A Sunday school teacher was discussing the Ten Commandments with her five and six year olds.
After explaining the commandment to honor your Father and your Mother, she asked, "Is there a
commandment that teaches us how to treat our brothers and sisters?" Without missing a beat one
little boy answered, "Thou shall not kill?"
One of the commonly avoided topics in the Christian life is how to deal with our anger. This morning’
s readings converge on perhaps the central aspect of this issue—forgiveness. The topic of
forgiveness is important enough that Jesus highlighted it in the prayer that he taught us. We pray
day after day for God to “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.”
In fact, right after the Lord taught this prayer, he said, “If you forgive people when they sin against
you, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive people their sins, your
Father will not forgive your sins” (Matthew 6:15). In Mark’s Gospel Jesus says, “When you stand
and pray, if you hold anything against anyone, forgive him, so that your Father in heaven may
forgive you your sins.”
And if that’s not plain enough, in today’s Gospel reading Jesus tells the Parable of the Unmerciful
Servant. After Jesus explains to Peter that when people sin against us we’re really to forgive without
limits, he tells the story of the servant who didn’t show the generosity his master had shown him.
Jesus says the servant owed his master 10,000 talents. To put this in perspective, this was more
money than the typical budget of an entire province of the Roman Empire. It was an impossible
amount. And in Jesus’ story this represents the debt we owe to God for our rebellion and the
incalculable tally of our sins as compared to God’s purity.
So the servant with this massive, forgiven debt goes out and starts throttling a fellow servant who
owes him a piddling 100 denarii, which works out to about 1/500,000th of his own debt. Our Psalm
today says “[God] has not dealt with us according to our sins, nor rewarded us according to our
wickedness.” So do you see the point Jesus is making here? Jesus says this simply doesn’t wash.
He says if God’s willing to offer us total forgiveness for every sin we ever committed or even thought
of committing, we must be willing to forgive the finite individual sins committed against us by others.
We’re to try to be like our Lord, forgiving as a way of life. It’s Satan that accuses, but the Lord
forgives. In fact, considering Jesus’ own words, we really can’t escape the conclusion that our
forgiveness is actually conditional upon our willingness to forgive others. It’s not some lighthearted
suggestion. Rather, it’s a requirement that the Lord places upon us in order for us to receive
forgiveness.
So, is anyone besides me beginning to feel a little uneasy? Are the faces of those you’ve not yet
forgiven beginning to pop up before your eyes? If so, don’t panic! God may be providing an
opportunity for all of us to make a healthy change this morning toward living the way He wants us to
live. I suspect that if you’re anything like me, forgiveness is not the easiest thing in the world for you
to do. I know I’m capable of being very creative in rationalizing why I shouldn’t forgive someone. But
really the bottom line is that when I do that, I’m usually so ticked off that I don’t want to forgive them.
Since I think we’ve established that forgiving others is expected of us, I’d like to spend a few minutes
this morning looking at how to forgive others in a way that really “takes.” I’ll be drawing a bit from my
experience as a former family therapist and making a few humble suggestions that I hope you’ll find
helpful. The first thing we need to do is make a distinction between anger and resentment. You see,
being angry isn’t necessarily a sin. For instance, no one has been able to convince me that
Jesus wasn’t angry when he overturned the tables of the money changers in the temple. And
the Scriptures are clear that Jesus was without sin. So at least in that case, anger was not a sin.
And Paul doesn’t say “do not be angry,” but “in your anger do not sin.” So it’s not necessarily the
emotion of anger that we need to be so concerned about. The problem is when we nurture or feed
that anger so that it leads us to sin. We often do this by replaying the offending scene over and
over again in our minds, don’t we? In fact, the word resentment comes from a Latin root, re-sentire,
which means “to relive.” J. C. Ryle says about resentment: “A fire cannot go on burning without
fuel.” And reliving a hurtful interaction will almost always fuel the fires of resentment. This really is
the opposite of forgiveness. So when you catch yourself replaying such a scene in your mind and
beginning to seethe, tell yourself, “STOP! That’s enough!” Nip it in the bud before it takes off with
you and causes you to sin. When you find yourself replaying, hit the “Stop” button. Stop the video
and eject it from your mental DVD player.
