7

“For if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you; but if you do not forgive others, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.”

What a horrible text this is. When we rub off the spiritual, holy patina encrusted on it from it being in the Lord’s Prayer — as if everything of the Lord was sweet and nice — and see it for what it really says, this text contradicts much of what we think and most of how we behave. It says, “forgive or else.” Forgive or we won’t be forgiven. We’ve got to forgive on the human level or God will not forgive us on the divine level. Aughh! (To quote Charlie Brown.) What a horrible text.[1]

Or maybe it’s the most wonderful text of all. Maybe it’s wonderful because I can’t think of anything more needful and more healing than forgiveness. Lew Smedes, who was my favorite seminary professor and who literally wrote the book on the art of forgiving, says that whenever hurt or wrong have been done, there are only two possibilities, revenge or forgiveness. Revenge closes off the future and only forgiveness opens the future to better possibilities.[2] So in our very broken and hurtful world, nothing is more needful or healing than forgiveness.

That is probably why out of all the petitions in the Lord’s Prayer, Jesus amplifies this one alone. He wants to make certain we know how important forgiveness is. He wants us to understand it. Even more, he wants us to do it: to be forgiving people. Here are two thoughts to help us.

The first thing to say is that we need to be forgiven. The Bible is crystal clear about that. We all need to be forgiven. We do not like to hear it but the Bible says it again and again. An ancient Hebrew poet cried out, “The thought of my affliction and my homelessness is wormwood and gall! My soul continually thinks of it and is bowed down within me.” (Lam. 3.19-20) He concludes that without God’s steadfast love and mercy there would be no hope at all.

One of the writers I’m quoting a lot in this prayer series is Dallas Willard and when he talks about God’s mercy he tends to speak of God’s pity. He says that only pity really reaches to the heart of our true condition. But to pity someone now is to feel sorry for them, and that is regarded as demeaning, whereas to have mercy now is thought to be slightly noble — just ‘give ‘em a break.’[3]

This is really important because we tend to pray “forgive us our debts” and what we really are thinking, perhaps subconsciously, is “give us a break.” Of course, if God gives us a break, it saves the ego. I am not a sinner, I just need a break! So we think. But Willard is right. We need more than a break. We need pity because of who we are. We are sinners and if our pride is untouched when we pray for forgiveness, we have not prayed for forgiveness. We don’t even understand it. If we can’t think of things we’ve done wrong, then we are in denial about who we are and how much we need pity.

Without pity life is hopeless and true pity would solve many of the crises we face today, both big ones and little ones. Pity would solve marriages that I know are coming apart because both spouses are saying the other one is wrong. And they’re right. There is always wrong on both sides. But only pity — only forgiveness — for the person who has done wrong and may continue to do wrong things can cut through to make things right. So it is that we need pity, from God and others, which is to say we need to be forgiven.

Obviously, then, the second point is that we need to forgive. It is not psychologically or spiritually possible for us really to know God’s pity and at the same time be hardhearted toward others.[4] That’s why Jesus makes forgiveness conditional. Only when we are filled with pity can we receive pity. Only when we forgive can we be forgiven.

Here is how Frederick Buechner defines what it means to forgive. “To forgive somebody is to say one way or another, ‘You have done something unspeakable, and by all rights I should call it quits between us. Both my pride and my principles demand no less. However, although I make no guarantees that I will be able to forget what you’ve done and though we may both carry the scars for life, I refuse to let it stand between us. I still want you for my friend.’”[5] To forgive is to refuse letting wrong stand between us.

Is that not, in fact, the very heart of what Jesus taught and how he lived? When we understand what it meant for Jesus to die on the cross, then we understand what forgiveness means. It means that God would not let our sins stand in the way of being our friend. Jesus died so that our sins wouldn’t stand in the way of God loving us. There’s always a cost to forgiveness. Think of the cost of the cross this way. The cost was not just Jesus suffering, as horrible as such suffering was. In a profound sense the cost was God giving up taking revenge on human sinners which we all are!

We know how good it feels to get revenge. We like to get even. We like to even the score when people have done us wrong. That’s why we rehearse our old grievances and play them back in our minds, and never let go of grudges. So I suppose that in some deep sense, paying us back for our wrongs would be pleasing to God. But because God is God and filled with mercy and pity, that revenge is given up for the sake of loving us.

Which gets to the point I’ve made before and will make again. We don’t forgive because someone deserves to be forgiven. In fact, just the opposite is true. We forgive because someone doesn’t deserve it. If they deserve it, it isn’t forgiveness. It may be something else but it’s not forgiveness.

We forgive, really, for just one of two reasons. First, we forgive because if we don’t, God won’t forgive us. That’s Jesus talking, folks. That’s not me. That’s our Lord telling us that if we don’t forgive, we won’t be forgiven. It’s not that God cannot forgive us even for being unforgiving. It’s just that hard hearts keep divine pity from getting inside us. So being forgiven is a good reason to forgive.

The second reason we forgive is that we want to be like God. God calls us to lives of godliness. God calls us to be conformed to the image of Jesus Christ. If we are like God, if we are conformed to the image of Christ, we will be forgiving.

