Seventh Sunday in Epiphany
18 February 2001
St. George’s Episcopal Church, Le Mars, Iowa
The Rev. Karen A. H. Wacome, Presiding
Dr. Donald H. Wacome, Lay Preacher
Genesis 45.3-11& 21-28
Psalm 37.1-18
1 Corinthians 15.35-38 & 42-50
Luke 6.27-38
Forgiving God
Do to others as you would have them do to you. (Luke 6.31)
Today’s text comes from the beginning of Jesus’ teaching ministry.
It’s part of a long talk Jesus gives, his first big public
address. It begins with what have become known as the Beatitudes. We have an
image of Jesus: this mild, hippie-like fellow
making these fine but of course idealistic pronouncements: Blessed are the
poor, for yours is the kingdom of God. A great
moral teacher dispensing noble ideals and lofty, even if impractical,
sentiments. It’s easy to forget that this is the man who
picked a fight with his whole home town and almost got thrown off a cliff for
it.
Even when he moves on, and his words take on a harder edge, we can
miss how unsettling this sermon would have been, how
at odds with the wisdom of the day: Woe to you that are rich, for you have
received your consolation. Woe to you that are full
now, for you shall mourn and weep. Some in that crowd would have heard
Jesus’ words as a frontal assault on everything
sacred. They’d have heard Jesus proposing a regime of moral chaos, one in which
the sign of God’s blessing is made into its
opposite and the mark of divine disfavor held up as the sign of blessing. A
world in which it’s the deserving who are wretched
and poor, the undeserving rich and happy. A world where there is no justice.
The rich and content would have been upset, but the not so well fixed
would have heard Jesus’ words with satisfaction, taking
them as a promise that God will ultimately see to it that justice is done, that
the truly deserving - like them - get what’s coming
to them, and the fat cats, who now have things so good, get what’s coming to
them. Even though things aren’t fair now, God
will make sure all’s fair in the end. There is justice after all.
But these hopes for a God who uses his might on the side of fairness
and justice collapse when we get to the part of the sermon recorded in this
morning’s lesson. Here too, I think it’s tempting to make Jesus say something
morally and religiously sensible.
Do to others as you would have them do to you (v. 31). It sounds, on a
superficial reading, that Jesus here pronounces the
“Golden Rule:” treat other people decently, the same way you would want them to
treat you. Or put it negatively: don’t do to
someone else something you’d object to if she did it to you. It’s reciprocity
in human relations; it’s moral and reasonable. The
first word in ethics.
Read this on the heels of the words that come before, though, and you
get something very different, something at odds with
anything we could call ethical. Jesus is talking about people who hate you,
about people who curse and abuse you. He’s talking
about that guy who smacks you and takes your belongings, who borrows your stuff
and won’t give it back. How do people
like that want to be treated? They’d like you to cooperate: turn the other
check so they can take another shot! They’ve stolen
your coat, they wouldn’t mind if you’d hand over your shirt too. They’ve
borrowed a pile of money from you, and they’d just
as soon you just forget about it, thank you. How would you like to be treated
if you behaved like that? Would you like to be
treated justly? Fairly? No way! You’d like to get away with it! So let
them! Do to others as you would have them do to you!
Jesus isn’t preaching about reciprocity, fairness, justice; he’s
talking about letting people get away with murder. Jesus isn’t
endorsing the Golden Rule; he’s turning it on its head just as he’s turned
upside down the all so plausible idea that the rich and
successful are well off because God blesses them, and the idea that the
poor and unfortunate are bad off because they’re
getting what they deserve.
Jesus pushes the point home: Do not judge: give up caring or even thinking about who deserves what. Never condemn. Always forgive, no strings attached. Let people get away with things.
The meaning of Jesus’ words is visible from a different angle: he’s
not, I think, trying to tell that crowd about the right way to
live. He’s not laying out the first principles of some new “Christian ethic.”
He’s describing the coming kingdom of God and
what it means to become part of it. He’s trying to tell them what God is like,
how God thinks and acts. It’s God who is struck
and yet turns his cheek. It’s God who lends without stint and is never repaid.
He’s expressing the attitude of the eternal living
God toward needy, sinful humanity. He’s inviting us to become a part of his
life of forgiving mercy, a life that overflows in joy.
What would it be like for us to relate to one another the same way
God has chosen to relate to us? It would be this impossible
life, this life where judgment itself has come under judgment and been done
away with, the life where all is forgiven. No
conditions, no penalties paid, no justice done; only the self-giving love of
endless mercy. Take Jesus’ words seriously and you
get a glimpse into the depths of what God is doing in Jesus. Dostoyevsky
famously said that without God all things are possible; if there’s no God you
can get away with anything. Dostoyevsky got it wrong. The God who comes to us
in Jesus is the God
with whom all things are possible. If this is the God there is then you can get
away with anything. There is, at last, only
forgiveness and mercy.