Having said this, let’s go on to the actual forgiveness process. Really, it can be distilled down to five
steps. The first step is to admit it to ourselves when we’ve been wronged. That may sound a little
odd, but when someone does something to offend us, we might be tempted to pretend that there’s
nothing wrong, or that their actions don’t bother us. It’s a type of denial or avoidance.
The problem with this is that it can lead to a kind of resentment that lurks below our conscious
minds. Kind of like a “stealth grudge.” You’ve probably seen examples of this. This is the person
who, with eyes dilated, teeth grinding and face flushed and twitching, says, “I – AM – NOT –
ANGRY!” This is called repressed anger, or unconscious anger, and I think it can be even more
dangerous than conscious anger, because it can lead us to sin without us even being fully
conscious of it. This is where passive-aggressive behavior comes from. If we’re not even aware
that we’re angry, we may not be aware that we’re doing nasty little things to vent our unconscious
anger. “Woops! Sorry! I didn’t mean to spill that piping hot mocha grande on you!” So instead of
pretending that everything’s just peachy after someone offends against us, we need to name the
offense and be clear and honest in our own minds about it.
Step two is this: Once we’ve acknowledged that we were wronged, we need to identify the feeling
that resulted from the offense. Again, this may sound a little funny, because isn’t it obvious? “I’M
TICKED OFF!” When someone offends against us, we get angry. But you see, there’s always
another feeling underneath anger. Anger is kind of like the hard shell of an egg, protecting the soft
stuff underneath. Anger is just the feeling on the surface. Underneath, when someone offends
against you, you’re likely to find one or more other emotions—like hurt, or fear, or maybe even guilt
or shame. You’re really not fully dealing with your own feelings until you look beneath that safer,
harder shell of anger at the more vulnerable feeling there.
This isn’t necessarily a fun thing to do. We’d often like to skip the part that exposes that vulnerable
side of ourselves. Yet God will use this exploration to teach us something about ourselves, and
show us ways that He can heal some of our vulnerabilities. If forgiveness is really going to “take,” we
need to be honest about what’s going on with our inner feelings.
The third step in forgiveness is to share these feelings with the Lord and, if at all possible, with
someone else you trust. Feeling heard and understood is a huge step toward forgiveness. It’s a
great way to catalyze that process of letting go. But here’s where I’d like to offer a strong word of
caution. Sharing your feelings with another person can be very freeing, but also dangerous. It can
easily become gossip about the offender. It can become a thinly veiled attempt to win an ally
against him or her. It’s important to remember the purpose of sharing. You’re sharing in order to
release your hurt and anger, and to come to forgiveness, not to make others have pity for you or
gain an ally in a dispute. And, it’s important to share with someone you know well and respect.
Someone who will keep your confidence, listen nonjudgmentally, and maybe give wise counsel
where needed. When done with the right motive, sharing your feelings begins to untangle the
resentment that binds your heart.
The fourth step is to pray for the will and the power to forgive. This is an especially easy step to
forget. Yet I know that I can go through the motions of forgiveness and not really have my heart in
it. I know, because I’ve done it repeatedly. But remember the very last line of Jesus’ teaching
today. He said that just as the unforgiving servant was handed over to punishment, “So my
heavenly Father will also do to every one of you, if you do not forgive your brother or sister from
your heart.” I don’t think this means we’re required to give perfect forgiveness with every atom of a
guileless heart, but that it can’t just be empty words. We can’t just go through the motions and think
we’re done. It has to come genuinely from our core. And when we can’t find the desire in our own
hearts to forgive, we turn to God in prayer. When we ask according to His will, He’s sure to answer,
and our forgiving others is clearly within His will.
Something that may help us in this step is to look at who it is that really suffers when we’re
unforgiving. Have you ever thought about that? Do we really think that our not forgiving those who
offend against us is really having any effect on them? “I’ll show him. I just won’t forgive him and
then he’ll really be miserable. Or me...” God knows that when we forgive others, we benefit
immensely. A wise person once said, “To forgive is to set a prisoner free and discover the prisoner
was you.” Forgiveness really is a ticket to freedom. So once you’ve shared your pain with the Lord,
ask Him for the grace to forgive. He will give it to you.
