Proper 19

An elderly man wandering on a lonely beach found a lamp. He rubbed the lamp and a genie appeared. The genie told the old man he would grant him any wish. The man thought for a while and said, “My brother and I had a fight 20 years ago and we haven’t spoken since. My wish is that he would finally forgive me.”

The genie clapped his hands, a bright light shot across the sky, and then he said, “Your wish has been granted.” Then the genie said, “You know, most men would have asked for wealth and fame. But you only asked for the love of your brother. Is it because you’re old and dying?”

The man said, “No, I’m not dying, but my brother is, and he’s worth $60 million.”

There’s a story about a little boy who was saying his prayers one night. As he went down the list of his family, asking God to bless each one of them, he omitted his brother’s name. His mother asked, “Why didn’t you pray for Danny?”

He said, “I’m not going to ask God to bless Danny because he hit me.”

And his mother said, “Don’t you remember that Jesus said to forgive your enemies?”

The little boy said, “That’s just the trouble. He’s not my enemy; he’s my brother!”

Sometimes it’s hard to forgive a brother or sister, someone close to you.

In today’s Gospel, Simon Peter wanted to know exactly what the Master expected out of him when it came to forgiveness. The prominent rabbis of the day were teaching that one should forgive his brother three times. Was that enough? Simon Peter wondered. So, one day he asked Christ this important question: “Lord, how often shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him—as many as seven times?”

Peter was exceeding the demands of the rabbis, but he still was unsure that he was doing what Christ expected of him. Some of us probably would like an answer to the same question. Forgiveness is a big problem in our lives. There have been people who have wronged us, and it’s difficult to let go of our feelings of anger, resentment and even hatred.

Our refusal to forgive one who has hurt us can have devastating effects not only on them, but also on ourselves. It can shorten our lives, poison our memories, weaken our relationship with God and even afflict our feelings of self-worth. This is in addition to the damage to the relationship with the person we cannot forgive. That’s a high price to pay in order to hold on to resentment, anger and hatred. But how do we forgive those who have wronged us? How do we let go of the pain, the resentment, the sense of betrayal?

We let go, first of all, by recognizing that we ourselves have been forgiven.  Since we have been forgiven, we are able to forgive others.

Some of us, every time we pray, we ask God to forgive us of our sins. That’s a countless number of requests for forgiveness over a lifetime. And yet we may carry in our hearts grievances toward others that we should have let go of long ago. We let go of that pain and resentment by recognizing that we ourselves have been forgiven through the grace of Jesus Christ.  

Next, we need to recognize that forgiveness is the most powerful witness we have to the activity of grace in our own lives. Want the world to know that you are a follower of Jesus? Then forgive someone who has done you a terrible wrong.

The great church father Augustine once said that sometimes people in his church omitted the phrase from the Lord’s Prayer that says, “and forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors.” They “just passed right over that phrase silently,” he said, “because they knew it would be lying for them to say that [phrase] aloud.”

I suspect that would be true of many Christians if we took seriously this segment of the Lord’s Prayer. We would not want to utter those words, “as we forgive those who trespass against us.” Forgiveness is hard. It may be the most difficult requirement of our faith.

E. Stanley Jones once noted that a rattlesnake, if cornered, will sometimes become so angry it will bite itself. That is exactly what the harboring of hate and resentment against others is: a biting of oneself. We think that we are harming others by having these negative feelings, but the deeper harm is to ourselves. This is to say that forgiveness and true happiness go hand-in-hand. It’s true. This is a dynamic to forgiveness that is often overlooked.

There was an article in USA Today. It was titled “Psychologists Now Know What Makes People Happy.” The article reported the findings of University of Michigan professor Christopher Peterson, who discovered that forgiveness is the single behavior most strongly linked to happiness.

Did you hear that? Forgiveness is the behavior most strongly linked to happiness. You can never be truly happy if part of your heart harbors resentment toward someone else.

Kent Crockett, in The 911 Handbook, puts it this way, “Unforgiveness will keep us chained to whomever we don’t forgive. When we go to bed at night, the unforgiven person is there to keep us awake. When we go on vacation, the unforgiven person travels with us to our destination. The only way to get unchained is to forgive and release the person who has offended us.” 

Forgiveness is a positive activity necessary to the healing and wholeness of our own hearts. When we do not forgive, two people suffer—the one we can’t forgive and we ourselves. In other words, forgiveness is not only something we do for the person who hurt us; it is something we do for ourselves.

In one of his books, business guru Brian Tracy tells about a man who called him one day from the Netherlands. The man had a testimony to give. He said he was raised in a dysfunctional family; he didn’t get along with his siblings. He had a bad marriage, was cheated by a business partner, lost all his money, and now he was quite sick.

To this his doctor said quite bluntly, “You’re going to die. Your system is so shot it’s just like a worn-out car, everything’s gone. You’ve got about six months to live, so you should make peace with whomever or whatever in your life [you are unhappy with], because there’s nothing that modern medicine can do for you.”

The doctor went on to confront the man about his issue with anger. The man was angry with many people. The doctor told him he needed to “let it all go.”

This got the man’s attention and he started to make a list of all the people he was furious with. He deduced that, if he were to take the doctor’s advice seriously, there were thirty-nine people he needed to make peace with. He went through the list and determined that he was going to forgive them all.

Some of the people were difficult to forgive. With some of them he said, “I’m going to have to call that person.” Or “I’m going to have to go and see him in person.”

He put all his affairs in order, he wrote his last will and testament, he sold all his worldly goods. Then he phoned or personally visited all the people on his list, and he asked for their forgiveness . . . and he forgave them. For six months he traveled around Europe and even came to the U.S. in order to forgive people and ask for their forgiveness.

As he did this, his health improved, and he got better, much better. By the end of the six months, he had forgiven every single person that ever hurt him. He went back to the doctor. The doctor couldn’t believe it: “You’re completely symptom-free,” the doctor exclaimed. His health was not only much, much better, but he had begun excelling in his work. He was feeling great toward himself and others. 

At the end of only six months, the man was a transformed person.

Is there someone you need to forgive—an unfaithful spouse—an overbearing parent—a friend who has stabbed you in the back—an employer who has taken advantage of you? I know there is pain, but the most powerful witness we have to the action of the grace of God at work in our own lives is the ability to forgive others.

As we forgive, we heal not only the wounds of a broken relationship, but we also find healing for wounds inflicted in our own hearts by anger, hurt and resentment. God has forgiven each of us for every soiled thought, act, and deed of which we are capable. Can we not forgive one another? Three times? Seven times? Even seventy times seven?