The Path to Forgiveness
M.B. Oliver
A sermon for the 7th Sunday after the Epiphany in Year C
commonly called Sexagesima Sunday.
Preached at St John the Evangelist, Cold Lake, Alberta 18 Feb 01.
Gen 45:3-11, 15
Ps 37:1-11, 39-40
1 Cor 15:35-38, 42-50
Luke 6:27-38
The readings today are linked together by one theme: forgiveness and our role in the act of forgiving. This culminates in the words of Jesus in the closing words of the Beatitudes this time presented as the “Sermon on the Plain” as recorded by Saint Luke. It is this theme of forgiveness, and how it applies to us today that I will focus on in this homily.
Imagine yourself in the place of Joseph’s brothers: here is the youngest and least of your brothers, innocently telling you about dream after dream in which he is the most important. He was also the best loved son of Jacob, being the ‘son of his old age’. Jacob honoured him with the wonderful ‘tunic of many colours’, an honour usually saved for the eldest son. And so we are told that his brothers hated him. This theme of family unrest is something just as common today as it was then. One day, far from home, they had the chance to rid themselves of Joseph and, stopping just short of murder, they sell him into slavery and bring home the beautiful coat torn and soaked in goat’s blood, telling Jacob a wild beast had devoured Joseph.
Now can you imagine his brother’s fright when they met Joseph in Egypt? Now the tables have turned and Joseph commands great authority in Egypt and literally has the power of life and death over them – they are completely at his mercy. Picture if you can the overpowering sense of helplessness and fear that must have been washing over them. And what does Joseph do? Is this not the time to punish his brothers, to gain retribution for the wrong they dealt him?
Instead, Joseph says to them, “do not be distressed or angry with yourselves…for God has sent me before you…” and so totally absolves them of their guilt and wrongdoing. “So it was not you who sent me here, but God…” acting through you. Even more astounding to us, he tells them to go back and bring their entire extended family back to dwell in Egypt under his protection and care. This history is a fine example of the economy of God’s grace – God uses even the evil that we poor sinners do to forward his work. With “God’s will being done” how can any mortal person remain angry? Even more important, if we judge another’s actions based on our limited view of time and space, how can we flawed humans see the divine plan being worked out? This divine plan often takes many lifetimes to understand – as we see in Joseph’s actions as, of course, Joseph had just delivered Israel into bondage in Egypt, which would again serve God’s will through the person of the Prince of Egypt, Moses.
What was it that allowed Joseph to forgive such a great wrong? When I think of how violently my emotions respond to even small perceived slights against me I am shocked that Joseph washed the slate clean so quickly. It boggles the mind to think that he was so aware of God’s grace in all around him that he would grant so big a boon to those who had hurt him. When we look to the sacrifice of the last Adam, Jesus Christ, maybe this isn’t so hard to understand. But the question remains…how did he do it?
We are called by God to transcend our sinful physical selves and to allow the growth of our spiritual selves. What constrains us in this is, more often than not, ourselves – in many things it is said, we are our own worst enemies. It is easy to live in what is comfortable and what is habit, but much harder to challenge ourselves to critically examine our lives to find what God calls us to transform. The dictionary defines an enemy as someone who wishes to harm another, and in many ways we are enemies to ourselves. The person who most stands in the way of my spiritual growth is not my wife, my family, my fellow members of St Johns – it is myself. I am the enemy of my spiritual development. In this sense, since God wants nothing more than us to become like Christ, I am also the enemy of God. Even though I fall into this trap over and over again, God does not give up on me, even though at times I seem to dedicate myself to thwarting his every effort. This limitless forgiveness is what gives us as Christians our boundless hope: as Christ said, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” This is the forgiveness as modelled by Joseph, but again, how are we poor sons of Adam and daughters of Eve to become able to do this impossible task?
Well, when I have questions about which way to go in life, prayer is always a good option. I have found my job in the past two years has involved a lot of conflict with others. It is easy to begin to hate those who anger me the most, because it removes from me the obligation to forgive and intercede – after all, they are the ones who have wronged me! This of course is contrary to the Christian way of life. I have found that one of the most dangerous traps of this spiritual combat we are in is to focus on the sins we perceive in others. The psalmist tells us today to “Refrain from anger, and forsake wrath. Do not fret – it leads only to evil.” A fretful spirit is open to many temptations – In science we are taught to have an open mind, but I have heard it said that an open mind is much like an ashtray, as every little bit of litter and used cigarettes collect there. So it is with a fretful spirit – it blinds us to the log in our own eye. The most powerful tool against this focus on the sins of others is prayer.
When was the last time in the Anglican cycle of prayer we heard an intercession for our enemies? In this day of sustained and intense attack on the church – be it clergy living allowances, tax exempt status of church lands or the use of Anglican marriage banns to forward same-sex issues – we are under attack. One of the best ways to deal with those who hurt us is to pray for them, and to pray that we will better understand them. Praying for someone does not mean we agree with what they have done.
