Wednesday, September 17
Peter came and said to Jesus, “Lord, if another member of the church sins against me, how often should I forgive? As many as seven times?” Jesus said to him, “Not seven times, but, I tell you, seventy-seven times.”
—Matthew 18: 21-22
The point of the parable is that if we do not deeply understand how much we have been and are forgiven, we cannot truly forgive someone else.
Some things are much easier to forgive; when a person is always late to meet us, or forgets appointments with us, for example, we can work at forgiveness in various ways.
The best is to express how we feel, and either accept that the person just
doesn’t understand time issues, or make the friendship work another way. Simply
ignoring the problem is NOT forgiveness; it is evasion!
Serious,
deep personal betrayals are another matter. If someone steals from your
business, if someone steals from your home, if someone harms your child…these
are the issues that tear the fabric of our hearts. There is no pat formula for
forgiveness in these situations.
What
I think we are asked to do, as people of faith, is to allow ourselves to FEEL
what we feel: rage, anguish, heart-breaking grief. And then, when we are ready,
we might gently recall the times we have been forgiven ourselves.
Maybe we have
never done anything comparable to what has been done to us, but on some level,
we have all been forgiven, and most of us for very serious things. As hard as it
is, that is what we are ultimately asked to remember in order to try to forgive
another who has deeply harmed us.
Aware
of God’s grace in our lives, we realize how it feels to be forgiven, and then,
gradually, we may be able to give that grace to someone else. It is not easy but
we are asked to at least try. There are amazing stories of people who have
forgiven the deepest hurts imaginable.
Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. Amen.
The Signposts for September are written by Margaret Jones and originally appeared on explorefaith in 2005.
