All this fall, we have been seeking peace together, exploring the themes of forgiveness and reconciliation and how we—each of us—but also we—our church fellowship—can become sources of grace in our families and our community. Last week, we had the first of two very practical, “how to” sermons on forgiveness, based on Desmond and Mpho Tutu’s, The Book of Forgiving.[1] When we are wounded or betrayed by someone, we have the choice to enter into the Revenge Cycle,
Revenge-Forgiveness Cycle, Desmond and Mpho Tutu’s, The Book of Forgiving. https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EaVXxnKWkAIs5py.jpg:large
which leads us and the perpetrator into an ever-darker cycle of pain, dehumanization, and violence…OR…to choose the path of healing. The Tutus lay out a Four-fold Path that leads us out of pain and into new life, not forgetting the pain but rising above it. Last week, we talked about the first two steps—Telling Our Story and Naming Our Hurt—and today, we take the next two steps with a really challenging teaching from Jesus.
In his book, The Applause of Heaven, Max Lucado tells the story of his friend, Daniel from Brazil.[1]
Daniel is big. He used to make his living by lifting weights and teaching others to do the same. His scrapbook is colorful with ribbons and photos of him in his prime, striking the muscle-man pose and flexing the bulging arms…
Daniel was living in the southern city of Porto Alegre. He worked at a gym and dreamed of owning his own. The bank agreed to finance the purchase if he could find someone to cosign the note. His brother agreed.
They filled out all the applications and awaited the approval. Everything went smoothly, and Daniel soon received a call from the bank telling him he could come and pick up the check. As soon as he got off work, he went to the bank.
When the loan officer saw Daniel, he looked surprised and asked Daniel why he had come.
“To pick up the check,” Daniel explained.
“That’s funny,” responded the banker. “Your brother was in here earlier. He picked up the money and used it to retire the mortgage on his house.”
Daniel was incensed. He never dreamed his own brother would trick him like that. He stormed over to his brother’s house and pounded on the door. The brother answered the door with his daughter in his arms. He knew Daniel wouldn’t hit him if he was holding a child.
He was right. Daniel didn’t hit him. But he promised his brother that if he ever saw him again he would break his neck.
Daniel went home, his big heart bruised...He had no other choice but to go back to the gym and work to pay off the debt.
A few months later, Daniel met a young American named Allen Dutton. Allen befriended Daniel and taught him about Jesus Christ. Daniel and his wife soon became Christians and devoted disciples.
But though Daniel had been forgiven so much, he still found it impossible to forgive his brother. The wound was too deep. The pot of revenge still simmered. He didn’t see his brother for two years. Daniel couldn’t bring himself to look into the face of the one who had betrayed him. And his brother liked his own face too much to let Daniel see it.
But an encounter was inevitable. Both knew they would eventually run into each other. And neither knew what would happen then.
Are you like Daniel? Have you been hurt by someone? Stabbed in the back? Maybe your wounds are so deep you don’t even have words for that kind of hurt. Our passage for today offers you and me a way through the pain to a new place of healing.
Before we get to forgiving others, though, we need to recognize the great mercy we have been given. Like the servant in our story, the one forgiven $10 million dollars, we are debtors of the highest order. Regularly, we spend the blessings God gives us on ourselves, drop the ball He gives us to make the play, and walk past those who need our help. Instead of beating us up or throwing us out, God says, “I love you!” How much? In Jesus, He stretched out His hands and said, “I love you this much,” as He died on the cross. Though our lives could have ended last night, today we have a new chance to walk with God. Truly, we have received mercy beyond anything we could repay. If this is a new idea to you or you haven’t experienced God’s great mercy poured out for you, won’t you take myself or someone you know aside and ask about it? We are more than happy to pray for God to do that in your life today.
So on we go!
The third step in the Four-fold Path is forgiveness. When Peter asks, “Lord, how many times shall I forgive my sister or brother when they sin against me? Up to seven times?” Jesus answered, ‘I tell you, not seven times, but seventy-seven times.’” Jesus makes this number so large because forgiving is to become part of who we are. Later, Jesus says we are to “forgive our sister or brother from the heart.” The Tutus ask, “How do we know when we grant forgiveness that we really mean it?...I wish I could give you a one-size-fits-all answer. For some, it feels as if a huge weight has been lifted. For others, it is an overwhelming feeling of peace. Often it can simply be that you know you have forgiven when you wish the other person well, and if you can’t wish them well, you at least no longer wish them harm…there is freedom in forgiveness, and when you feel this new freedom, you know you have truly forgiven.”[2] For some people, though, forgiving someone really only starts the process of healing. In an article in Guideposts, Corrie ten Boom told of going to a Christian conference and seeing one of the Nazi guards who had imprisoned her, but who had since demonstrably given his life to Christ. She had forgiven him, but she kept rehashing the memories and so, couldn’t sleep. Finally, Corrie cried out to God for help in putting the problem to rest. She writes: “His help came in the form of a kindly Lutheran pastor to whom I confessed my failure after two sleepless weeks. ‘Up in that church tower,’ he said, nodding out the window, ‘is a bell which is rung by pulling on a rope. But you know what? After the sexton lets go of the rope, the bell keeps on ringing. First ‘ding,’ then ‘dong.’ Slower and slower until there’s a final dong and it stops. I believe the same thing is true of forgiveness. When we forgive, we take our hand off the rope. But if we’ve been tugging at our grievances for a long time, we mustn’t be surprised if the old angry thoughts keep coming for a while. They’re just the ding-dongs of the old bell slowing down.’” The third step in the Four-fold Path is forgiveness.
