Sunday, September 17, 2017

God clears away what keeps us distant – Matt 18:21-35

Year A, Twenty-fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time; Holy Infant

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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