Forgiveness is Heart Work

"Why Forgive and Forget When You Can Remember and Blame?" It's the title of a song I heard a long time ago. It's a sentiment that I think resonates with all of us, individually and collectively. Because, whether the issue is a personal hurt or a public outrage, I think we all have a natural impulse to seek justice -- to try and balance the moral equation when something goes awry. The way we see it, in the words of Willy Loman, "Attention must be paid." It's a matter of justice; of settling accounts; of making life come out right.

Today's Gospel lesson spotlights Jesus' famous parable of the unforgiving servant -- someone who receives mercy and a new start from his master, but who refuses to extend that same mercy to his own debtor. It's a parable many of us have heard so often that we're inclined to think, "Yeah, yeah, yeah...I get it...seventy-times-seven...don't hold a grudge...keep on forgiving."

But, at least for me, the phrase that stuck in my consciousness after reading this text a few times was Jesus' warning at the very end of his story, about the perils of not forgiving from the heart.

You know how you can think you've forgiven someone for a serious injury -- its gravity just seems to slip away from your consciousness for a while, maybe even for years -- and then suddenly one day you're startled by a vivid memory of the way in which you were wronged, and all the old feelings of anger and outrage and desire for payback wash over you with renewed intensity? I've had that experience. So on some level I haven't really forgiven these people who've hurt me. I'm still bound -- honor-bound, one might say -- by this compulsive need to even the score.

What does Jesus tell us in the text? Game over. That's the only way to escape the endless cycle of injury and payback; tear up the scorecard. Because that is what God does for us.

Gracia Grindal, in discussing today's text , notes that when we can't forgive others from the heart -- what we need is a new heart. She quotes poet Stevie Smith's "The Repentance of Lady T":

I look in the glass.
Whose face do I see?
It is the face of Lady T.
I wish to change. How can that be?
Oh Lamb of God
Change me, change me.

The Unforgiving Servant, artist unknown, Reformation era