The Hardest Word

I was twenty-four the first time I was asked for a forgiveness I wasn’t sure I could give. Maybe that means I had lived an unusually easy life up until that point, or maybe it means I’d simply never seriously considered forgiving someone anything that actually mattered before, I’m not sure. What I do know is that my best friend – someone with whom I had a deep, trusting relationship; someone with whom I had both great fun and meaningful conversation; someone I considered to be a true kindred spirit, a soul friend – my best friend had betrayed me.

I no longer even remember the details of what she did, but I remember how it felt. I was shocked and devastated and angry and numb when she came to me crying and asking me to forgive her. We were both Christians – both of us in seminary studying to be ministers, in fact. We both knew what Jesus said I was supposed to do.

I wasn’t sure I could do it.

“People in general would rather die than forgive.” These are the words of the narrator of Sue Monk Kidd’s novel The Secret Life of Bees, 14 year-old Lily Melissa Owens, who struggles to forgive her mother for a terrible, irreversible decision. “People in general would rather die than forgive,” she notes. “It’s that hard. If God said in plain language, ‘I’m giving you a choice, forgive or die,’ a lot of people would go ahead and order their coffin.”[i]

Just because we know what we’re “supposed” to do doesn’t mean we can do it.

Peter came to Jesus one day and asked, “Lord, if my brother sins against me, how often should I forgive? As many as seven times?”

He probably thought he was being pretty generous. To forgive one time is good. To forgive a second time is admirable. To forgive the same person a third time seems a bit foolish. But Peter, knowing Jesus takes things further than most, comes up with a big, bold number.[ii] “Seven times?” Knowing how hard it is to forgive even once, that number seems unreasonably large.

But Jesus’ response seems even more unreasonable. “Not seven times, but I tell you, seventy-seven times.” Which seems … excessive. He might as well be saying forgive them to infinity, and beyond. Which is part of the point – forgive so many times you lose count. In fact, if you are still counting, it’s probably not really forgiveness.

And that unusual number – seventy-seven – doesn’t just come out of nowhere. There is one other place in the Bible where this exact number is used – way back in Genesis, by a man named Lamech, a descendant of Cain, who killed his brother Abel. When God drove Cain out of Eden, and Cain expressed his fear that anyone who found him would kill him, God said, “Not so! Whoever kills Cain will suffer a sevenfold vengeance.” Many years later, Cain’s great-great-great grandson Lamech killed a young man who had hurt him. Lamech went home bragging to his wives that his own vengeance was exponentially greater than that of God: “If Cain is avenged seven times, then Lamech seventy-seven times,” he said.[iii]

“Seventy-seven times” is how excessive we can be in escalating things when someone harms us. “Seventy-seven times” is how we ramp up the curse of Cain, how we let ourselves get locked in cycles of pain and resentment and violence and retribution. “Seventy-seven times” is how often and how long we pass that pain forward, from generation to generation. “Seventy-seven times” is how much damage needs undoing.

Into the mess we have made in the world, Jesus’ word comes. How many times should I forgive? Not seven times, but I tell you, seventy-seven times. Forgiveness is the beginning of the undoing of the damage.

And then he tells a story. A king wanted to settle accounts with his servants. He began reckoning with one who owed him 10,000 talents. A talent was roughly the equivalent of 15 years’ wages. So this man owed the king 150,000 years’ worth of pay! How could that be? Why on earth would the king have extended that much credit to anyone? Nobody could ever pay that back.

This was likely not a personal loan or some kind of debt amassed by personal expenditure. The servant was probably an overseer of other servants, perhaps the top financial manager, and as such he would have been responsible for the flow of money from below him up towards the king. The debt he owed the king probably represented the income he was supposed to produce from those lower than he was. It’s a classic pyramid. And if you know anything about how financial pyramids work, then you know that the people at each level have to make sure the money is coming in from below.[iv]

Perhaps this servant has mismanaged accounts. Perhaps he has kept too large a cut for himself. Perhaps those below him have not been able to pay what they owe. Whatever the reason, the amount the servant now owes the king is an impossibly large sum, and the king, wanting to get at least a portion of what he is owed, determines to sell the servant, his wife, his children, and his possessions. So the servant falls on his knees saying, “Have patience with me, and I will pay you everything!”

And at that, the king releases him and forgives his debt! It’s extraordinary. The servant begs for more time; the king gives him freedom. He not only doesn’t sell the servant, he wipes his ledger clean. The man owes nothing more.

This has ramifications for the whole pyramid below this servant. The amnesty the king has just granted is not just for this one servant, but for all those below him in his debt. The freedom given flows all the way down.

That same servant, on his way out, sees another servant who owes him a hundred denarii. This would’ve been roughly 3 months’ pay. Not a trifling amount for a laborer, but certainly not the 150,000 years’ worth of pay the first servant owed the king. But since the first servant doesn’t owe the king anything anymore, he no longer needs to call in any of his own debts.

Which is why it is so surprising when he grabs the man by the throat and tells him, “Pay what you owe!” And the second servant does exactly what the first servant himself had done only moments earlier. He falls on his knees and pleads, “Have patience with me, and I will repay you!” And his request for more time is pretty reasonable – the amount he owes, after all, is very little compared to what the first servant had owed. But the first servant refuses his request and throws him into prison until he can pay his debt.

When the other servants see all of this, they are distressed, and they go and tell the king, who summons the man and reprimands him for having no mercy when he had received nothing but mercy. And the king hands him over to be tortured. And according to Matthew, Jesus says, “So my heavenly father will also do to every one of you, if you do not forgive your brother or sister from your heart.”

