard to not hurt again, though sometimes they did, and then they did as before – justified, rationalized, balled it up and chucked it out, and moved on. This second person formed new relationships, some deep and caring, and lived life with abundance, while the first was locked away in lonely safety.
It’s Not Fair:
What do you think of my little story? Does it resonate as true? Is it fair? Does it make you feel angry, or sad? Do you see yourself in either of the two characters?
This morning we are going to do some hard work together, on a difficult relationship skill, but one that is most essential. Because I think we all have been in the same spot as both of the characters, and we can all especially remember being in the same spot as the first character. And in fact, I want you to think right now of a person who has hurt you deeply. I want you to think of their name, and say it in your mind and your heart. I want you to crack a little window through whatever wall you might have put up to protect yourself, and I want to say that it is ok to face the hurt, to acknowledge the pain, and to let yourself feel it. I’m not going to ask you to share it, or to talk about it, but I am going to ask you to admit it to yourself. And with that in mind, let’s talk about the critical relationship skill of forgiveness.
Forgiveness is NOT:
As many of you know, one of the things that frustrates me most is when good things of God get twisted into something barely recognizable. I’ve spoke before about how we don’t really understand the Biblical idea of “peace” – we reduce it to an absence of conflict where hostilities are repressed but still present, and call that “peace”. NOPE! Or, one of my favourites, “love” – we reduce it to a sappy, romantic sentimentalism that would never challenge, offend, or require work or pain or sacrifice. “Forgiveness” is another.
Forgiveness has been reduced, for many Christians, to an automatic duty. We expect it automatically from God – all we have to do is say “oops! Sorry God. Let me off the hook, ok?” And, in fact, we sometimes even get mad at God if there are lingering effects of our sin, things we call “consequences”, because we see them as messages that we are not really forgiven, that somehow God continues to “punish” us when He was supposed to let us off the hook. And then we guilt ourselves into thinking it means the same in our relationships with others. If someone hurts us, we think “well I’m supposed to forgive them, so I guess I have to forgive them.” And we THINK we let them off the hook, remove any consequences, forgo any punishment, because to do otherwise is to not forgive.
And we become the first person in the story. We withdraw. Build walls. Retreat. We take that festering, infected hurt and lock it in a black box we mis-name forgiveness, thinking we can bury it in some deep corner of our souls where it won’t impact us, when in reality we lock ourselves in the same box. We blame ourselves for continuing to feel any sort of anger or hurt, because we tell ourselves the lie that “well I forgave them, none of that should matter any more”, and dump guilt on top of pain and feel like really bad Christians, bad people, who thus really deserve to be miserable in the first place. We become the jailor who locks himself in jail. Imprisoned, condemned by our own conscience, and locked in by our own hand, with the keys in our own pocket.
And the person that hurt us? They run free. At most, they feel some guilt, but it doesn’t wreck them like the hurt wrecks us. They move on; especially if we say “I forgive you” but do so with a reduced and impotent understanding of forgiveness that is merely “letting the other off the hook”.
Forgiveness is not saying, “it doesn’t matter, it’s no big deal.”
Forgiveness is not saying, “I release you from the consequences of your actions.”
Forgiveness is not saying, “I probably deserved it anyway, so you aren’t really wrong.”
Forgiveness is not saying, “our relationship can just go back to where it was as if nothing happened.”
Then What Is It??
What, then, is forgiveness? It is a short, hard path out of darkness and slavery to ourselves, into light, for which there is no shortcut. Ultimately it becomes a choice – but one that must not be made too soon, too lightly, or without consideration. For small wounds, the path is easier; for larger wounds, the path is harder – but it is still a short path. If it is too long, you’ve likely gotten bogged down in a lie along the way. And it isn’t always a single, linear path. The same event might create multiple wounds, each requiring forgiveness separately; here the good news is that we get stronger and more able to climb the paths each time we walk one of them and do the hard work of forgiveness.
Steps On The Path:
Let me describe the steps along the path in general. First, we begin when the sin of another throws us into a pit, which hurts. So step one is to diagnose the hurt – how deep is it, how debilitating, how much is broken, how much is bruised, how much function do I have left. It is ludicrous to assume that the person that threw us in can poke their head over the top and say, “oops, sorry old chap!”, and for the broken person at the bottom to say, “oh, that’s ok, it’s nothing, I’m fine, you are forgiven”, when they don’t even yet know what the wound is. Step one: how deep is the hurt? You have to feel it, you have to wash away the dirt to see if it is a just a scratch, or a compound fracture that split a major artery. You can’t forgive at step one.
Step two is the equivalent of “first aid”. This doesn’t solve the problem, but it intervenes immediately to contain the hurt, stop the bleeding, stabilize the broken bones, and prepare to get deeper help. In our relationships this becomes all the immediate things that need to happen to stop making things worse; sometimes this is walking away, sometimes it is running to the safe arms of a caring friend who can listen and support, sometimes it is the very practical things of life-essentials like a meal and rest. Again, this is not the time to say to the person who pushed, “forget it, I forgive you, go in peace.” You can’t forgive at step two.
Sometimes, unfortunately, we stall at this step. The bleeding stops, so we think we’re ok now. The immediate crisis is past, so we think “life” can just return to normal and we can pretend nothing happened. Maybe the left leg is broken, but we can still hop along on the right leg. But in fact, we are not ok. Emotionally and spiritually, we sometimes put a bandage on an infected, dirty wound, which is just going to fester and get infected and gangrenous and eventually that part will just die. Or it is never setting a broken bone properly, so it doesn’t heal properly and leaves us crippled and misshapen and having to cope. If we don’t follow to the next steps, where eventually we can truly, deeply forgive, we sentence ourselves to prolonging the agony, locking ourselves in jail, and we stay stuck at step 2. But we are still not ready to forgive.
