70 x 7

Scriptures:     Exodus 14:19-31                    Psalm 103:1-13

Romans 14:1-12                     Matthew 18:21-35

Our reading from Matthew’s gospel is the second part of a sort of two-part series on conflict resolution, done the Jesus way.  Last week’s gospel reading provides a framework for confronting wrongdoing – first confront the offender one on one, and if that doesn’t resolve the issue, take two or three others as witnesses, and if that doesn’t resolve the issues, bring it before the church, and if that doesn’t resolve the issue, then the person needs to leave the community.  This procedure allows space both to preserve the offender’s dignity and reputation while safeguarding the health of the greater community.   It’s a kind of damage control, a way to try to isolate the infection of wrongdoing before it spreads and sickens the entire community.  And ultimately, the hope is that the offender will be forgiven and restored to community.

In this week’s reading, the conversation between Jesus and the disciples continues.  Peter asks, “Lord, if another member of the church sins against me, how often should I forgive?  As many as seven times?”  Peter likely thought he was being generous – and he was certainly more generous than we may be inclined to be.  For some reason, I think we tend offer forgiveness according to baseball rules – three strikes and you’re out.  Certainly, our legal system sometimes functions in those terms.  And there’s a logic to it:  who among us hasn’t messed up at least once.  Who among us with a driver’s license hasn’t been preoccupied with something else and run a stop sign or red light, or forgotten to put on our turn signal when changing lanes…and who among us hasn’t unwittingly failed to stay in our own lane in other ways at least once.  But if someone offends in the same way a second time, or a third, there’s a sense that the offense is more than an accidental glitch, that there’s something about the person that causes repeated bad behavior, that the behavior is willful, intentional.  And so with repeated bad behavior comes increasingly harsh consequences.  We want to say, and in some cases our legal system does say “three strikes and you’re out”.  Peter’s willingness to give someone seven strikes may seem quite generous to us.

But Jesus invites Peter to go further – much further.  “Not seven times, I tell you, but seventy times seven” – at least according to some translations.  Others say “seventy seven times.”  It has to do with the word order, and in different manuscripts, the words may have been copied down slightly differently. 

No matter.  Jesus isn’t going for mathematical precision here.  Jesus’ response to Peter is not about different math, but a different mindset.  Peter’s offer of forgiving someone seven times seems generous – but it still puts Peter – and us – in the realm of keeping score, of remembering – and tracking – how many times a person has offended us, of counting balls and strikes.  Jesus knocks Peter’s words out of the ballpark – literally.  Whereas Peter offers to keep score in a generous way, Jesus gives Peter a number that realistically is impossible to track – who on earth is going to keep a tally sheet tracking 490 offenses or even 77 offenses for every single person they know - in effect telling Peter: Stop keeping score altogether.  Stop keeping score.  Just stop.

It sounds like Jesus is being pie in the sky impractical.  But, Jesus was very realistic about human nature.  Nobody’s perfect.  We all mess up.  And more than that, each one of us has a shadow side to our personality.  Each one of us has tendencies to sin, of which we may not be conscious – and often they are connected to our strengths – like the garden in one of Jesus parables, in which wheat and weeds grew side by side, with the roots intertwined.   For example, a person may have a burning passion to see justice done – but the shadow side of that passion may be self-righteousness, or vengefulness.  Or a person may have a great need for calm and peace – but the shadow side of that tendency may be squelching and stifling the voices of those who are being hurt by the status quo.  A person may have a great respect for the traditions of the past – but the shadow side of that tendency can be rigidity and resistance to needed change.  A person may have a very easy-going, tolerant nature – but the shadow side of that may look like apathy or indifference.   Generosity can have the shadow side of a desire to control others by keeping them dependent on us rather than developing their own gifts and talents.  Each of us has blind spots.   Each of us has our own unique combination of strengths and weaknesses, all inseparably intertwined, so what looks like righteous behavior to us may bring harm and pain to others.  Some of the greatest crimes of humanity – the Crusades, the Inquisition, on a much smaller scale the Salem witch trials – were committed by people who thought they were doing God’s will.  Indeed, the arrest and execution of Jesus was committed by the leaders of Jewish and Roman society, the best each society had to offer, the Jewish leadership doing what they thought was God’s will, and the Roman leadership doing what they thought Roman law demanded.  They couldn’t see the shadow side of their own self-righteous behavior.  Instead of acknowledging their own limitation and brokenness, they projected their own sense of sin and guilt onto other people, whom they labeled infidels and heretics and witches, in the case of Jesus, labeled him a false prophet and a rebel against Rome – in short, a troublemaker - scapegoating others for their own sins – with results so awful that we remember them even today, as cautionary tales to avoid fanaticism.