While we’re at it, it’s also not a bad idea to ask God for wisdom and discernment as to whether we
actually go face-to-face with our offender to forgive them. Some examples of when we might not
want to do this would be if we’re placing ourselves in danger by doing so, or if the person didn’t
know they offended us, and to bring up the matter might potentially backfire on our relationship.
These are tricky issues on which the Lord and trusted others can give us guidance.
The fifth and final step is to let go and let God. The wonderful thing about forgiveness is that once
we’ve let go of our resentment, we realize how much energy it took to hold onto it. In fact, here it
may even be helpful to do something concretely symbolizing our decision to forgive. Like holding
onto a beanbag or a brick, or some other object for a while, and release it as we pronounce our
forgiveness. (Releasing it on the head of the offender isn’t permitted, by the way.)
I think it’s helpful to speak our forgiveness out loud, and without hedging. For example: “Dear
Father in heaven, in the name of Jesus, I hereby forgive Chelsea Chatterbox for hurting my feelings
when she gossiped about me. I release my feelings to your perfect justice, and I surrender my
resentment to your perfect love.” And drop the brick to the ground, turn and walk away. When we
do this we’re accepting the truth that we can rely on God’s justice ultimately to prevail. Remember
the epistle reading from two weeks ago, when Paul quoted Deuteronomy and said, “Never avenge
yourselves, but leave room for God’s wrath, for it is written, ‘Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the
Lord.’” We’re literally letting go and letting God. And don’t be too surprised if the Lord works good
in your offender through the forgiveness process as well. Stranger things have happened.
So without limit we forgive anyone who has offended against us. What we stand to gain is that the
purity of our love is guarded from the poison of resentment. We can now refuse to allow our
relationships and our peace, God’s shalom, to be controlled or destroyed by a bitterness from which
God offers to unburden us, if we’ll just release it into His just and omnipotent hand. The resulting
freedom is what Jesus, in His love, wants for each of us. Let us pray.
Grant, O Lord, that as your Son Jesus Christ prayed for his enemies on the cross, so we may have
grace to forgive those who wrongfully or scornfully use us, that we ourselves may be able to receive
your forgiveness; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit,
on God, for ever and ever. Amen.
After explaining the commandment to honor your Father and your Mother, she asked, "Is there a
commandment that teaches us how to treat our brothers and sisters?" Without missing a beat one
little boy answered, "Thou shall not kill?"
One of the commonly avoided topics in the Christian life is how to deal with our anger. This morning’
s readings converge on perhaps the central aspect of this issue—forgiveness. The topic of
forgiveness is important enough that Jesus highlighted it in the prayer that he taught us. We pray
day after day for God to “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.”
In fact, right after the Lord taught this prayer, he said, “If you forgive people when they sin against
you, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive people their sins, your
Father will not forgive your sins” (Matthew 6:15). In Mark’s Gospel Jesus says, “When you stand
and pray, if you hold anything against anyone, forgive him, so that your Father in heaven may
forgive you your sins.”
And if that’s not plain enough, in today’s Gospel reading Jesus tells the Parable of the Unmerciful
Servant. After Jesus explains to Peter that when people sin against us we’re really to forgive without
limits, he tells the story of the servant who didn’t show the generosity his master had shown him.
Jesus says the servant owed his master 10,000 talents. To put this in perspective, this was more
money than the typical budget of an entire province of the Roman Empire. It was an impossible
amount. And in Jesus’ story this represents the debt we owe to God for our rebellion and the
incalculable tally of our sins as compared to God’s purity.
So the servant with this massive, forgiven debt goes out and starts throttling a fellow servant who
owes him a piddling 100 denarii, which works out to about 1/500,000th of his own debt. Our Psalm
today says “[God] has not dealt with us according to our sins, nor rewarded us according to our
wickedness.” So do you see the point Jesus is making here? Jesus says this simply doesn’t wash.
He says if God’s willing to offer us total forgiveness for every sin we ever committed or even thought
of committing, we must be willing to forgive the finite individual sins committed against us by others.
We’re to try to be like our Lord, forgiving as a way of life. It’s Satan that accuses, but the Lord
forgives. In fact, considering Jesus’ own words, we really can’t escape the conclusion that our
forgiveness is actually conditional upon our willingness to forgive others. It’s not some lighthearted
suggestion. Rather, it’s a requirement that the Lord places upon us in order for us to receive
forgiveness.
