Don Friesen
It's been ten years since Bill Watterson put aside his cartoonist's pen, retiring the popular Calvin and Hobbes comic strip at the height of its popularity. Watterson rejected attempts to commercialize his characters, this at a time when many cartoons were little more than commercials intended to convince children that they needed all of their junk emblazoned with registered trademarked likenesses. An unconventional cartoonist, perhaps, but then, when your cartoon characters are named after John Calvin (1509-64) and Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), one a 16th century church reformer and the other a 17th century philosopher, one can expect something different. Throw in the fact that the strip also featured a teacher named Wormwood — a character from C.S. Lewis' Screwtape Letters who is the nephew of Satan, no less — and you have a cartoon with substance. Watterson said of the severe John Calvin, "I wouldn't want Calvin in my house, but on paper, he helps me sort through my life and understand it."
For those too young to remember, the strip featured the adventures and musings of an irrepressible boy named Calvin, whose behaviour was only occasionally tempered by Hobbes, his stuffed tiger. And on one occasion the precocious Calvin walked into the living room and announced to his father, "I've concluded that nothing bad that I do is my fault."
"Oh?" said his father.
"Yes," continued Calvin, "being young and impressionable, I'm the helpless victim of countless bad influences! An unwholesome culture panders to my undeveloped values and pushes me to malfeasance. I take no responsibility for my behaviour! I'm an innocent pawn! It's society's fault."
To which his father replies, "Then you need to build more character. Go shovel the walk."
The last pane of the cartoon shows Calvin shovelling snow and complaining, "These discussions never go where they're supposed to go."
Some Things Are our Fault!
Discussions don't always conclude as we wish, and some things are our fault. We are fallible human beings, and rare is the person who has not needed or received forgiveness. When John Wesley, the 18th century missionary to the American colonies, met General James Oglethorpe, the Governor of Georgia, Oglethorpe said to Wesley, "I never forgive, Reverend." Whereupon Wesley looked at Oglethorpe and said, "Then sir, I hope you never sin."
Some time ago my brother wrote a book entitled, Do Christians Forgive? with the sub-title, "Well, Some Do ..." (2000) He canvassed many Christians, soliciting stories of forgiveness, and was disappointed with how few he received. He also recounts, in the preface to his book, a childhood incident in which our local church decided to switch from the German language to the English language. The vote favoured English, whereupon one of the church elders who disagreed with the decision, got up from his seat at the front and walked out of the church. He never set foot in the church again until years later when the coffin bearing his body was brought in for his funeral service. (John W. Friesen, Do Christians Forgive? Well, Some Do ..., page ix) My brother doesn't identify the man, but I'm quite sure it was our grandfather, who was so principled that he could bend very little in any direction.
Some of us have deep struggles with forgiveness. One woman tells of her father leaving for a business trip when she was ten, and never returning. Decades later he made contact with her, asking for forgiveness. How does one forgive a daddy who was not there for her sports events, for her graduation, or her wedding, or the thousand other events that she would have loved to share with him. It's not easy to grant forgiveness for such behaviour, and yet to withhold it would have destroyed her, she realized. (story cited by Thomas K. Tewell, "When You Can't Forgive")
Our reading from the psalms is poignant in its plea for forgiveness:
Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean; wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow.
Hide your face from my sins, and blot out all my iniquities. Create in me a clean heart, O God, and put a new and right spirit within me." (Psalm 51:1-2,7, 9-10)
A similar eloquence is expressed by the 19th century American poet and abolitionist, John Greenleaf Whittier (1807-1892), who wrote the hymn, "Dear Lord and Father of Mankind" (Hymnal: A Worship Book, #523)
The Bible's F-list: F is not for Filth or Foolishness
Today's biblical word is forgiveness. To be sure, there are a lot of F-words in the Bible, and if we were publishing a daily newspaper, we would have a fulsome supply of front-page fodder, like "fraud," "fury," "fornication," and "filth". Other pages of the newspaper could feature "fear," "failure," "flattery," and "foolishness," or anything else the Scriptures classify as "forbidden".
The Scriptures also have many beautiful words starting with the letter, "F," like "friendship," "family," "forbearance," "freedom," "faith," "faithfulness," "fellowship," and "fidelity". If I have to choose but one word to represent the letter, "F," it would be the word, "forgiveness". It doesn't appear as often in the Bible as, say, "friendship" or "freedom," but it's an very important word, key to our understanding of redemption.
Forgiveness: No Math Homework Required!
