September 8, 2005
Trumped
Pentecost 17/19A
The grace of God is not about magic and certainly not about anything easy. It’s about something simple, that God can be trusted, but not taken for granted. It’s what can be called a “difficult simplicity.”
One discovers this fact of life along a way that twists and turns, where Yogi Berra’s advice, “When you come to a fork in the road, take it,” makes perfect sense. It is what those early disciples first called “The Way,” and what we later unfortunately called “Christianity.” We might better have stayed with them. For “The Way” is a name that catches all the delicious ambiguity of the Gospel, doesn’t lend itself to the outrageous misuse of the label “Christian,” and most nearly follows Yogi’s exegesis.
To be forgiven is to be found by the grace of God. It is, like C S Lewis, to be “surprised by joy.” It is not to care whether light is wave or particle, but to celebrate gladly that there is light at all, and that it’s suddenly bathing and basking in our corner of life. God’s offer (aka Holy Spirit) is there for all. Whether all accept it is another matter.
Peter seemed not so sure. He, like a lot of his type today, was not into ambiguity. He didn’t appear to have anything against forgiving, he just wanted to be careful not to overdo it. He didn’t ask Jesus whether to forgive, he simply wanted to know how much. “Lord, how often shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? As many as seven times?” (Mt 18.21)
Jesus’ answer of 490 times probably pleased him immensely, not because it surely overtaxed his capacities, but because Jesus gave him the kind of left-brain teaser he really cherished. Whether Peter would climb all over his brother on number 491 or whether Jesus put any limit at all on redemption is not mentioned. Neither is there any reference to what must surely have been Peter’s immense pleasure over Jesus restoring him to the fellowship after a mere three betrayals — and actually giving him the keys to the clubhouse, to boot.
Forgiveness never comes easy — either giving it nor, especially, receiving it. The sin against the Holy Spirit, the so-called unforgivable sin, is precisely that not because God won’t forgive us, but because we won’t accept such reconciliation into God’s graces. By God’s imagining of us, we are free to choose. And that means we are free to refuse even God’s forgiveness.
Forgiveness, of course, never means to forget, nor does it mean there aren’t consequences nor punishments. What it does mean is that the connections are opened and kept open, the channels of communication are freed up, the vision, the eye-to-eye remains clear, the arms are open for embrace.
And forgiveness never means there are no risks. For the same painful exchange that created the need in the first place might well happen again. But, as well, the lack of forgiveness never means there is love or no grace, just that the love, the grace cannot break through to start its healing nourishment.
For we are the way God forgives. It is through you and me that God’s grace is known. It is when we — in the words of our baptismal covenant — “seek and serve Christ” in the other that grace explodes into our lives, and we are overwhelmed by it.
But then, if we just can’t buy all this, there’s always Oscar Wilde’s admonition that no less a worthy than St Paul confirmed. “Always forgive your enemies,” said Wilde, “nothing annoys them so much.” Whether or not he’d read St Paul, he was coming from the same place. Only Paul must have been beyond simply annoying somebody when he wrote, “If your enemy is hungry, feed him; if he is thirsty, give him drink; for by so doing you will heap burning coals upon his head” (Rms 12.20). Well, we might add, it could be a lot worse.
But then, Jesus trumped the both of them and all the rest of us when he said, simply, “Love your enemies” (Mt 5.44).