1.
Pardon the expression: but
sometimes Jesus seems to me some kind of a bull in a china shop. Bouncing here and thrashing there. His intensions are good, but he can’t help scattering
tender topics like so many fragile plates crashing to the floor. And sometimes it seems to me that my job is
to stand up here on Sunday morning, gathering the shards, seeing if there’s
anything left worth saving.
We can all appreciate how important
forgiveness is. We can even appreciate
Jesus’ insistence that disciples forgive not just once in a while, but over and
over and over again. We remember that
stunning, revolutionary moment on the cross itself: when Jesus looks at his
executioners then raises his eyes to heaven above, and says, “Father, forgive
them, for they know not what they do.” Forgiveness
is something like the heart of the Christian gospel, the indispensable practice
of the Christian community. “Not seven
times,” Jesus says to Peter, and to us, “but, I tell you, seventy-seven
times.” Disciples forgive not just once
in a while—when it’s convenient—but over and over and over again.
We appreciate forgiveness. We get it.
But then Jesus has to go and tell a parable like the one we’ve read this
morning. Where the one slave is forgiven
his huge debt, but comes upon another who owes him a little something and needs
some time to pay it off. Where the first
slave seizes the second by the throat and demands payment right away. And where he also refuses the second slave’s
petition for mercy and throws him into prison until he can pay off the debt.
And it ends darkly, doesn’t
it? It ends with the king hauling the
first slave in: “You wicked slave!” he says.
“I forgave you all that debt because you pleaded with me. Should you not have had mercy on your
fellow-slave, as I had mercy on you?”
And in his anger, Jesus says, the king handed him over to be tortured
until he should pay his entire debt. And
so my heavenly Father will also do to every one of you, he says, if you do not
forgive your brother or your sister from your heart. Here’s this lovely, poignant, potent teaching
about patience and mercy and forgiveness.
And Jesus has to bang it home with threats of torture and humiliation
and worse. See what I mean about the
bull in the china shop? Sometimes it
seems that Jesus can’t help himself.
2.
So I find myself looking for
help. On sabbatical last spring, I went
back to a couple of my favorite novels—novels I’d not read in dozens of
years—and slowly read them one more time.
At the top of my list was this one, The Brothers Karamazov, by
the great Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky.
It’s a slow read, but a great read, a timeless meditation on faith and
betrayal, forgiveness and mercy.
It’s impossible, of course, to
simply sum up a great Russian novel. But
for me, the heartbeat of Dostoevsky’s storytelling is sounded in a couple of
chapters in the middle of the book. In
these two chapters, the old orthodox monk Zosima is describing his conversion
to the faith as a young man and his turning then toward mercy as a lifestyle
and practice. I share a little of this
with you this morning—because Zosima helps me understand Jesus, and this
morning I need that help.
Zosima had been a dashing young
soldier in the Russian army, charismatic and brash. In those days, he’d fallen in love with
another man’s wife. And he was so
brazen, so proud in his youth, that he challenged that other man to a
duel. They would rise at daybreak to
face off with their weapons for honor’s sake and for pride. Zosima intended to have the other man’s wife.
But even the anticipation of
violence hardens his heart. And the
night before the duel, Zosima picked a fight with a young servant in his
building, and he hit the servant hard, twice, across the face. He was not only brash, but brutish and
ugly. And he went to bed angrily
anticipating the morning’s duel. Another
adversary. Another challenge.
But, here, the story begins to turn.
Having slept just a few hours,
Zosima awoke early, as day was breaking, and went to his window. He watched the sun rising, and he heard the
birds begin to sing and chime and play.
And here’s how Dostoevsky describes what happened next, Zosima’s own
words:
Why is it, I thought, that I feel something, as it were, mean and shameful in my soul? Is it because I am going to shed blood? No, I thought, it doesn’t seem to be that. Is it because I am afraid of death, afraid to be killed? No, not that, not that at all...And suddenly I understood at once what it was: it was because I had beaten Afanasy the night before! I suddenly pictured it all as if it were happening over again: he is standing before me, and I strike him in the face with all my might, and he keeps his arms at his sides, head erect, eyes staring straight ahead as if he were at attention; he winces at each blow, and does not even dare raise a hand to shield himself—that is what a man can be brought to, a man beating his fellow man!...
Suddenly my comrade, the lieutenant, came in with the pistols to fetch me: ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘it’s good you’re up already, let’s be off, it’s time.’ I began rushing about, quite at a loss, but still we went out to the carriage. ‘Wait a bit,’ I said to him, ‘I must run back in for a moment, I’ve forgotten my purse.’ I ran back into the house alone, straight into Afanasy’s room. ‘Afanasy,’ I said, ‘yesterday I struck you twice in the face. Forgive me,’ I said. He started as if he were afraid, and I saw that it was not enough, not enough; and suddenly, just as I was, epaulettes and all, I threw myself at his feet with my forehead to the ground: ‘Forgive me!’ I said. At that he was completely astounded: ‘Your honor, my dear master, but how can you...I’m not worthy...,’ and he suddenly began weeping himself, just as I had done shortly before, covered his face with both hands, turned to the window, and began shaking all over with tears...