Jesus thought it was an important word. It's included in the prayer he taught his disciples — "Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us" — or as the youth group translated it this week, in a RAP version:
Peter had good reason to expect congratulation. According to Jewish law, forgiving someone three times was all that was required. And truth be told, how often have we forgiven someone three times for the same offence? No doubt Peter thought he was being magnanimous, for to the Hebrew mind the number seven implies fullness. I'm sure Peter was surprised by Jesus' reply; Jesus said, "No, Peter, not seven times, but seventy times seven!" (Matthew 18:22, PHL) In other words, an exponential number.
Like an earnest engineer, Peter wanted to reduce forgiveness to a math problem, something he could manipulate. Forgiveness, however, has to do with relationships, something over which we have but limited control. Jesus was telling Peter, With respect to forgiveness, there's no math homework required! Seventy-times-seven equals 490, but there's no need to do the math! This is not about numbers!
I suppose that one could try and map out the mathematics of forgiveness, but it would require complex tallies and accounting procedures and checks and balances and reciprocities, and then we might know our standing in a protracted forgiveness negotiation, but the Scriptures tells us that "love keeps no score of wrongs". (1 Corinthians 13:5, NEB)
After Jesus told Peter to drop the math, he told him a story, a story about a certain king who had a day of financial reckoning with his indebted servants. One of his servants owed him 10,000 talents! The man was unable to pay, and would have been thrown in jail — along with his family — but when the servant requested leniency the king forgave him the entire debt.
Jesus' story is a warning to those of us who like to track the numbers, for the number used by Jesus is the highest number used in arithmetic at the time. Generous estimates of King Herod's total annual income amount to only 900 talents. In other words, this is not about numbers. It's about unlimited forgiveness.
There's a twist to the story, however. The servant who had been forgiven refused to forgive someone who owed him money — and a rather paltry sum, in comparison to his own debt. He who was shown mercy showed no mercy himself, and so his own debt was reinstated. The man would be punished. And Jesus concludes, with a rather ominous voice, "So my heavenly Father will also do to every one of you, if you do not forgive your brother or sister from your heart." (Matthew 18:35) The positive lesson, of course, is: how can we, who have been forgiven so much, withhold forgiveness from anyone? How can anyone who has received God's extravagant forgiveness refuse to offer it to others?
A Rich Biblical Legacy of Forgiveness
This series of sermons is about words that should be in a Christian's vocabulary, and the Scriptures have a rich vocabulary of forgiveness. The psalms, for example, praise God's forgiveness, saying:
... as far as the east is from the west,
The Bible has bequeathed us a rich legacy of expression and experience with respect to forgiveness, reaching back to the reconciliation of Jacob and Esau (Genesis 33), and Joseph and his brothers (Genesis 45), but perhaps its greatest gift to us is what it tells us about God's character. The Bible says that God "will forgive (our) iniquity and remember (our) sin no more". (Jeremiah 31:34, RSV) Our wrong-doings are "not imputed" against us, as the psalmist says (Psalm 32:2), or, to put it into computer-geek-talk, it is deleted from our disk, and one would have to be stubbornly unforgiving to "undelete" it.
We are forgiven by God because God wants to forgive us. The Bible tells us, "If we confess our sins, he who is faithful and just will forgive us our sins...." (1 John 1:9) God, it appears, does not have to be persuaded to forgive us. God does not appear reluctant to forgive us, indeed, God is probably more willing to forgive us than we are willing to forgive ourselves. God's willingness to forgive is powerfully portrayed in the Old Testament book of Hosea, where we discover that God will go to incredible lengths to forgive us, overlooking incredible infidelities!
Some of us have difficulty getting our minds — but especially our hearts — around the idea of unconditional love and grace. It's bewildering! We want to earn love and forgiveness. We want to feel that in some small way, at least, we deserve to be forgiven. And to those of us who like to think that standards and ethics and judgement might provide some helpful restraints, Jesus tells the story of a father who forgot all of the faults of his feckless son and threw a feast in his honour! (Luke 15)
Yes, God has expectations of us, and no doubt we often disappoint God, and there are times, in the Old Testament, for example, when God lashes out at Israel, feeling they should be wiped off the face of the earth! But then God adds:
To that spirit within ourselves that is tempted to "wipe out" evil-doers, God says, I will "wipe clean"their slates and allow them to start over. To that voice within ourselves that says, You've made your bed and now you must lie in it, another voice, a forgiving voice, says, Take up your bed and walk. Your sins are forgiven. (Matthew 9:2-7) To those of us who are tempted to say that we are forgiven "because of," the Bible maintains that God forgives us "in spite of". To that part within ourselves that wants to limit God's love and forgiveness, Jesus answer us, as he answered Peter, Forgive not seven times, but seventy times seven times seven times seven times seven ...