Taken neat, forgiveness is pretty appalling. We ought not to forget
how much we tend to disapprove of it. Sometimes, it’s all
but impossible to bear. The great Mississippi Baptist preacher, peace
advocate and civil rights activist Will Campbell devoted
himself to Christ’s gospel of reconciliation and forgiveness, but even he knew
how hard it could be to agree with God about it.
Back in the 60’s, a friend of his who was registering blacks to vote was
murdered in cold blood by a southern deputy. Later
Campell confessed that his convictions about grace and reconciliation were put
to the test. He wrote, “the notion that a man
could go to a store where a group of unarmed human beings are drinking soda pop
and eating moon pies, fire a shotgun blast at one of them, tearing his lungs
and heart and bowels from his body...and that God would set him free is almost
more than I could stand. But unless that is precisely the case, ...there is no
Gospel, there is no Good News. Unless that is the truth, we have only
bad news.”
Sometimes it’s the possibility of our own forgiveness that we can’t
abide. The character Francis Phelan in William Kennedy’s
novel Ironweed carries a load of pain and guilt so great that the very
idea of his being forgiven offends his sensibilities. Phelan, a trolley
mechanic out on strike, has thrown a stone that kills a scab. Back home, he’s
drunk and needs to leave town quickly
before the law catches up with him. In his haste, he drops - and kills - his
infant son. He flees and his family never hears from
him until, years later he returns to town and the novel’s story begins as he
encounters the ghosts of his past and struggles against the possibility of
forgiveness. He says: ''My guilt is all that I have left. If I lose it, I have
stood for nothing, done nothing, been
nothing.''
The wild and risky mercy of God is hard to put up with for the likes
of us, inveterate champions of justice and pursuers of
justification, even to our own hurt. No doubt if there is a Hell it is
populated entirely by those who will not forgive God for the
indiscriminate forgiveness he lets loose upon an unsuspecting world.
Anne Lamott’s novel Crooked Little Heart is the story of
Rosie, a 13 year old tennis player. She’s confused and awkward in
school and in every other department of her teenage life but on the court she
is all power and grace. Her parents and coaches
tell her she has the potential to be a star. But Rosie carries a crushing
burden: she cheats. When the referee is not looking she
calls her opponents’ shots out when they are in fact in. Rosie is a very
troubled, very typical adolescent. She’s trapped in a
circle of pride, insecurity, fear, and panic that leads to more cheating, more
guilt, more fear. No one knows her terrible secret
except a mysterious, disreputable, vaguely threatening character named (of all
things) Luther. It becomes at last too much to
bear; Rosie confesses, anticipating nothing but contempt and loss of love. To
her stepfather she says: “‘You don’t even get it
James. You don’t get that I feel like I have to pay for this for my whole
life.’ Rosie wanted to scream....but instead she crawled onto her mother’s lap
and cried for awhile. ‘Rosie?’ said her mother, ‘I don’t know what’s going on
in you, but whatever it is,
you have paid. Okay? You are free and clear.’ Free and clear Rosie thought, and
could have stood on the table to bellow, I
have paid, I am free and clear.”
The currency Rosie pays to get free is not her own; it’s sheer gift.
In reality, the only payment she can offer is the forgiveness
her mother gives her. It’s the power of her mother’s unconditional love for
her, a love that takes upon itself the fear, guilt and
anger that has crippled Rosie. Nothing else suffices to enlarge and straighten
her crooked little heart. There’s no other power in
heaven or on earth that can make her free and clear.
There’s in us something that always says mercy and forgiveness are
weakness, and that only a God who enforces the rules and
insists on justice is strong enough to vanquish the forces of evil that prey
upon us. We are incredibly inventive in devising ways
to reject God’s rejection of justice in favor of mercy and in insisting that in
the end everyone gets precisely what they deserve.
But that’s not true. We find God in the scandalous Cross or not at all. God,
if he was ever in it, has gotten out of the business
of justice. God the enforcer of what’s right and fair does not exist. There is
no power short of the forgiveness and mercy God
pours forth in Jesus that can deliver us.
Does this mean that what we choose, the course you or I make for
ourselves in life, the ways we treat one another, are
unimportant? That this God who forgives us without conditions doesn’t care what
we do, what becomes of us? Surely not.
Some ways of living make sense in light of the good news of God’s unconditional
love and forgiveness; others don’t. Some
ways of life bear witness to, and rejoice in, God’s invincible mercy and love,
others absurdly deny and delay it:
We should be grateful to God because he is gracious and merciful to us even when we are ungrateful.
We should be merciful to others because God is merciful to us even when we are merciless to others.
We should forgive as we are forgiven, not because our being forgiven
is contingent on our doing so, but precisely because it
isn’t. God’s great forgiveness and mercy is not frustrated by our hardness of
heart.
There is no justice in the world. Thanks be to God.
Amen.