The question that keeps coming up is how then do we live as Joseph forgave? We are told in the Gospel today to love our enemies and to bless those who curse us, and to pray for those who abuse us. Also, to be merciful just as our Father is merciful. Focus on that phrase – to be merciful just as our Father is merciful, to forgive just like God forgives. Wow. If we thought the standard that Joseph set was hard, how can we ever dream to forgive as God himself forgives us?
Joseph forgave his brothers for wronging him, but he ended up as the prime minister of Egypt. Not hard to imagine forgiveness when your life has worked out so well, is it? It would be easy to forgive your family member who wronged you if that wrong caused you to end up with a million dollars in the bank. What about those of us who have not seen the happy ending to the story? Those of us who have not spoken to family members in years, those of us who have lost loved ones to the fault of others? What about the parents of the 14 women killed at the Ecole Polytechnique in Montreal and their relationship with the killer? What about the murderers, thieves and rapists we see on television each night, and the families whose lives they have changed forever? This seems to be not so easy. As I was writing these notes on Friday at lunch sitting at my desk, the phone rang with the news that the American coalition had just bombed Baghdad…a fitting footnote to a sermon on forgiveness.
Why do we forgive? Jesus also tells us in the Gospel today that we will be forgiven as we forgive others, words echoed in the Lord’s Prayer, “forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.” In the Gospel according to Saint John, Christ gives us the new commandment – to love one another. “Just as I have loved you, you should also love one another” and there again is that charge to love others as God loves us (and did God not love us so much that he gave his only begotten Son to die for us?). And the reason why: “By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.”
Now if there was another really good reason to forgive our enemies that is it – so that everyone will know that we are disciples of the most high. Forgiveness, Jesus is saying, is a form of evangelism – indeed it is not only our souls in the balance, but also the eternal life of those who hate us. Jesus set the standard for this forgiveness on the cross, and the army of Holy Martyrs have echoed this – beginning with Saint Stephen’s stoning before the Sanhedrin and his prayer, “Lord, do not hold this against them.” But how? How does a parent who loses a son in a terrible high school shooting forgive those who have injured him and pray for their forgiveness? How did Saint Seraphim, of the Russian Orthodox church, forgive the three men who beat him and crippled him for the rest of his life, to the point that he carried a mill stone on his back for their penance for years?
The answer is – we can not. It is impossible for us to forgive all. When the persecution reaches a certain point we can not find the forgiveness that God charges us to give. At least, we can not find it alone.
At the end of her book, The Hiding Place, Corrie Ten Boom tells of her own struggle with forgiving a guard from the death camp where she had been imprisoned: “It was a church service in Munich that I saw him, the former SS Man who had stood guard at the shower room door in the processing centre at Ravensbruck. He was the first of our actual jailers that I had seen since that time. And suddenly it was all there – the roomful of mocking men, the heaps of clothing, Betsie’s pain-blanched face. He came up to me as the church was emptying, beaming and bowing. “How grateful I am for your message Fraulein,” he said. “To think that, as you say, He has washed my sins away!” His hand was out to shake mine. And I, who had preached so often to the people in Bloemendaal the need to forgive, kept my hand at my side. Even as the angry, vengeful thoughts boiled through me, I saw the sin of them. Jesus Christ had died for this man; was I going to ask for more? Lord Jesus, I prayed, forgive me and help me to forgive him. I tried to smile, I struggled to raise my hand. I could not. I felt nothing, not the slightest spark of warmth or charity. And so again I breathed a silent prayer. Jesus, I cannot forgive him. Give me Your forgiveness. As I took his hand the most incredible thing happened. From my shoulder along my arm and through my hand a current seemed to pass from me to him, while into my heart sprang a love for this stranger that almost overwhelmed me. And so I discovered that it is not on our forgiveness any more than on our goodness that the world’s healing hinges, but on his. When He tells us to love our enemies, He gives, along with the command, the love itself (p 220-221).”
He gives, along with the command, the love itself. Here then at last is the answer – we can not achieve this level of love and forgiveness ourselves, but only when the love and grace flows to us from God. Our job is to ask God for His help.
John W. Stott writes, “…we Christians are specifically called to love our enemies (in which loving there is no self-interest) and this is impossible without the supernatural grace of God flowing through us…” The way to love our enemies is not through reliance on ourselves, but on the power of God working through us by the indwelling presence of the Holy Spirit. Only through this can we strive to be the spiritual beings that God calls us to be.
We are charged by God to pray for those that harm us, to forgive, through God’s presence in us, those that harm us, and in all things to follow the golden rule – “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” Forgiveness is an easy thing to talk about, but I know for myself it is the hardest part of our spiritual battle to consistently succeed at – as we can not do it alone. Our challenge is to overcome our natural inclination to hate, and to pray for our enemies. I will accept as a challenge for myself, and invite everyone today to do the same – in the next week pray for one person who angers you and ask for God’s grace to help you forgive them. Can you imagine what Palestine and Israel would be like today if everyone committed themselves to following such a course? Through these small steps we may feel the promise of Jesus – “Your reward will be great and you will be children of the Most High…for the measure you give will be the measure you get back.”
I speak to you in the name of the Father, † the Son and the Holy Ghost. Amen.