Forgiveness Offers a Welcome Release
Leslie Weatherhead was a pastor in London during the Second World War. He spent many nights in the underground stations with the people of central London, leading prayers and helping to calm their anxiety as German bombs and rockets destroyed their city. He also helped to disarm their hatred of the Germans, speaking of the need to forgive our enemies. He described God's work of forgiveness in terms of the old sludge boats that once carried off sewage from the city of London. This was before the days of modern sewage systems, and the little sludge boats lined up at the docks to have the waste pumped into them, and then, one by one, they moved out to the North Sea. Hundreds of miles out, they dumped their burdens, the idea being that somehow the sea would clean up the mess. It's a century-old practise that was only discontinued in 1998, thanks to European Union standards (PR Newswire Europe, 30 December 1998), but at the time life in London would have been unbearable without those sludge boats.
It's a rather crude illustration, but perhaps forgiveness is the sludge boat of the spirit, carrying away the more unsavoury aspects of human relationships. Forgiveness takes away the sludge of anger and guilt and hostility, those toxins that poison our relationships and, indeed, our very souls.
The woman whose father abandoned his family when she was ten tells of meeting her father, thirty-five years later, and that she wasn't sure she wanted to meet him. Approaching his hospital room, she had to stop along the way, breathing so heavily that she thought she was going to be sick. Her father weighed 105 pounds and was very weak, but he got up, broke into tears, and said "I'm so, so sorry." Later she said of the experience, "It was like my father was being set free from prison." "It's a curious thing," she adds, "but you know the person who was most in need of being set free (was) me! It wasn't my father, it was me."
Forgiveness releases those things that poison and imprison us and makes life bearable again. God invites us to release the debts, the grudges, the perceived obligations of others toward us, to release those offenses and slights and to give them to God in order that we might experience the freedom of forgiveness. God invites us to forgive others as God in His great mercy has forgiven us. God wants to "reclothe us in our rightful mind," that our lives might "confess the beauty of (God's) peace."
"Have mercy on me, O God, ...according to your abundant mercy blot out my transgressions. Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin.
Some scholars think these words were written by King David at a time when he was struggling with some malfeasance of his own. Perhaps it had to do with his adultery, perhaps murder or any of the other commandments he broke. His psalm is an eloquent request for forgiveness.
"Dear Lord and Father of mankind,
Some preachers like to think that this is a reference to Whittier's use of opium, but it may just as well have to do with the excesses of revivalism. Whatever the inspiration, the hymn is an eloquent plea for forgiveness. "Reclothe us in our rightful mind," he writes, "in purer lives thy service find.... Take from our souls the strain and stress, and let our ordered lives confess the beauty of thy peace."
forgive our foolish ways."
Gives us now your daily bread
Jesus also had a memorable conversation with his disciple, Peter, when Peter asked him, "Lord, how often shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? As many as seven times?" (Matthew 18:21, RSV) I don't know if Peter was serious or if he was just an eager student trying to get in the good graces of the teacher. Perhaps he expected a pat on the head, and Jesus would say, "Good boy, Peter! You get an A-plus! Go to the head of the class."
so we don't have to rob da homestead
Bust me outta da cell
Before da guy I robbed can tell
"Bless the Lord, O my soul,
Other Old Testament words convey a similar idea, words meaning, "to wipe away," and "to send away". In the New Testament the most frequent word used for forgiveness also means, "to send away" (Matthew 6:12, 14-15); another word conveys "passing over" (Romans 3:25), while yet another New Testament word means "to be gracious to," stressing the graciousness and generosity of Christian forgiveness. (Luke 7:43; 2 Corinthians 2:7, 10; Colossians 2:13)
and do not forget all his benefits —
who forgives all your iniquity...
so far he removes our transgressions from us." (Psalm 103:2-3, 12)
"How can I give you up...? How can I hand you over?
Instead of being "wiped off" the face of the earth, Israel's slate was "wiped clean".
... My heart recoils within me;
my compassion grows warm and tender." (Hosea 11:8)
All quotations of Scripture, unless otherwise noted, are from the New Revised Standard Version.