Let’s put this in simpler terms. The baseball season will soon climax with the World Series and it looks mighty grim for the Red Sox. But for me one of the most interesting baseball stories this year actually began last winter. That’s when Pete Rose published a book called My Prison Without Bars. In that book he admitted for the first time publicly that he had in fact gambled on baseball.[6] He hopes by finally admitting this that Major League Baseball might forgive and remove its lifetime ban which keeps him out of the Hall of Fame.

A few years ago I clipped an article out of the paper and stuck it in my sermon notebook, an article about baseball and Pete Rose. In was interview in the New York Times with former baseball commissioner Fay Vincent. At the time Vincent was arguing that it would be a serious mistake to let Pete Rose into the Hall of Fame. Vincent said, “Although [Rose] has admitted he had a problem with gambling generally and said that he sought help, he continues to attack me and others who dealt with his case in 1989. I hope that today’s custodians of our national game will continue to see the issue as what is right for baseball and not as further testing of our innate and often laudable sense of mercy.”

Now I don’t really think mercy is innate but that’s not my biggest quibble with what Vincent said. He went on to say, “I might forgive Pete Rose and I can understand why he so badly wants to be a part of the game again. But for me, mercy is summoned forth by contrition and must always be balanced by justice.”[7]

With all due respect to Mr. Vincent, if he wants to keep Pete Rose out of the Hall of Fame, that’s fine. Maybe Pete Rose doesn’t deserve to be in the Hall of Fame because of what he did. But that’s about deserving and not at all about mercy. Mercy is not summoned forth by contrition. For who among us could know that we were contrite enough and truly forgiven? God forgives because without forgiveness we could not be in relationship to God. So we too must be forgiving.

In her wonderful book Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith, Kathleen Norris tells how at times she works as an artist-in-residence at parochial schools. She likes to read the psalms out loud to inspire the students, who are usually not aware that the snippets they sing at Mass are among the greatest poems in the world. But she has found that when children write their own poems there is an emotional directness like many of the Bible’s psalms. Kids know what it s like to be small in a world designed for big people, to feel lost and abandoned and they are often astonished to discover that the psalmists so freely express negative emotions, sadness and anger, even anger at God, and that all of this is in the Bible that they hear read in church on Sunday mornings.

She goes on to tell how children who are picked on by big brothers and sisters and sometimes big parents can be remarkably adept at writing “cursing” poems and that writing them offers a safe haven in which to work through their desires for revenge in a healthy way. Once a little boy wrote a poem called “The Monster Who Was Sorry.” He began by admitting that he hates it when his father yells at him; his response in the poem is to throw his sister down the stairs. Then in the poem he wrecks his room. Finally in the poem he wrecks the whole town. The poem concludes: “Then I sit in my messy house and say to myself, “I shouldn’t have done all that.”

Norris write, “‘My messy house’ says it all. With more honesty than most adults could have mustered, the boy made a metaphor for himself that admitted the depth of his rage and also gave him a way out. If that boy had been a novice in the fourth century monastic desert, his elders might have told him that he was well on the way toward repentance, not such a monster after all, but only human. If the house is messy, they might have said, why not clean it up, why not make it into a place where God might wish to dwell?”[8]

Friends, that’s why forgiveness is so important. It’s time to get honest and serious about the messy houses of our lives. Then let’s clean them up a bit by being forgiving even as God is forgiving us.

[1] Murray’s discussion of the Lord’s Prayer is too often pietistic and moralistic, probably without intending such. But this sentence underscores the challenge of forgiveness: “In each prayer to the Father I must be able to say that I know of no one whom I do not heartily love.” If that were literally true, we could never pray. But the point is made. Andrew Murray, With Christ in the School of Prayer: Thoughts on Our Training for the Ministry of Intercession (Old Tappan, NJ: Fleming H. Revell, 1953) 30.

[2] Lewis B. Smedes, The Art of Forgiving: When You Need to Forgive and Don’t Know How (New York: Ballantine Books, 1996) 58.

[3] Dallas Willard, The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life in God (San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1998) 262, 264.

[4] Willard, 262.

[5] Frederick Buechner, Wishful Thinking: A Theological ABC (New York: Harper & Row, 1973) 28-29.

[6] Pete Rose with Rick Hill, My Prison Without Bars (Emmaus, PA: Rodale Books, 2004) 78. Pete Rose holds more major league baseball records than any other player in history. Rose holds seven Major League and twelve National League records from his 24-year career. He stands alone as baseball’s hit king having shattered the previously “unbreakable” record held by Ty Cobb. It has been said about him that he was a blue-collar hero with the kind of old-fashioned work ethic that turned great talent into legendary accomplishments. Rose is also a lifelong gambler and a sufferer of oppositional defiant disorder. For the past 13 years, he has been banned from baseball and, therefore, barred from the Hall of Fame.

[7] “Baseball Notebook,” Spokesman-Review [Spokane, WA] 9 Dec 1999: C6. As deputy commissioner to A. Bartlett Giamatti in 1989, Vincent was in charge of the Rose investigation and hired lawyer John Dowd, who assembled evidence that Rose bet on games involving the Cincinnati Reds while managing the team. Rose agreed to a lifetime ban in an agreement that made no conclusions about his gambling. But the agreement said there was a factual basis for the punishment. The agreement, of course, keeps him out of the Hall of Fame.

[8] Kathleen Norris, Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith (New York: Riverhead Books, 1998) 69-70.