Step three is healing post-wound. Here we have to face the wound. Recognize it for exactly what it is, get a clear diagnosis, understand it, and then decide on a course of treatment and follow through with it. Emotionally and spiritually, this means seeing the sin that started this all off for exactly what it is: hurtful, wrong, evil, and deeply painful. This is not the time for compassion and understanding for the other person, that can come later, but this is the time to see and act on whatever needs to be done in us to begin the healing. Often this involves speaking the pain out loud, putting it into words, making it concrete and tangible. See, when we keep these things locked inside of us they grow larger in our minds, hearts, and spirits, and they have increasing power over us. Fear works the same way. One of the best treatments for this kind of pain is to speak the words to a trusted friend or counsellor, to get them out, to name the pain, and to hear that other person affirm the feelings without minimization or rationalization. Still, we are not yet ready to actually forgive.
Step four is, believe it or not, to get angry. We need to love ourselves enough to feel the deep injustice of the hurt that was done to us. We need to believe we did not deserve it, we did not earn it, it was not somehow a punishment that resulted from how bad we are. We need to find the place in the heart of God that cries for justice to be done. We need to believe that in the eyes of justice, we have every right, under God, to inflict the same level of hurt on the other person as we experienced. That would be justice – “an eye for an eye”, in the words of the Old Testament. And we are owed that justice. We can’t shortcut here either, we can’t tell ourselves that we shouldn’t feel that way, that feeling like that means we are bad or sinning, and we certainly can’t tell ourselves to stop feeling like this because it isn’t very “Christian”. In fact, being angry at sin is PROFOUNDLY Christian, and is an essence precursor to forgiveness.
Now, when we’ve diagnosed the hurt (step 1), managed the immediate needs (step 2), started to heal (step 3), and felt anger at the injustice/sin that was done to us (step 4), and ONLY now, are we ready to make a free decision. And here it is: either, we hurt back, as justice demands; or we forgive. Hurting back perpetuates the cycle, it causes more pain, it “evens the score” but it does so at -2 each. Sometimes, for example in the United States, it even means that the murderer is sent to death row and executed. This, in that system, is called “justice”. But to the victims of the original crime, does this heal the original wound? Does it bring back their loved one? It may bring closure, relief, and a sense of justice, but at most it says “now we are even…”. No one is whole.
The other option, when we get to what I’m calling “step 4” and we feel the injustice and recognize that we have the right to hurt back, is to choose to forgive. Here we can say, “You deserve to be hurt back, you deserve to ache like I ache, because I deserve justice. But instead, I choose to not exercise my right to justice, I choose to forgive, because I have been the recipient of forgiveness from God and so I extend that to you.
The result is this: we are both set free. It doesn’t mean there are no consequences – if the other person smashed your car while it was parked on the side of the road, they still are responsible to pay for the damages. But “forgiving” in emotional and spiritual realms means they are released from the demands of retribution, and when we release them we discover that we also are released. The man in my first story changes – he doesn’t keep a locked up black box; the jailer takes the keys from the pocket, opens the door and sets himself free.
Scripture (finally!): Matt 18:21-35
What I have described above is no easy process. And I don’t know where along the short, hard path you are with the person I asked you to name in your mind, who has hurt you. But I do believe you need to move to the next steps, and you need to get to the final step of forgiveness, because I don’t want you locked in the misery of my first fictional man in the story. And, further more, Jesus commands us to get to that final place. He doesn’t lay out the steps like I did – Jesus is harsher. Let me close with His words:
15 “If another believer sins against you, go privately and point out the offense. If the other person listens and confesses it, you have won that person back. 16 But if you are unsuccessful, take one or two others with you and go back again, so that everything you say may be confirmed by two or three witnesses. 17 If the person still refuses to listen, take your case to the church. Then if he or she won’t accept the church’s decision, treat that person as a pagan or a corrupt tax collector.
18 “I tell you the truth, whatever you forbid on earth will be forbidden in heaven, and whatever you permit on earth will be permitted in heaven. 19 “I also tell you this: If two of you agree here on earth concerning anything you ask, my Father in heaven will do it for you. 20 For where two or three gather together as my followers, I am there among them.”
21 Then Peter came to him and asked, “Lord, how often should I forgive someone who sins against me? Seven times?” 22 “No, not seven times,” Jesus replied, “but seventy times seven!
23 “Therefore, the Kingdom of Heaven can be compared to a king who decided to bring his accounts up to date with servants who had borrowed money from him. 24 In the process, one of his debtors was brought in who owed him millions of dollars. 25 He couldn’t pay, so his master ordered that he be sold—along with his wife, his children, and everything he owned—to pay the debt. 26 “But the man fell down before his master and begged him, ‘Please, be patient with me, and I will pay it all.’ 27 Then his master was filled with pity for him, and he released him and forgave his debt.
28 “But when the man left the king, he went to a fellow servant who owed him a few thousand dollars. He grabbed him by the throat and demanded instant payment. 29 “His fellow servant fell down before him and begged for a little more time. ‘Be patient with me, and I will pay it,’ he pleaded. 30 But his creditor wouldn’t wait. He had the man arrested and put in prison until the debt could be paid in full.
31 “When some of the other servants saw this, they were very upset. They went to the king and told him everything that had happened. 32 Then the king called in the man he had forgiven and said, ‘You evil servant! I forgave you that tremendous debt because you pleaded with me. 33 Shouldn’t you have mercy on your fellow servant, just as I had mercy on you?’ 34 Then the angry king sent the man to prison to be tortured until he had paid his entire debt. 35 “That’s what my heavenly Father will do to you if you refuse to forgive your brothers and sisters from your heart.”
