September 14, 2008

Denise Kelsall

Pentecost 18     Exodus 14:19-31     Matthew 18:21-35

The parting of the Red Sea – remember or imagine the impossibly high walls of water with the motley band of Israelites walking through to safety and the Egyptian army with horses and chariots being deluged and drowned – every last one of them. I think it was Cinemascope and one of the first movies I remember vividly from my childhood. When I look back I think that the rash of biblical movies in the 1950s and 1960s did as much to tell me important stories of the bible as Sunday school ever did. They were laced with lollies, and if I was lucky some hot chips to eat on the way home while still reliving what I had just seen. The Ten Commandments will always be Charlton Heston as Moses, the strong staunch leader who has a hotline to God and does miracles – remember the staff turning into a snake – now that was really freaky. In that era we didn’t question the story – it was part of our Christian heritage and just reinforced what we heard at Sunday school. Our God saved our good ancestors from the baddies who were out to get them and they were all killed. Just as it should be we understood. Life was uncomplicated.

We grow up and life bites and kisses, satisfies and infuriates, challenges and stabs, and along the way we find out a bit about ourselves. Quite a lot if it is our intention to live what is called the “examined life.” We learn that not everybody is like us and that they can do mean and horrible things that hurt us, make us cry and we never want to see them again, and maybe we dream that something really awful will happen to them. Then they’ll be sorry! Good job – they had it coming we might think secretly.

There is a difference about how we live individually and collectively that is reflected in the two readings today. Our world is governed by a largely retributive justice system where a person pays for their wrongdoing. Their crime is examined and the damage assessed, the life and record of the perpetrator may be taken into account and judgement is passed. Justice is seen to be done.

Forgiveness or mercy are not generally part of the picture. A debt is owed to society for crimes committed and the criminal must be seen to pay. This is all well and good and how we have developed as civilized people able to live en masse together in community. But it is a far cry from how we understand our progenitors, the first homosapiens, who killed primitively and indiscriminately merely to survive. Simplistically this gave rise to the Darwinian notion of the survival of the fittest. Certainly the strongest and mightiest would triumph over the weak and sickly.

Our Old Testament stories tell us of the forging of a people, a nation – the Israelites who banded together and who, with the might of the awesome God who defined them as a people, vanquished their enemies and survived. Rules were made as they became a people and these rules and laws for living together continue to inform much of our own legal systems today.

Our parable from Matthew reinforces the notion of paying for your debts. It’s quite a layered story ostensibly dealing with mercy or forgiveness over the payment of debts. As we hear, a King calls in his debts from a slave who owes him an unimaginable amount – millions if we do a literal translation and we know a slave could never get that amount together, but wait a minute – what was the King doing lending it to him anyway – and he’s left it this long and the debt has got so big… Well, the slave can’t pay – he grovels and abases himself. He flings himself on the mercy of the King who is going to sell him and his wife and children to recover the debt. And wait for it – Hallelujah, the King, Mr Super-rich, forgives him so he walks away free.

Wow – fantastic we think – how generous and wonderful for that poor lowly indebted slave.

But the story continues – the slave comes across a fellow slave who owes him just $10 and can’t pay – who pleads with him just as he did with the King. Demanding payment he just about throttles him to death and then has him thrown into debtor’s prison – all for a measly amount when he himself had been forgiven a fortune.

Other indignant slaves report this to the King who furiously condemns the mean and unforgiving slave and throws him into jail to be tortured till he pays up. The juxtaposition in this parable is between justice and mercy. It has often been understood as an allegory on God and heaven. I don’t hold to this idea as I don’t believe God is a torturer.

Framing this story are verses exhorting us to forgive others. At the beginning it is an infinite and total forgiveness without limits, seventy-seven times, forgiveness that should pervade our very souls. And at the end of the story, the threat of torture if we don’t forgive others from our hearts.

Forgiving is hard. As I mentioned before forgiving others can be difficult. But I believe that forgiving ourselves is harder and yet that is where forgiveness starts. Recrimination, self loathing, self criticism and guilt over realising sometimes too late what we have done are all common traits of being human. Our common life together is regulated by rules and laws that attempt to administer justice for crime by convicting the perpetrator and less commonly recompense the victim. This is not the forgiveness that Jesus talks about. I would like to suggest that the forgiveness that Jesus asks that we try to live is personal. It is primarily about ourselves and concerns the freedom and wholeness that elude us when resentment, anger and self-recrimination dominate our spirits and clutch at our hearts.

A personal anecdote. When I was training for ministry I spent a great year at St Peter’s church in Onehunga. My father’s family a few generations back lived in Onehunga and I knew that some worshipped there and were buried in the old churchyard on the street-front but I had never been to see them.

It was an interesting four sided plinth of marble structure with inscriptions of different members of the family on each side with suitable dedications. One tugged at my heart and has stayed with me ever since. A name was simply inscribed and underneath was poignantly written “Until the day break and the shadows flee away.”

I don’t know if you have had terrible and sleepless nights wrestling with pain and hurt or confusion but I have and I am sure you know what I mean. Concerns of the heart are always harder at night – perhaps because it is dark and quiet and there are no distractions. But it is usually because we are sick with hurt of some kind – sometimes unresolvable and something we somehow just have to work through. But I would like to offer the possibility that these tormented thoughts are based upon unforgiveness of some kind. That all our torment and inner anguish or even petty irritation is based upon lack of forgiveness for ourselves and our actions, our perceived stupidity, our culpability – because the inference is that if we cannot forgive ourselves then we cannot forgive others. If we hate ourselves then we hate the world, if we forgive ourselves we can forgive others as is written in our formal Anglican liturgies.

I believe that this is the liberating message of Jesus. That in forgiving ourselves for our very human weaknesses we are free to forgive others and leave our prisons of judgement and alienation behind. Only when we can do this do we become truly authentic and real, we become free to be as Jack Spong said “the best we can be” and the shadows flee away.

It about the paradox that Jesus poses between forgiveness and justice.