This gospel
passage is powerful, capable of communicating something wondrous and awesome
(in the true sense). But, like anything powerful, it’s also dangerous. Powerful
things are rarely safe. One of the dangers is, in using this financial imagery
for sin and forgiveness, it can encourage us to think of sin in those terms, in
a kind of mechanical accounting – “Well, I gossiped four times today, and I was
kind of judgmental, so five Hail Marys in this other column will offset that,
and one good deed to round them off will put me in the black!” And if that kind
of thinking leads people to do good, then great, as a first step. But, its
danger is that it prevents us from seeing what sin is holding us back from.
To try
to make this point at a grade school penance service once, I wanted to get
across the idea that sin harms our relationship with God, but God never
abandons us. So, I decided to use the image of air. God is all around us, just
like the air, only sometimes it’s us who don’t take deep breaths like God longs
for us to. I’d always expect participation during a grade school homily, so I
asked the kids what could stop us from being able to breathe well. Many hands
shot up and the first one I called on proudly gave the answer: Boogers! I had
to explain that in this context, it was quite OK to say that in church,
because, yes, boogers do make it to breathe in deeply (at least through your
nose). That’s a pretty good image, actually, for what the Church calls venial
sins, things that don’t shut God out but do make it harder to whole-heartedly
take Him in, things we’d rather be rid of. Then, there are the mortal sins. The
allergic reaction, the hand round our neck, that stops breath, shuts God out,
stops life.
To have
our sins forgiven, to have our noses wiped, our assailants dragged away, our respiratory
system healed, is to allow us to take in a deep breath of God, to allow God to
live closer to us than we are to ourselves. And if God is close to me, and God
is close to you, then we must be at least kind of close to each other. That’s
just how close-ness works. So, to truly receive forgiveness from God, to have
those barnacles of sin we’ve collected wiped away, and to take the next step of
doing what comes most naturally to us and breathing, is to desire, if not quite
that same closeness, at least something proximate to it, with each and every
other human that God loves, which is each and every other human. Including the
ones we find it pretty inconvenient, and maybe even heart-breaking, to love.
That’s
what our parable is really saying, that to think you’re forgiven by God but to refuse
to forgive another human, is a delusion. This is powerful, and that means that
this is dangerous too. I meet a lot of people really worried about their
inability to forgive someone. I first want to note that refusing to forgive
someone is an entirely different thing from trying and finding it really really
hard. There’s no suggestion in Jesus’ parable that the servant tried, but
struggled, to forgive his fellow servants their debts; he just refuses.
I also
want to think a little more carefully about what forgiveness is. When someone
hurts us, it’s human to feel hurt. Continuing to feel hurt by someone is not
the same as not having forgiven them. Which, by the way, is an insight we
should also apply to God’s forgiveness: It’s not just human, but the Bible
testifies to it being divine to feel hurt when someone shuns you. God can
forgive our sins, and still feel hurt.
I also
made the point that forgiving someone is wiping away all that prevents you
being you being close to another: radically close, in the case of God forgiving
us; and really quite close in other cases. Of course, the other person can
choose to keep their distance, we still respect their freedom, just as God
respects ours, and that doesn’t mean we haven’t forgiven. But, there are also
cases when forgiveness doesn’t mean any desire or even toleration to be close
in the short term, medium term, even the rest of our earthly existence. Think
of a survivor of domestic violence, for instance. If this is you, or someone
you know, forgiveness does not mean continuing to be close to an abuser.
Forgiveness does not mean continuing to be close to an abuser. Getting out and getting
help can be a beacon of light to others, and caring about your own safety can
be an act of reverence to the God who made you His masterpiece. And there are
plenty of less drastic scenarios in which forgiveness doesn’t mean closeness
any time soon either.
Forgiveness
means desiring heaven for the other person (not just as they are, but after the
healing grace of God has done its work on them), desiring heaven for ourselves
as well, and recognizing that that means we may end up shoulder to shoulder
with that person, praising God for ever. It can take a long time to get there,
especially when the hurt is loud, but there’s a tight connection between taking
a full breath of the intimacy of God and wanting to want that.
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