So, is anyone besides me beginning to feel a little uneasy? Are the faces of those you’ve not yet
forgiven beginning to pop up before your eyes? If so, don’t panic! God may be providing an
opportunity for all of us to make a healthy change this morning toward living the way He wants us to
live. I suspect that if you’re anything like me, forgiveness is not the easiest thing in the world for you
to do. I know I’m capable of being very creative in rationalizing why I shouldn’t forgive someone. But
really the bottom line is that when I do that, I’m usually so ticked off that I don’t want to forgive them.
Since I think we’ve established that forgiving others is expected of us, I’d like to spend a few minutes
this morning looking at how to forgive others in a way that really “takes.” I’ll be drawing a bit from my
experience as a former family therapist and making a few humble suggestions that I hope you’ll find
helpful. The first thing we need to do is make a distinction between anger and resentment. You see,
being angry isn’t necessarily a sin. For instance, no one has been able to convince me that
Jesus wasn’t angry when he overturned the tables of the money changers in the temple. And
the Scriptures are clear that Jesus was without sin. So at least in that case, anger was not a sin.
And Paul doesn’t say “do not be angry,” but “in your anger do not sin.” So it’s not necessarily the
emotion of anger that we need to be so concerned about. The problem is when we nurture or feed
that anger so that it leads us to sin. We often do this by replaying the offending scene over and
over again in our minds, don’t we? In fact, the word resentment comes from a Latin root, re-sentire,
which means “to relive.” J. C. Ryle says about resentment: “A fire cannot go on burning without
fuel.” And reliving a hurtful interaction will almost always fuel the fires of resentment. This really is
the opposite of forgiveness. So when you catch yourself replaying such a scene in your mind and
beginning to seethe, tell yourself, “STOP! That’s enough!” Nip it in the bud before it takes off with
you and causes you to sin. When you find yourself replaying, hit the “Stop” button. Stop the video
and eject it from your mental DVD player.
Having said this, let’s go on to the actual forgiveness process. Really, it can be distilled down to five
steps. The first step is to admit it to ourselves when we’ve been wronged. That may sound a little
odd, but when someone does something to offend us, we might be tempted to pretend that there’s
nothing wrong, or that their actions don’t bother us. It’s a type of denial or avoidance.
The problem with this is that it can lead to a kind of resentment that lurks below our conscious
minds. Kind of like a “stealth grudge.” You’ve probably seen examples of this. This is the person
who, with eyes dilated, teeth grinding and face flushed and twitching, says, “I – AM – NOT –
ANGRY!” This is called repressed anger, or unconscious anger, and I think it can be even more
dangerous than conscious anger, because it can lead us to sin without us even being fully
conscious of it. This is where passive-aggressive behavior comes from. If we’re not even aware
that we’re angry, we may not be aware that we’re doing nasty little things to vent our unconscious
anger. “Woops! Sorry! I didn’t mean to spill that piping hot mocha grande on you!” So instead of
pretending that everything’s just peachy after someone offends against us, we need to name the
offense and be clear and honest in our own minds about it.
Step two is this: Once we’ve acknowledged that we were wronged, we need to identify the feeling
that resulted from the offense. Again, this may sound a little funny, because isn’t it obvious? “I’M
TICKED OFF!” When someone offends against us, we get angry. But you see, there’s always
another feeling underneath anger. Anger is kind of like the hard shell of an egg, protecting the soft
stuff underneath. Anger is just the feeling on the surface. Underneath, when someone offends
against you, you’re likely to find one or more other emotions—like hurt, or fear, or maybe even guilt
or shame. You’re really not fully dealing with your own feelings until you look beneath that safer,
harder shell of anger at the more vulnerable feeling there.
This isn’t necessarily a fun thing to do. We’d often like to skip the part that exposes that vulnerable
side of ourselves. Yet God will use this exploration to teach us something about ourselves, and
show us ways that He can heal some of our vulnerabilities. If forgiveness is really going to “take,” we
need to be honest about what’s going on with our inner feelings.
