Did you ever wish that you could take back your words and do it again? Say it again? Of course you have. I’m constantly amazed that God (and others) keep on putting up with me! Scripture lessons to be unpacked this upcoming weekend tend to re-assure the would-be disciple that they are forgiven, no matter how great their crimes; and would call the gathered community into a restoration of wholeness. This is certainly counter-cultural to the way the world works, as we are reminded daily of the brokenness surrounding us. (I’m gonna quit watching Rachel Maddow, it gets me too worked up.)
We begin with GENESIS 50:15-21. Joseph’s brothers, in a fit of jealousy, had sold Joseph into slavery–but he rose to be the grand poohbah of Egypt! And now come his brothers unknowingly to beg for grain to get them through the famine: omigosh, the shoe’s now on the other foot. So the brothers pleaded for forgiveness, figuring that Joseph still nurtured a grudge; he in his greatness, had long forgiven them, and now arranged for them and their families to settle in Egypt, near the mouths of the Nile. The story is holy because the Past has been erased, or at lest altered. The unspoken question becomes whether or not modern-day disciples will overcome the evils of the Past by forgiving the perpetrators of previous wrongs.
St. Paul says to the ROMANS, in 14:1-12, that there will be differences of practice. “…They will be upheld, for the Lord is able to make them stand….Why do you pass judgment on your brother or sister?” It seems that we’re all in the same boat, that is, doers of evil who desperately need God’s grace. We do God a great disservice by ascribing our human feelings to this God: just because we ourselves suffer from road-rage doesn’t mean that God does also! “Paul is helping persons in the early Christian community [and the current one] to resist demonizing each other…” (Jeanette A. Good, in FEASTING on the WORD, A 4:67)
MATTHEW’s Gospel (18:21-35) is really a continuation of last week’s excursion into telling each other about latent hurts before they become festering sores. So Peter (on our behalf) asks about the Jewish tradition of forgiveness seven times. “Jesus said to him, ‘Not seven times, but, I tell you, SEVENTY-seven times.'” What?! But I believe in the old Three-Strikes-and-yer-out rule. Can the offender really reform? Can I forgive the addict who made a sucker of me? And what about the guy who beats his wife? Can these ever be trusted again, enough to rejoin our group? Jesus used hyperbole in his parable: the first slave could never earn enough to repay “the Master”–but he was forgiven everything!! ‘Twasn’t very nice for him, so great a debtor, to put the screws to the guy who owed him three days wages. The first slave was condemned not for his debt, but for his non-forgiving attitude toward the other guy.
Not mentioned in the Biblical account is the realization that forgiveness brings freedom. Those old grudges become very heavy after a while. Marjorie Thompson has written, “To forgive is to make a conscious choice to release the person who has wounded us from the sentence of our judgment….Forgiveness means the power of the original wound’s power to hold us trapped is broken.” (WEAVINGS, March-April 1992, p.9) Good Luck with that!
In the process of unfolding, Horace Brown King
Please join us every Tuesday as we joust about the Scriptures to be heard on the upcoming weekend: at horacebrownking.com
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