I really recommend the book—if you
haven’t read it yet. Or even if you
have. It’s that good.
Forgiveness, it seems, is not so
much a mathematical equation, not so much an easy life skill, as it is a gift,
a blessing, a life-changing mystery. Maybe
that’s what Jesus is trying to say in the parable today. To be alive is to be forgiven. To be human is to be showered in mercy. And to miss all that is to live a kind of
tortured, tormented, emaciated spiritual life.
Because Zosima awakens to this
mystery, because he somehow receives this gift, he goes off from there, charged
with courage and mercy and even a kind of bold sweetness. He bails on the duel, choosing not to shoot
at another man and even to embrace the one he’d resented and detested just a
day earlier. In all this, his dashing reputation
takes a hit, for he’s no longer seen by his mates as the embodiment of manliness
and bravado. But this hardly matters,
not to Zosima anyway. And he goes on to
the monastery, a teacher, a mentor, a creative soul who embodies mercy and
compassion in daily choices and everyday friendships.
The great Peruvian priest and
liberation theologian Gustavo Guttierez insists on forgiveness as the key to
justice and healing among all the earth’s peoples. The whole journey demands humility and
courage and a kind of relentless honesty around our own brokenness. “To recognize one’s own sin,” wrote Guttierez
years ago, “implies also the will to restore broken friendship and leads to
asking for forgiveness and reconciliation.”
And he finishes this way: “The capacity for [confession and] forgiveness
itself creates community.”
I want to read all that
again—because I think (I want to think) that this is where Jesus is going in
this morning’s parable: “To recognize one’s own sin implies also the will to
restore broken friendship and leads to asking for forgiveness and
reconciliation.” And then this: “The
capacity for [confession and] forgiveness itself creates community.”
3.
The real gift in The Brothers
Karamazov, the real genius in Dostoevsky’s storytelling, is Zosima’s
recognition of his own sin: his stunning awareness of the hurt he’s inflicted
on another man and the hurt he may yet inflict in the duel he’s arranged. It’s a gift because it inspires him to ask
for forgiveness and restore broken friendships and imagine a fuller, better,
faithful life. And Zosima comes to
understand that his sin is not a curse then, not a severing of divine
compassion, but the one essential opening to true loving and effective
forgiving and prayer itself. From this
moment on, in Dostoevsky’s great novel, Zosima represents our human capacity
for community, compassion and justice.
And his sin—his recognition of his sin—is the key to all of that.
So it all comes back to one’s
personal capacity for confession and forgiveness, a disciple’s readiness for
self-examination and honesty and his willingness to confess his mistakes and
ask for forgiveness. And then, as we
know, it depends on another disciple’s readiness to forgive, let go, reconcile. The capacity for forgiveness itself creates
community. The church’s witness in the
world—what makes our witness different and distinctive—is that very
creativity. Risking a future other than
the one imposed by the past. Friends,
that risk is mutually shared and mutually exercised within the body of Christ. Right here, Sunday after Sunday after
Sunday. Because we are Jesus’ people,
formed and inspired by strange and provocative teachings like this one in
Matthew 18.
To know God’s grace, to live in the
light of God’s grace, is to know ourselves and our brokenness. We are not perfect, not intended to be. To appreciate the boundlessness of God’s love
is to recognize our sin and then appreciate the power of love in healing and
transforming our sin for the good. Jesus
might have gone about this teaching in a more delicate way; but he’s not always
a delicate teacher or friend. Instead,
he wants you and me to grasp the importance, the essential importance of
forgiveness and mercy in Christian life.
If we truly appreciate God’s grace, if we truly embody God’s grace, we are
co-creators with God in a new future, a new community and a new world.
Every day now, I leave my home in
the morning and cross a yard that is parched and dry and devastated by this
year’s drought. It strikes me, now, that
my front yard is something like Jesus’ parable in Matthew 18. If I turn from mercy, if I refuse to forgive,
my soul is soon parched and dry and helpless.
If we turn toward that mercy, a new creation is possible, even
imminent. The greening of our world and
our hearts can begin.
For our hearts live and thrive on
the sustenance that is mercy and forgiveness.
Our spirits depend on the grace that is freely given and generously
shared from above. It’s my
responsibility and it’s your responsibility and it’s our responsibility to pass
along that same mercy, to dare that same kind of forgiveness in our own
families, relationships and churches.
It’s who we are. And it’s who we
simply must be.
Amen.