Oh, mercy.

We know we’re supposed to forgive. But is this really what happens when we don’t? Does God really punish those of us who refuse to forgive? The notion is disturbing.

And yet isn’t this the truth of what we do to ourselves – and to God – when we hang on to what others have done to us? The unforgiving servant in Jesus’ story, having been released from his debt, chooses to still operate as if he is within that old system of reckoning. He is the one that constructs for himself a world of punishment when he had been released into a new life of freedom.

We know the truth of this too well. The things we cannot forgive are the things that continue to torture us. The pain we hang onto is the pain we pass forward. The limits to God’s mercy are the limits we set. Our lack of forgiveness is a prison we make for ourselves.

Nelson Mandela, released from prison in South Africa after 27 years, later said, “As I walked out the door toward the gate that would lead to my freedom, I knew if I didn’t leave my bitterness and hatred behind, I’d still be in prison.”[v] And then he went on to lead his country towards the dismantling of the institutionalized racial segregation and discrimination known as apartheid. There is a connection between our ability to let go the wrong done to us and our ability to participate in the undoing of evil in our world. When we realize we are unbound, we can participate in the unbinding.

Knowing all of this, however, does not make it easy for us to forgive. Sometimes, the choice to forgive or not may be the only power we think we have left after we’ve been hurt. Our refusal to forgive can feel like armor that will protect us from getting hurt again. Our refusal to forgive can feel like a form of control. But who is actually being controlled?

The fact is, there is nothing you or I can do to change the past. Recognizing that truth is part of what forgiveness is, actually – as writer Anne Lamott says, “Forgiveness is giving up all hope of having had a better past.”[vi] Forgiveness is accepting what can’t be changed. Forgiveness is letting go of the right to keep massaging the anger, bitterness, or resentment. Forgiveness doesn’t mean excusing wrong or letting bad things continue or staying in a harmful situation or pretending things away or not holding someone accountable. Forgiveness means choosing not to allow the past to define the future. That includes our own past actions, too.

Into the mess of our lives Jesus’ word comes, the hardest word. How many times should I forgive? Not seven times, but I tell you, seventy-seven times.

And it sounds like another “should,” another thing we know we’re supposed to do but can’t do very well, another standard we have to live up to that we just can’t. But if all we hear in his words is the impossible expectation, then we’ve missed the point. The point is not about all the things we need to forgive other people for, and how often we must keep doing it. The point is the unbelievable, unreasonable, unlimited grace we ourselves have been given.

That first servant, the one who owed 150,000 years’ worth of money to his boss – his ledger had been wiped clean, and he walked out of there acting like nothing had changed. Everything had changed. He was a free man. Released from the bondage of his past miscalculations. Released from the burden of a future that could never be paid off. Absolute forgiveness, and he went around acting like he still owed. A free man acting like a debtor.

“How many times should I forgive?” Peter asked. And the Greek word used here for “forgive,” aphiemi, is dense with meaning. Aphiemi can mean to give up a debt, to divorce, to leave behind, to let go. It is about loosening our hold on something or someone, letting go our claim to it. It is about release. Much later in Matthew’s Gospel, the word will appear again, when Matthew tells us that Jesus, on the cross, cried out and aphiemi his spirit – he gave up his spirit. He died. And in the mystery of the cross, his release became our release.

When I was 24, and my best friend came begging my forgiveness, we both sat on the floor and cried. I cried because of how she’d hurt me, but I also cried for what we had lost. Our beautiful friendship had been wrecked, and we could never go back to the way things had been before. The idea of forgiving her felt like it actually cost me something. I felt like she owed me something, and that if I forgave her, I was saying that she didn’t owe it to me anymore. And that felt costly to me. And impossible.

And yet I found myself choking out the impossible words of forgiveness, choosing to trust that I would somehow find grace enough to give it. I expected it would take some time, a long time, actually. I expected we would never be real friends again. And, though it was true that we never did go back to the friendship we had had before, we did go forward into a new kind of friendship, the kind that is built not on illusions but on truth. And the pain I thought would hold on to my heart for a long time was eventually replaced by something that felt like grace.

Forgiveness can seem impossible. Sometimes it really is impossible. It can feel like death. But in the Jesus story, death is never the end. It is only the beginning of new life. The hardest word may be “forgiveness” but the other word for it is “freedom.”

You do not have to be defined by what someone else has done or not done. You do not have to be defined by what you have done or not done. All you have to do is see this: you are free. You really are. And you can walk out of the prison of your pain and live like it.

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[i] Sue Monk Kidd, The Secret Life of Bees, Viking Penguin, 2002, 278.

[ii] Homiletician Clayton Schmit notes the contrast between Peter’s number and what the rabbinic approach would have been, which likely would have suggested forgiving as many as two or three times. “Matthew 18:21-35,” workingpreacher.org, September 2008. http://www.workingpreacher.org/preaching.aspx?commentary_id=138

[iii] Though other scholars note the connection between this text and Genesis 4:23-24, I’m indebted to New Testament scholar Stanley Saunders for his observations about this connection and its implication. “Matthew 18:21-35,” workingpreacher.org, September 2017. http://www.workingpreacher.org/preaching.aspx?commentary_id=3393

[iv] Again, it is Stanley Saunders who most clearly explains what the Mediterranean audience of Jesus’ and Matthew’s times would have understood about this parable. http://www.workingpreacher.org/preaching.aspx?commentary_id=3393

[v] Hillary Rodham Clinton, “Living History,” Simon & Schuster, 236.

[vi] Anne Lamott, “Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith,” Anchor Books, 213.