Forgiveness is at the heart of two of today’s readings. And we get the
message from two teachers, both named Jesus. Jesus happens to be the
name of the author of the Book of Sirach, Jesus (Joshua) Ben Sirach.
Listen again to his words. They nicely complement the teaching of Jesus
in Matthew’s gospel.
Wrath and anger are hateful things…
The
vengeful will suffer the Lord’s vengeance…
Forgive your neighbor’s
injustice;
Then when you pray
Your own sins will be forgiven.
Can anyone nourish anger against another
And expect healing from the
Lord?
Can anyone refuse mercy to another…
And seek pardon for his
own sins?”
Any way you read that, Jesus Ben Sirach, writing
some 200 years before the time of Jesus the Christ, goes beyond the
demands of the Jewish Law - which allowed for measured retaliation - and
actually anticipated the teachings of Christ by holding up forgiveness
and mercy – not retaliation - as the only way to respond to an unjust
attack.
In the gospel reading,
Peter’s question to Jesus (“How many times must I forgive, seven
times?”) sprang from a heart that was willing to go well beyond the
demands of strict justice. Peter must have thought he was being very
generous - going overboard even - in his willingness to forgive a person
as many as seven times (a number in Scripture that suggests infinity).
But that wasn’t generous enough for Jesus. Jesus raised the ante, as he
so often does. He challenged Peter to go beyond generosity – even to go
beyond common sense. He challenged him to go to the place where only
faith can go. In saying to Peter, “not seven times but seventy-seven
times,” Jesus was telling him that there is simply no limit to how many
times a person is to forgive.
But it’s
interesting to note that the parable Jesus tells to illustrate this
point focuses less on how many times we are to forgive than on what it
is we are to forgive. And that’s where things get interesting. And
challenging.
The ungrateful,
unforgiving servant of the parable was forgiven “a huge amount” of
money: ‘ten thousand talents,’ as one translation has it (in other
words, an astronomical sum). And Jesus says that if God places no limits
on the divine forgiveness, we can’t place limits on ours. And if we do
place limits on what we’re willing to forgive, there will be limits
placed on what God will forgive us. A sobering thought. Right?
Now, let me take
this out of the realm of theory into a real-life story - to the moving
story of Corrie Ten Boom, the Dutch woman who, along with her sister,
was arrested by the Nazis for harboring Jewish people, and who managed
to survive the horrors of the Ravensbruck concentration camp. She later
told her story in a book entitled The Hiding Place, which some of you
have most likely read. The book gave her instant celebrity status and
put her on the lecture circuit.
One day, while
speaking in a church in Munich, Ms. Ten Boom’s saw across the room a
balding, heavyset man. The moment she saw him, she flashed back to a
guard at Ravensbruck in a blue uniform and a visored cap with a skull
and crossbones. He had inflicted unspeakable cruelty and brutality on
her and her sister – and countless others - in the death camp.
She somehow managed to
get through her speech - which happened to be about forgiveness - and
then, the man came up to her and told her how reassured he was to hear
her say that if we ask God’s forgiveness, God casts our sins to the
bottom of the sea. Then he told her how he had come to embrace the
Christian faith and how he knew that God had forgiven him. He then put
out his hand, looked her squarely in the eye and asked, “will you
forgive me?"
She stood there, frozen,
telling herself she could not. Her sister and countless others had died
in that evil place. The man stood there, his hand held out as she
wrestled with the hardest thing she had ever been asked to do. But she
knew she had no choice, she knew that every time she prayed the Lord’s
Prayer she told God to forgive her only if she forgave. Still, she stood
there, coldness clutching her heart until, with a sheer act of the will,
she said to God, “I can offer my hand but You must supply the feeling.”
Then, woodenly, mechanically, she extended her hand to the man, and as
she did, she could feel a warm current racing down her arm and into
their joined hands. The healing warmth flooded her whole being and she
cried out, “I forgive you, brother, with my whole heart.” Later,
reflecting on that moment, she said, “Never have I known God's love so
intensely as I did then.”
My friends, to
follow Jesus Christ is to forgive. Pure and simple. Seventy-seven times.
No limits, whatever. And there is nothing, absolutely nothing, that we
are to refuse to forgive. And, no doubt, there will be times when,
because of the greatness of the offense, we will freeze like Corrie Ten
Boom did, times when only with the greatest effort imaginable will we be
able to extend our hand. That’s when the grace of God - which is more
powerful by far than even the greatest human hurt – the grace of God
makes possible what is humanly impossible.
My friends, the
grace that flows to us in the Eucharist which we are about to receive
makes possible what is humanly impossible.
Father Michael G. Ryan
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