Can we forgive?

 Psalm 71│Zephaniah3.14-20│Jude│Matthew 18.21-35

Psaumes 71|Sophonie 3.14-20 |Jude |Matthieu 18.21-35

 

Can we forgive?

When I think of forgiveness or the capacity to forgive, I’m always reminded of the very brave people – parents/relatives/citizens - of Northern Ireland that were featured in a news item I picked up once. It was still the time of the ‘troubles’ in that part of the world and a family had had their child taken from them by a bomb that had killed him/her. The first words the family appeared to say in the news item were ‘we forgive the perpetrators’. I sort of understood that they were Christian believers, and that’s all I remember.

 

Forgiveness ‘from the heart’ (as urged in the passage we have before us today, at the end) is so hard. We see in this passage that a ‘master’, faced with what seems to be a large amount owed by one of his servants, not only laid aside the servant’s offer to pay back the debt in due course, but cancelled the debt instead. The master ‘took pity’ on the servant, his compassion welling up to dispel any resentment he might have felt that the servant owed him money and had not made provision for paying it back.

 

Later in the passage we see something different. Here, we see what happens when other gods in our lives get in the way of being able to show heart-felt forgiveness. The same servant – startlingly – turns on a fellow-servant and refuses to forgive a much smaller debt, even though he had been on the receiving end of such generosity previously. The servant’s other god was money, which appeared to be suddenly all-consuming when he faced his fellow- servant and that person’s debt. What an about-turn! We learn that the unforgiving servant was eventually handed to jailors and tortured.

 

I conclude from this that forgiveness comes with a positive choice to forgive, yes, but also through lives dedicated to seeking God’s ways so that our default reaction is indeed godly and not worldly. I don’t believe God sets out to punish us for going wrong, but if we do make poor choices then we run the risk of it backfiring on us in other areas of our lives later. Forgiveness is liberating and unforgiveness is constraining – although sometimes the latter seems the easier option, paradoxically.

 

I pray today that we would all find it in us to act with compassion to those around us who find themselves in a difficult situation, even though they may have wronged us.

 

Voir l’exemple de ce passage de Matthieu qui nous montre le pardon dans des circonstances

difficiles.

 Sue Bird

Image: 'The Unforgiving Servant by JESUS MAFA, 1973  

From Art in the Christian Tradition, a project of the Vanderbilt Divinity Library, Nashville, TN. https://diglib.library.vanderbilt.edu/act-imagelink.pl?RC=48396 [retrieved December 4, 2021]. Original source: http://www.librairie-emmanuel.fr (contact page: https://www.librairie-emmanuel.fr/contact).