Throughout our readings from last week and this week, Jesus’ goal is healing and restoration of relationship between individuals, with a further goal of maintaining the health of the community.  Our readings last week and this week tell us that for healing to take place, two things need to happen:  there needs to be acknowledgment of wrongdoing, recognition that a relationship has been broken – in short, confession and repentance – and there needs to be forgiveness.

There are no shortcuts.  While we can brush off minor offenses, when one person has seriously wronged another, the offender – and maybe even the offended party – may want to deny there’s a problem.  “It’s not that big a deal. Let’s not stir up trouble.  Let’s just move on.”  But denying a problem exists doesn’t make the problem go away – if anything, denial of wrongdoing, of a break in relationship, guarantees it’s going to resurface, again and again.  It has been said that if trauma isn’t healed, it will be transmitted.  That is to say, unless healing takes place, people who have been hurt will hurt other people.  Unless healing takes place, traumatized people traumatize other people.  The prophet Jeremiah spoke of the denial within the society of his day, saying, “They bandage the wound of my people lightly, saying, ‘Peace, peace’ when there is no peace.”   And so, to get to healing, there’s no shortcut or detour around acknowledgement of wrongdoing, acknowledgement that there is a break in relationship.

Once wrongdoing has been acknowledged, the other tendency is for the offended party to get stuck in their own pain.  Without forgiveness, both the offender and the offended party are stuck in a place of pain, with no possibility of healing.  And vengeance only perpetuates a cycle of violence.  As Gandhi said, “An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.”  Forgiveness is the circuit breaker that keeps violence from passing on from generation to generation. When we forgive, we claim our own power to stop the cycle of violence from escalating.

We acknowledge this in the church, at least in traditions in which confession of sin and assurance of pardon are part of the liturgy.   We begin the service with adoration of God – usually with a hymn of praise.  But then we acknowledge that we’ve broken faith with God and neighbor through the week, that our relationship with God and neighbor is broken.  The only way to get past that broken relationship is through confessing our sins.   We confess our sin and ask for mercy – Lord have mercy upon us, Christ have mercy upon us, Lord have mercy upon us.  And then the priest or pastor offers assurance of pardon:  If we confess our sins, God who is faithful and just will forgive our sins, and cleanse us from all unrighteousness.  And only after there is confession and pardon can we move on with the rest of the service.  Because we alternate between two or three prayers of confession for most of our worship, the words may become rote, but I’d encourage us to really read over the prayer of confession, really ponder it, truly pray it, along with the assurance of pardon.

Many of the recurring problems in our national life are likewise due to unacknowledged and unhealed trauma, due to national sin that is unconfessed and unforgiven.  The legacy of the slave trade and the Jim Crow laws passed after emancipation continue to play out in our country to this day.  Some say, “That was a long time ago.  Get over it. Move on” while others say that while there’s no changing the past, the consequences of the past are still playing out in the present, damaging lives here and now – unhealed trauma playing out generation after generation.  Again, if trauma is not healed, it will be transmitted.  It will not just go away.  South Africa attempted to come to terms with its awful legacy of apartheid, racial separation, by means of a Truth and Reconciliation commission, in which the sins of the past and present were confessed and acknowledged, not for the sake of punishment, but for healing and reconciliation.  The outcome was far from perfect – South Africa has many problems, with extremes of wealth and poverty and a high rate of crime – but it was an attempt to avoid the cycles of violence and retribution that plague so many other countries during times of political upheaval, an attempt, however imperfect, to heal trauma instead of transmitting it.

If the person who offended us doesn’t acknowledge their wrongdoing and change their ways, what then?   There’s going to be strain and distance in the relationship.  But Jesus also tells us to love our enemies, to pray for those who wrong us.  If we can’t get them to acknowledge their offense, we pray that God will open their hearts, and love them - anyway.   The pain may be such that we may need to limit contact, to love the person at a distance.  Even so, we keep ourselves open to the possibility of reconciliation, even in the midst of a damaged relationship – in the same way that God always seeks reconciliation with us, even when we’re unfaithful – not because of who we are, but because of who God is.  As Paul wrote, “while we were yet sinners, Christ died for the ungodly.”  While we were yet sinners.  Even before we acknowledged our sin, God gifted us with unconditional love.   God doesn’t love us because we’re good, but in order that through love’s transforming power, we may be led to change our ways for the better.

In a few moments we’ll pray, “Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors”.  Forgive us our trespasses, our sins, as we forgive those of others.  God’s forgiveness of us is tied to our forgiveness of others.   May we come to know the magnitude of God’s love, forgiveness and grace shown to us, that we may pass it along to others, and in that way help to heal our broken nation and our broken world. Amen.