Don’t you find it amazing that on the tenth anniversary of 9/11 the Gospel reading should be about forgiveness? The list of offenses we have to forgive scarcely ends. We could name the horror of the massive killing, the terror and grief inflicted, the sense of vulnerability and distrust we now live with, the searing confrontation with evil, the loss of direction for us as a nation, the catastrophic destruction, the on-going health issues, the loss of our innocence, for some, even the loss of faith. If Jesus calls seventy-seven the upper limit of the number of times we should forgive, we can get well above this with 9/11.
When we start counting, though, we have to ask, how shall we count? Should we count the whole of the World Trade Center attack as one huge offense? Or should we start naming the separate offenses, as I tried to do just now? Or the individual people? Is seventy-seven times the limit for one episode, or for one day? Does an offense have to have a degree of magnitude to count as one of the seventy seven? Questions abound.
Apart from figuring out how to count wrongs or calculate the magnitude of offenses, forgiving involves another complication. To forgive someone requires, first, the struggle to forgive, and then ever after, watchful maintenance of that forgiveness. This locks up a lot of energy. And if our watchfulness slips, we might find ourselves back to retaliating, back to square one with our hard-won forgiveness. So to be honest, trying to forgive offenses puts us in an impossible situation. We cannot do it. Jesus’ command to forgive from the heart amounts to lifting ourselves up by our boot straps.
This is not the forgiveness Jesus is asking for. It’s not about counting how many times we forgave or how hard we struggled. In the Hebrew tradition seventy-seven stood for an infinite number. In other words, Jesus is saying, don’t even start to count.
What Jesus is saying is quite radical. Let me give you an image for what Jesus means when he says forgive. Think of an offense as a bullet. Picture it slamming into soft soil, into humus. It goes no further, doesn’t ricochet, does no more damage. The the bullet’s momentum dies. The soil absorbs all the angry energy. This is the work of forgiveness. It does not aim outward toward the offense at all, but inward toward the heart, toward its gradual transformation into a heart of humus. The work of forgiveness aims toward having a heart like the heart of God or of Jesus. No offense is even taken. To forgive from the heart is to be as the earth.
Yes, but what about Jesus’ parable where the king, himself, seems vindictive? Surely the king stands for God! At first the king was kind to his slave who owed him 10,000 denarii. In fact, he wiped out the entire debt. But when that same slave showed no mercy to a fellow slave who owed him only 100 denarii, the king turned against the first slave. He sentenced him to be tortured until the entire 10,000 was paid. Jesus ended by saying, “so my heavenly Father will also do to every one of you, if you do not forgive your brother or sister from your heart.” Is this a case of God’s saying, “Do as I say not as I do?”
Jesus told the story that way to emphasize the supreme importance of a transformed heart, not to paint God as a vindictive judge with a heart of stone. In fact, God can only love. If we are tortured by being barred from the kingdom of heaven, it is not because God would keep us out. Far otherwise! God longs only to bring us in. It is we who keep ourselves out. And forgiveness from the heart is the key by which we either keep ourselves out, or let ourselves in to the kingdom of heaven.
At this point we may be saying to ourselves, “I want in!” But let’s make sure we do want in. Here are two questions we can ask to test that claim. First, how comfortable would I be in a place that outlawed judgment and blame? Imagine going through life without the satisfaction of making judgments — of separating, at least in my own mind, the good from the bad, the deserving from the undeserving, the right from the wrong. Or going through life without the relief of blaming, given careless or criminal behavior? The second question is this. How comfortable would I be in a place where everyone and every thing were interconnected? Where whatever happened would affect me, and whatever I did would affect the rest of creation? Can I imagine living in a place with these norms?
Let’s go back to Jesus’ parable where he mentions torture. We do not think of our everyday life as torture; but where we deal out judgment and blame almost subconsciously, and where think of ourselves as solitary individuals. . . well, in terms of Jesus’ parable, that life is torture. And yet, if that is where we’re comfortable, we need to think twice before we claim we want to leave it.
Let me step aside for a moment and make an important distinction between judgment and discernment. Judgment asks what or who is wrong here? Discernment asks, what is needed to bring healing here? Judgment is passive, seeing the situation as “not my problem”. Discernment is active, seeing the situation as involving me, personally. Applied to 9/11, discernment would follow a process, first analyzing: what is going on here? What concatenations of causes have brought this about? And after analyzing, discernment would assess: given the whole picture, what resources do I have — what skills, experience, influence — that can bring healing? One of the people at Centering Prayer yesterday spoke of a special kind of creativity, the “creativity of kindness.” It’s a great way to think of how discernment springs into action with ingenuity as well as energy.
Going back to Jesus’ parable, for those of us who do want to enter the kingdom of heaven, how shall we go about transforming our hearts from rock to humus — that is, achieving forgiveness from the heart? I think of Jesus and his disciples that time in the boat on the Sea of Galilee. The wind was raging, the waves threatened to swamp them, the storm was reaching its peak and Jesus was asleep in the bow with his head on a pillow. How was that possible? It was possible because Jesus, himself, was in the eye of the storm. We can take that literally, if we like, but the deeper meaning for us is that always, whatever was going on, Jesus dwelt in a place of inner tranquility.
He did not get there by special dispensation, being the Son of God. He did not enjoy some level of divinity that put him on a different plane from ours. He got there with practice. Every day, perhaps from quite an early age, he set aside time to practice — let me put it this way — being in the eye of the storm. The storm may have been no greater than the tumult of his thoughts. Or it may have been the very real threats that began to accumulate. But he practiced every day, putting himself inside the storm, in the tranquility of its eye. And when the end did come he was ready, not with blame or judgment, but with forgiveness from the heart, no offense taken, for he knew that he was intimately interconnected. His transformed heart discerned he was one with the whole of creation.
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Tags: 9/11, blame, discernment, forgiveness, judgment
