Readings: Psalm 103, Romans 14: 1-12 Matthew 18: 21-35
Let us pray: may the words of my mouth and the meditations
of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, our rock and our sustainer. Amen.
A reading telling
us to stop judging each other and another telling us that forgiveness must
never stop...... Now if they are not two
of the hardest, most difficult things to do – I don’t know what is. They are two words that we stumble over often
as we grapple with our faith. Judgment and forgiveness.
We will all have
experiences similar to my own – a leader in our church in Amberley saying with
passion and decisiveness that they would never forgive the Minister of
the adjoining Parish as they were judged to have split a church family in
half. I doubt that anything I would have
said could have made a difference to their stance. At the time I remember going ‘um but...’ isn’t that
wrong, the directly opposite view to that which Jesus teaches in his parable
of the Unforgiving Servant.
And yet, in a
strange way, how well forgiveness and judgement go hand in hand – both in our
misuse of them and in our seeking to be Christlike in them.
Let us begin with
Paul – and I have to say that it is somewhat ironic that Paul manages to say we
are to not judge our brother and our sister and in the same breath talks about
those who disagree with him as being weak in the faith - a touch of judgement there methinks.
Paul was speaking
into a situation of serious doctrinal issues, mostly to do with differences
between Jewish and Gentile, issues that would potentially divide and
exclude. With great passion he says:
‘Let each have their views, do not despise the other view, hold firm to what
you think and express it with conviction – but – and this is vital – in the end
it’s not about our various theological or doctrinal positions, it is about the
fact that we are all children of God living in God’s grace and therefore our
spirit towards each other is to be one of love , especially to those with whom
we disagree, those whom we might see as enemies.
And this is what I
mean about judgement and forgiveness going hand in hand. Too often when we disagree with someone we
forget the adage ‘ hate the sin, love the sinner’ and end up somehow unable to
separate that which has been done from the person who has done it. And when you do that it makes it much easier
to take a position of judgement, of righteous opposition because you have
somehow managed to personify the sin into the sinner. In the fight against oppression, injustice we
end up sweeping up the sin and the sinner into the one basket and treating both
as something to be abhorred – and it is another easy step from there to put on
the mantle of righteous, not in our love for each other (especially those we do
not see eye to eye with) but in our
judgement of those we believe are wrong and our belief that we are in the
right.
There is the story
of the stranger who came into Dunedin one day and stood in the Octagon – they had
on a rather strange coat – covered in patches of all shapes, sizes and
colours. And so the people gathered
around, silent until one curious bystander asked ‘what about those patches?’ ‘They represent the sins, the wrongdoings of
different people in the city’, said the stranger and proceeded to explain and
denounce each patch before he went on his way.
And as he left they saw on his back the biggest darkest patch of them
all – and a voice said from the crowd – ‘and that represents their own sin, for
they seem willing to point out the shortcomings of others yet fail to see their
own.’
So don’t judge
each other says Paul – it is a miry pit and pointless, for we are all children
of God, we live in God and die in God and it will be to God that we are accountable. Take issue with the issue –but love the
issuer. Remember that when we lose
ourselves to Christ we lose ourselves to justice and to good, not to the moral
and doctrinal high ground. We have our
identity in Christ, do we not, and therefore, says Paul, it is not for us to
seek to shut others off from having that same access to Christ’s transforming
grace.
You can understand
why this is so important to Paul, why he
never forgets this and why he strive so passionately to get us to
understand this – for he, as Saul, was saved by radical grace from being this
person of terrible judgement, of unrighteous oppression, of standing over the
coats of those being stoned for their beliefs; he, even in this horror,
was loved by God, and by Stephen and in
turn transformed by grace.
So how do we look
at this in our church, in our community?
How hard is it for us to, say, disagree with someone’s stance, but to be able to express and discuss
the issue with respect whilst holding firm in the relationship you share in
Christ?
How tricky is it
to point out an unloving, unjust action to someone without somehow personifying
it, without cutting off the person as well as the act?
How difficult is
it to hold a place of hope in your heart for someone who consistently chooses
the selfish, the greedy, the judgemental path – to remember that they too are a
child of God and open to God’s transforming grace.
And here’s the
one. How hard is it to forgive, again
and again, when you are battered and bruised, often rejected and never
forgetting – how hard is it to release your claim to anger and retribution and
to leave that to God? Very hard, I think
most of us would say.
It really is hard
to prise apart the two elements we began with – judgement and forgiveness. In the same way we have trouble separating
the act of injustice from the person perpetrating that act, we also get tangled
up with the idea that to forgive is to forget, to imagine it has never
happened, to somehow exonerate a wrong act, as if holding on to hatred, refusing
to forgive is the only way to stop the act from dissolving into nothing. And that is understandable but is not the way
that Christ engages with and forgives our wrongdoings and therefore is not the
way that we are to pass on as a way of responding to hurt being done to
us. That is the crux of this parable –
the servant was forgiven of an impossibly large debt but in the end he couldn’t
get hold of the ‘therefore’ – the passing on of the gift of forgiveness, the releasing
him from debt, to another. He didn’t get
that the enormity of peace and relief that he felt at the forgiveness of his
debt was his to give to another. He
didn’t get that the lack of forgiveness would bring back to him pain and
suffering – that sense that if we hold on to hatred, refuse to forgive it
becomes not only a canker in our soul but makes it almost impossible to
continue in relationship with that person or that church or that family because
we are unable to separate that which they have done or said to hurt us from the
our belief that we are all children of God living in God’s transforming
grace. It doesn’t mean that we forget or
ignore that which is wrong, nor does it mean that we pretend it never happened
and or that things can be what they were – we have to challenge, remember and
change those things that are wrong – abuse, exploitation, accusation, sin but
we do not have to hold the hatred, the justice, the eventual accountability in
our hearts – that is for God to whom all are accountable and in whom all are
held in love and grace.
Margaret Garland
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