The Paradox of Forgiveness

Text: Matthew 18.21-35

On August 22 in 2005 an extraordinary rite of mutual forgiveness was simultaneously enacted in the English city of Coventry and the German city of Dresden.  The English ceremony took place at Coventry Cathedral which, on the 14th of November 1940, was destroyed by German bombs.  The German ceremony took place at the newly restored Frauenkirche, which was destroyed by English bombs on the 13th of February 1945.  For the blindness which led to their mutual destruction of each other in the 2nd World War, the German worshippers sought forgiveness from the English, and the English worshippers sought forgiveness from the German.  Real forgiveness, as we learn from the parable in today’s gospel, is hard. It cannot be granted without an acknowledgment of real guilt or a commitment, from the parties who have breached the relationship, that they we seek to make amends as best they can. So the liturgies at Coventry and Dresden did not shy away from covering that territory.  The words that were spoken on that day were the result of many meetings, over many years, between representatives of the Christian communities in both cities. For this was no small thing. The bombing of Coventry was part of a campaign explicitly designed to kill people—women, men and children—and so to cower them into submission and surrender.  The Dresden bombing took place when the war was all but over.  It is widely acknowledged that there was not even a strategic military reason for the bombing, which levelled Dresden and killed 40 000 people. The motive was revenge. It was humbling to be in Dresden on August 13th of 2005 to hear a local Catholic priest tell us, with tears, how much it meant to him, and to the people of Dresden, that my colleagues and I should come to Dresden to reflect with them on the forgiveness at the heart of our shared gospel.

The crimes committed in the 2nd World War were, you see, not only crimes committed by one group of human beings against another.  They were also crimes committed by one group of Christians against another.  Most of the soldiers, sailors and airmen involved in the conflict were Christians—Anglicans, Lutherans, Methodists, Presbyterians, Reformed, Orthodox and Roman Catholic—Christians who were killing each other not for Christ, but for territorial Empire.   What the Second World War highlighted, graphically and tragically, was not only the inhumanity of men and women towards other men and women, but also the lack of true peace or reconciliation at the heart of European Christianity.  

Turning now to today’s gospel reading, I’d like you to note just two things.  First, that Peter’s question about forgiveness is not occasioned by the misdeeds of someone beyond the community of faith.  Peter asks how many times he is called to forgive a member of his own church.  “Seventy-times-seven” times, says Jesus, or, if I may translate, as many times as is necessary for the sake of reconciliation.  For what is the church if not a reconciled community, a community that is able to live at peace with itself in spite of all the sins of its members?  What is the church if its members cannot forgive each other as Christ has forgiven them?  If the church cannot do this, then it is not the church.  It is nothing more than a sociological or political reality where birds of a feather flock together.  If a church’s members cannot live with each other’s differences and forgive each other’s sins, then we are nothing more than a social club, gathered around the very ghettos of race, class or gender that Christ came to overcome.  

People sometimes ask me why I am still part of the church, especially given the church’s participation in the genocide against my people.  The people who ask are usually those who have been wounded by the church, people who feel that the church has let them down or, at least, undervalued what they had to contribute.  My reply usually goes something like this:  the scandal of the gospel is that Christ, who had no sin, yet became sin for our sake.  He took on the flesh of people who hate and kill each other.  By doing so, he loved and accepted our fragile humanity.  He forgave our sins and made reconciliation possible.  Who am I, then, to pretend that I am somehow superior to anyone else in the church?  The church can only exist by forgiveness.  How can I, who have been forgiven my sins by both Christ and my sisters and brothers, refuse to forgive the church?  I cannot. 

That does not mean, of course, that we should forgive each other’s sins willy-nilly, whether there are any true signs of repentance or not. Expecting victims to forgive a perpetrator who shows no signs of remorse and no willingness to change their behaviour is simply to reinforce the power of perpetrators, and does nothing for victims except to retraumatise and preserve them in their victimhood. Last week’s reading, from earlier in this same chapter of Matthew, should make that clear. The one who has clearly and incontrovertibly sinned against another needs to repent and amend their lives if they are to retain their membership of the church. For where there is, in fact, true repentance and amendment of life, true forgiveness also becomes possible.  Without it, though, forgiveness should remain forever off the table.

Which brings me to the second thing I would like you to notice about today’s gospel passage: that forgiveness is only possible for people who are willing, themselves, to forgive.  That’s the point of the story about the forgiven slave who cannot forgive his brother, is it not?  Although the king, out of sheer mercy, had forgiven his unpayable debt, the slave was not able to do the same for a brother who owed him something.  So the king threw the unmerciful slave into prison.  Now, some of you, I know, will think this very harsh.  Perhaps some of you will even get a little theological and say that this story encourages a gospel of works because what it says, in the end, is that it is our capacity to forgive that ultimately earns God’s forgiveness.  Well, to that I would reply in the classically reformed way:  that our capacity to forgive another does not earn God’s forgiveness, but rather shows that we are people who have truly experienced the power and truth of forgiveness ourselves.  Only the person who knows that they can never repay the debt owed to God, only the person who knows themselves to be loved and forgiven it all, would possibly be able to forgive the crimes of his or her brother.  If we do not know this, deep in our bones, perhaps we have never experienced the true power of forgiveness?

At a human rights conference at Whitley College in 1997, in the midst of lots of grand speeches about the call to justice and reconciliation, I met a man named Retosa.  At lunch one day, I asked him where he was from, and what he did all day.  His reply showed me what forgiveness really looks like, in practice. Restosa was from Liberia, and what he did all day was this:  gathering families who had killed each other’s children during the first civil war (1989-1997) together into a room to confess their sins and learn the journey towards forgiving one another.  “Only the person who knows the depth of their crime, and the amazing liberation that is possible because of God’s forgiveness, could possibly summon the courage to forgive such crimes from the heart” said Retosa.  Perhaps that is why this extraordinary work is being undertaken by a Christian pastor rather than a social worker.

Allow me to summarise what we have noticed in this way.  (1) That the church is called to be a community of reconciliation.  (2) That our capacity to be that community is directly related to the extent to which our sins, which are many, are forgiven in Christ.  And, finally, this:  (3) that Christ’s forgiveness comes alive in the world only where the church knows itself to be a community of forgiven sinners.  For that, my friends, is what all that talk in Matthew about binding and loosing is all about (see 18.18-20).  Christ will only do in the world what his church is willing to do.  For we are his body, in whom the Spirit of Christ faces this world.  What we do, or do not do, is what Christ himself does.  Such is Christ’s vulnerability.  Such, then, is our responsibility.  

The paradox of forgiveness is this, then:  that we are forgiven only insofar as the truth of our own forgiveness has so penetrated our hearts that we are able to regard others, also, with mercy and grace.  May God help us to repent, and amend our lives, and forgive those who trespass against us, as God in Christ has forgiven us.

Let me finish with a prayer, the litany of reconciliation from Coventry Cathedral:

‘All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.’

The hatred which divides nation from nation, race from race, class from class,

    Father forgive.

The covetous desires of people and nations to possess what is not their own,

    Father forgive.

The greed which exploits the work of human hands and lays waste the earth,

    Father forgive.

Our envy of the welfare and happiness of others,

    Father forgive.

Our indifference to the plight of the imprisoned, the homeless, the refugee,

    Father forgive.

The lust which dishonours the bodies of men, women and children,

    Father forgive.

The pride which leads us to trust in ourselves and not in God,

    Father forgive.

‘Be kind to one another, tender-hearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you.’

Garry Worete Deverell