Another challenging sermon from my liberal friend Harry Cook.

Very Close to the Center

Harry T. Cook

9/14/08

Matthew 18: 21-35

We are into today’s reading from St. Matthew only by three sentences when we find ourselves at or very near the center of the ethical wisdom credited by history to Jesus of Nazareth. It is expressed in the response Matthew imagined Jesus giving to Peter’s question about how many times it was necessary to forgive another. Peter wondered if he had to do so as many as seven times (the Babylonian Talmud would eventually say three times). The words Matthew put on the lips of Jesus at this point amount to a thunderclap that still reverberates in the world of ethical thought: Not seven times, but, I tell you, seventy times seven. Don’t bother with the math. Seventy times seven means an indefinitely great number, maybe unto infinity. Its biblical origin seems to be in an obscure passage from Genesis wherein a character named Lamech claimed that an attack on him deserved vengeance at the rate of seventy-sevenfold.

What makes the New Testament “new” is that forgiveness takes the place of vengeance. In the forgive seventy times seven we hear a call for the establishment and maintenance of a culture of forgiveness that is wanted for a world whose residents wish to abide usefully in an environment of peace and security. It is a way of saying that an unforgiven slight or offense becomes like a cancerous tumor in the body. It sucks the life out of its host, making him or her increasingly bitter and sour, until there is nothing left but the grudge itself. Not to mention what coddled offenses both real and imagined do to the outward dispositions of those who hold them. That is what starts feuds, fights and wars. Adolf Hitler came to power on the strength of his smoldering resentment over Germany’s defeat in World War I. That same kind of resentment over the United States’ defeat in Vietnam ate away at people like Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney until they saw their chance to start and win a war in Iraq. Yes, well . . . What does it mean to forgive once, never mind three or seven or seventy times seven times?

The New Testament word is (to let go), and it carries the connotation of “release” or “pardon” or, perhaps more to the point, “the remission of a debt.” “Releasing” or “pardoning” or “remitting” is not saying an offense did not occur. Think back to Gerald Ford’s pardoning of Richard Nixon, which probably cost Ford the presidency in 1976. Yet for the sake of ending what Ford called “our long national nightmare,” it was surely the right thing to do.

Sometimes wealthy nations work with other wealthy nations to forgive the crushing debts of Third World nations. The forgivers lose money, but wholeness and health come from such remission on both sides of the equation. The mandate to forgive as often as it takes is radical, and it is challenging. Like so many of Jesus’ ethical gems (say, “Turn the other cheek” or “Give up your shirt as well as your coat”) it goes against the grain of human nature, which, as history so clearly shows, is not so hugely superior to the nature of other mammals. So forgiveness does not come naturally. The impulse to forgive springs from another emotion that is all too scarce among us, and that is the emotion to love in the sense of a certain New Testament word that connotes how ancients imagined a wholly benevolent god would love those over whom he, she or it had power. How do we realize the ability to forgive? How do we cultivate it so that we create around us that culture of forgiveness which goes against the natural grain?

When the church at any level – local, diocesan, national, worldwide – pays attention to its mission instead of to its grievances about this and that, it will find itself concentrating on the content and import of such texts as the one we have before us today: Forgive seventy times seven. Even so, that’s a mountainous effort to contemplate. Sisyphean, almost. We start on it by never walking away from the table, never ceasing to talk with real and perceived enemies, never failing to love them in all their unloveliness until our love breaks down the political, cultural and philosophical walls that separate us. Here’s how one New Testament writer put it after the manner of St. Paul: So Christ came and proclaimed peace to you were far off and to you who were near . . . thus we are no longer strangers and aliens, but citizens of the same household

© Copyright 2008, Harry T. Cook. All rights reserved. This article may not be used or reproduced without proper credit.