The third step in forgiveness is to share these feelings with the Lord and, if at all possible, with
someone else you trust. Feeling heard and understood is a huge step toward forgiveness. It’s a
great way to catalyze that process of letting go. But here’s where I’d like to offer a strong word of
caution. Sharing your feelings with another person can be very freeing, but also dangerous. It can
easily become gossip about the offender. It can become a thinly veiled attempt to win an ally
against him or her. It’s important to remember the purpose of sharing. You’re sharing in order to
release your hurt and anger, and to come to forgiveness, not to make others have pity for you or
gain an ally in a dispute. And, it’s important to share with someone you know well and respect.
Someone who will keep your confidence, listen nonjudgmentally, and maybe give wise counsel
where needed. When done with the right motive, sharing your feelings begins to untangle the
resentment that binds your heart.
The fourth step is to pray for the will and the power to forgive. This is an especially easy step to
forget. Yet I know that I can go through the motions of forgiveness and not really have my heart in
it. I know, because I’ve done it repeatedly. But remember the very last line of Jesus’ teaching
today. He said that just as the unforgiving servant was handed over to punishment, “So my
heavenly Father will also do to every one of you, if you do not forgive your brother or sister from
your heart.” I don’t think this means we’re required to give perfect forgiveness with every atom of a
guileless heart, but that it can’t just be empty words. We can’t just go through the motions and think
we’re done. It has to come genuinely from our core. And when we can’t find the desire in our own
hearts to forgive, we turn to God in prayer. When we ask according to His will, He’s sure to answer,
and our forgiving others is clearly within His will.
Something that may help us in this step is to look at who it is that really suffers when we’re
unforgiving. Have you ever thought about that? Do we really think that our not forgiving those who
offend against us is really having any effect on them? “I’ll show him. I just won’t forgive him and
then he’ll really be miserable. Or me...” God knows that when we forgive others, we benefit
immensely. A wise person once said, “To forgive is to set a prisoner free and discover the prisoner
was you.” Forgiveness really is a ticket to freedom. So once you’ve shared your pain with the Lord,
ask Him for the grace to forgive. He will give it to you.
While we’re at it, it’s also not a bad idea to ask God for wisdom and discernment as to whether we
actually go face-to-face with our offender to forgive them. Some examples of when we might not
want to do this would be if we’re placing ourselves in danger by doing so, or if the person didn’t
know they offended us, and to bring up the matter might potentially backfire on our relationship.
These are tricky issues on which the Lord and trusted others can give us guidance.
The fifth and final step is to let go and let God. The wonderful thing about forgiveness is that once
we’ve let go of our resentment, we realize how much energy it took to hold onto it. In fact, here it
may even be helpful to do something concretely symbolizing our decision to forgive. Like holding
onto a beanbag or a brick, or some other object for a while, and release it as we pronounce our
forgiveness. (Releasing it on the head of the offender isn’t permitted, by the way.)
I think it’s helpful to speak our forgiveness out loud, and without hedging. For example: “Dear
Father in heaven, in the name of Jesus, I hereby forgive Chelsea Chatterbox for hurting my feelings
when she gossiped about me. I release my feelings to your perfect justice, and I surrender my
resentment to your perfect love.” And drop the brick to the ground, turn and walk away. When we
do this we’re accepting the truth that we can rely on God’s justice ultimately to prevail. Remember
the epistle reading from two weeks ago, when Paul quoted Deuteronomy and said, “Never avenge
yourselves, but leave room for God’s wrath, for it is written, ‘Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the
Lord.’” We’re literally letting go and letting God. And don’t be too surprised if the Lord works good
in your offender through the forgiveness process as well. Stranger things have happened.
So without limit we forgive anyone who has offended against us. What we stand to gain is that the
purity of our love is guarded from the poison of resentment. We can now refuse to allow our
relationships and our peace, God’s shalom, to be controlled or destroyed by a bitterness from which
God offers to unburden us, if we’ll just release it into His just and omnipotent hand. The resulting
freedom is what Jesus, in His love, wants for each of us. Let us pray.
Grant, O Lord, that as your Son Jesus Christ prayed for his enemies on the cross, so we may have
grace to forgive those who wrongfully or scornfully use us, that we ourselves may be able to receive
your forgiveness; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit,
on God, for ever and ever. Amen.
Forgiveness and Freedom
September 14, 2008
Fr. Dan Tuton
Fr. Dan Tuton