I CAN'T GET CLOSURE

( a sermon preached at St.Wulfran’s church, Ovingdean  on 13th September 2020)

Text: Matthew chapter 18 versesI 21-35 (the parable of the unforgiving servant)

“Forgiveness” is a tricky one. When people ask me about it, their story, or their problem, always takes one of three forms. Let’s call them the serendipity, the no-brainer and the worst case scenario.

First type. You can’t forgive yourself for something you’ve done or not done which you feel has caused or failed to prevent hurt and suffering to somebody else. In other words you feel guilty. That’s easy. Whatever the attitude of the injured party, if you are genuinely sorry, you can be absolutely sure (but you must let yourself be convinced) that God forgives you. That’s grace. That’s called the serendipity.

In the second type of forgiveness problem, the boot is on the other foot. Can you or should you forgive another person for a wrong or hurt done by them to you.

Well, if the offending party is sincerely contrite and genuinely          asks for your forgiveness, there can really be no excuse, according to today’s gospel, for withholding it. That’s called the no-brainer.

And thirdly we come to the “worst case scenario”. You have been wronged or hurt but the perpetrator does not ask for your forgiveness, doesn’t even want it, in fact doesn’t give a fig about it. No remorse. May not even think what he did was wrong.

And yet the test of whether or not you can still achieve a feeling of forgiveness in your heart, even where you cannot bestow forgiveness because of the unrepentant attitude of the wrongdoer, is of vital importance both to you and to God.

People are always talking these days in relation to wrongs done to them in terms of “obtaining closure” but this imagined ‘closure’ is always external. Somebody must take the blame. Somebody must be punished. Somebody must apologise (although notice that the next cliche is usually “Sorry is not enough!).

But we really need search our own hearts. Because if we allow some slight against us, some injury, even some outrage to fester inside us because we haven’t obtained “satisfaction” from a third party, we may have unwittingly incubated a spiritual cancer which could multiply cells of bitterness, take over our soul and destroy our precious relationship with God.

What about God’s feelings? Did you know that top of God’s list of things He cares most about is forgiveness? Make no mistake. Our Heavenly Father’s No.1 priority is to forgive us our sins.

But. And it’s is big but. He just can’t do it (even with all His power, even with all His love, even after all Christ went through on the Cross) unless we in our turn are prepared to forgive.

He CAN’T do it. Not He WON’T do it. It’s not divine pique. He CAN’T do it simply because, unless and until we are willing to let go, to stop demanding retribution and “seeking closure”, we are putting ourselves in a hell of our own making where His love cannot touch us, we are not fit to meet Him, we wouldn’t even recognize Him if we saw Him.

Here’s something scary. "When you pray" says Jesus, "ask your father in heaven to forgive your sins as you forgive those who trespass against you".

Notice the sting in the tail. The prayer for forgiveness is the only bit of the Lord's Prayer to which any condition is attached. The catch is not, as you might expect, that we must sufficiently repent of our own sins before we can be forgiven.  It is rather, it is simply, that we must be prepared to forgive others.

And the lesson is driven home powerfully - you might almost say with overkill - in this morning’s gospel. Unfortunately the story turns out to be in the “no-brainer” category. It’s colourful and exaggerated.  The debt which the king was ready to forgive is the equivalent of about £30m in today's money. So for the servant to say "Give me time” is ridiculous - who did he think he was kidding?

On the other hand, the debt which the same servant refused to forgive someone else on his way out was the equivalent of less than 50 quid, the sort of sum it wouldn’t even be worth wasting costs taking anybody to court about.

And the point of the parable? The debt which you and I owe to God in terms both of what he has done for us and of what we have failed to do for Him could never be repaid. Yet he is ready and willing just to write it all off – to wipe the slate clean - provided we will only forgive what others do to us.

That is surely why St. Peter was told that he should forgive seventy times, or in some versions of the text, seventy times seven, in which case I make it 490.

 But of course Our Lord was not giving a multiplication lesson. You’re not supposed to keep a strict tally of the number of times you have forgiven and save yourselves up for being able to say triumphantly on the 491st occasion "Aha! Got you this time. Sorry, mate, you've done it once too often!".

You should simply never refuse a sincere request to forgive. It’s the no-brainer.

Now the king in the story is understandably (and very humanly) furious when he hears how mean and ungrateful his servant has been and punishes him. But don’t read into that the idea that God Himself is huffy or petty.  He never stands on his own dignity. If He did, He would never have sent His only Son into the world to serve, to suffer, to be nailed to the cross and to say "Father, forgive them for they know not what they do".

God’s forgiveness is like all aspects of His love – it is always on offer – but we have to be capable of receiving it. And that means the sting in the tail: as we forgive those who trespass against us.  The trouble is, unlike God, we often find it more comforting to bear grudges and harbour resentments.

It is of course especially difficult to forgive a hurt when the offender laughs in your face. On one level, you might say forgiveness cannot operate fully unless it is accepted as well as offered. But this is precisely what I chose with some care to call the “worst case scenario”.

You see, the toughest but the most important part of the healing process of forgiveness takes place inside the forgiver. Now, the Greek word St. Matthew uses which we translate "forgive" is aphiemi and the interesting thing is that this simply means to let go.  To forgive = to let go the dead weight of hurt or grievance and so to heal ourselves psychologically.

Think for a moment about Our Lord’s other parables:

Particularly the one about the labourers in the vineyard, who grumbled  because the owner gave the same wages to other workers who hadn’t worked as long as them, even though they themselves were still paid in full exactly what they had negotiated;

and what about that most famous story of all, the prodigal son?  We all know how generously forgiving the father was but we prefer to forget how unattractively self-righteous the sulking elder brother was.  When he saw the lights and dancing in the house as he came home from the fields, he was "angry and would not go in" because all he could think about was his own worth. 

These labourers and this elder brother are characters invented by Our Lord because He wants us to see how they have not learnt to let go of their rights and their resentments. 

Let go. Picture yourself gaining height towards God in a spiritual balloon by jettisoning the ballast of your rights and your hurts, even your anger against people who have done you grievous harm.

Because once you have truly forgiven in your heart all those who trespass against you, that is your pass into the kingdom of heaven. You can soar, light and free as a bird, into God's arms.