The final step in the Four-fold Path is to renew or release the relationship. This is what the king assumes would happen in Jesus’ parable—that the forgiveness the servant experienced would be the beginning of a new life. The Tutus write, “Renewing our relationships is how we harvest the fruit that forgiveness has planted. Renewal is not an act of restoration. We do not make a carbon copy of the relationship we had before the hurt or insult…We make a new relationship…regardless of the realities of the old relationship.”[3] But sometimes we cannot renew our relationship and we must learn to release it. The Tutus add, “Renewing the relationship might harm you further, or you do not know who harmed you, or the person has died and is not someone you carry in your heart…You can choose to not have someone in your life any longer, but you have released the relationship only when you have truly chosen that path without wishing that person ill. Releasing is refusing to let an experience or a person occupy space in your head or heart any longer.”[4] After Corrie ten Boom took her hand off the rope by forgiving, she writes, “There were a few more midnight reverberations, a couple of dings when the subject came up in my conversations. But the force—which was my willingness in the matter—had gone out of them. They came less and less often and at last stopped altogether.” If forgiveness is taking our hand off the rope that rings the bell, then releasing is when the bell stops ringing. The fourth step is to renew or release the relationship.
As Daniel knew it would happen, he did run into his brother on a busy street one day. Daniel told it this way:
I saw him, but he didn’t see me. I felt my fists clench and my face get hot. My initial impulse was to grab him around the throat and choke the life out of him.
But as I looked into his face, my anger began to melt. For as I saw him, I saw the image of my father. I saw my father’s eyes. I saw my father’s look. I saw my father’s expression. And as I saw my father in his face, my enemy once again became my brother.
Max Lucado continues, “Daniel walked toward him. The brother stopped, turned, and started to run, but he was too slow. Daniel reached out and grabbed his shoulder. The brother winced, expecting the worst. But rather than have his throat squeezed by Daniel’s hands, he found himself hugged by Daniel’s big arms. And the two brothers stood in the middle of the river of people and wept.”[5]
In Step 1 of the Four-fold Path of Forgiveness, we “Tell the Story” of the hurt we experienced, and we are the victim. In Step 2, we “Name the Hurt” we received, and we look our pain and loss in the face. In Step 3, we “Grant Forgiveness” to the person who has wronged us, and we are freed from the inner prison of our anger and pain. In Step 4, we “Renew or Release the Relationship,” and like Daniel with his brother, we re-write the story of being wronged. Where once we were the victim, now we are the hero. Where once we experienced suffering, now our suffering has meaning. Instead of being embittered by our experience, we are now ennobled by it.[6] We can live forward, freed from reliving that wrong over and over again, and freed totell the new story of a new life and a new relationship.
Isn’t that Jesus’ story? Innocent, Jesus was hung on a cross the authorities with the crowds cheering them on, and Jesus died a horrible death. But that’s not where Jesus stayed. Good Friday is not the only story we tell about Jesus. Because Jesus forgave those who scorned and murdered Him, because Jesus gave up His vast power to show God’s steadfast love, God raised Jesus from the grave. New life. New hope. New story. And when we forgive, when we give up our right to take an eye for eye, when we die to our need for retaliation, forgive those who wrong us, and by the grace of God show the grace of God, then God does something amazing and new in us. And it all begins, when we realize, how much we are forgiven by God.
[1]Desmond and Mpho Tutu, The Book of Forgiving: The Fourfold Path for Healing Ourselves and Our World (NY: Harper Collins).
[1]Max Lucado, The Applause of Heaven (Dallas: Word Publishing, 1996), pp. 105–106.
[2]The Book of Forgiving, op.cit, p. 128–129
[3]Ibid, 148
[4]Ibid, pp. 154–155.
[5]Lucado, op.cit, p. 106.
[6]The Book of Forgiving, op.cit, The Tutus talk about choosing to be “embittered” or “ennobled.” On p. 134:
“The guarantee in life is that we will suffer. What is not guaranteed is how we will respond, whether we will let this suffering embitter us or ennoble us. This is our choice. How do we allow our suffering to ennoble us? We make meaning out of it and make it matter. We use our experiences as many of the people in this book have used theirs: to make ourselves into richer, deeper, more empathic people. We may, like the people you meet in this book, work to prevent such harm from happening to others.”