(By Rev. Malcolm Stranathan)
Tough Question Number 3 _ Who are the Five People I don’t want to meet in Heaven – God’s forgiveness toward us and our’s toward others:
Based on Scripture Text: Matthew 18:21-35
It was a great question; obviously the author of the question had heard of or read the book by Mitch Albom titled The Five People You meet in Heaven. After dying in a freak accident, Eddie, a simple yet dignified man, finds himself in heaven where he encounters five people who have significantly affected his life. Albom dedicates the book to his uncle Edward Beitchman. He says that he wants people like his uncle who felt unimportant here on earth to realize, finally, how much they mattered and how they were loved.
“The Tough Question” card asked a slightly different question, “Who are the five people I don’t want to meet in heaven.” Ouch, reading perhaps more into the question, the question seemed to dovetail into other questions dealing with forgiveness, how do we forgive those people in our lives who have done unspeakable things to us personally or society as a whole.
I asked my Facebook friends that questions and got some interesting responses. I feel like we need an applause-o-meter on if you agree. One wrote, Hitler and Gangues Khan as well as some recent U.S. presidents, another confessed that he would struggle with meeting people who he still owed money too (right up there with the tax man), another mentioned with a sense of humility “people I wasn’t nice too.” And still another wrote “unrepentant sinners”
Perhaps we all have some idea of who we’d rather like to think will never make it into the pearly gates (but that’s next week’s tough question). I believe that this person might be asking, how does forgiveness work God’s towards humanity and our’s toward others who do us wrong or perhaps even, how we do other’s wrong.
Each week, in one service and sometimes in all three, we pray a prayer that Jesus gave us to model, in it we pray by rote asking God to “forgive our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.”
Today’s message falls under the categorized “Easier said than done” Yet, John Wesley, co founder of Methodist societies and movement, often felt obliged to remind the people called Methodist that we are “going on to perfection” A process empowered by God’s Spirit and sanctify grace as we choose to love perfectly and to live out of that love in this lifetime. But … nobody ever said it was gonna be easy.
Let’s pray …
(Experience)
When my family lived in Bangkok, Thailand my brothers and I attended Calvary Baptist Church. The church had an active program for youth of which we were part. One evening a woman came to speak at church. She had a very thick accent, she lived in Europe during World War II in a country that in all truthfulness I can’t quite recollect. Her message was a powerful one, one that kept the attention of a middle schooler. She shared how during the war she spent some time in a concentration camp. I don’t recollect why she was there, she wasn’t Jewish, and she shared how she was released from the camp to return home. Many years after that, she would travel and share her story. At one of these events, she recognized one of the people in the audience as a particularly brutal guard during her stay in the concentration camp. After the meeting she shared that the guard walked up to her and addressed her as a follower of Jesus Christ, and asked for forgiveness over that time.
When she and her family were arrested, some of them died because of they were arrested and sent to these camps. Not all, but some. This woman shared how difficult it was to address her former prison guard, but address him she did, not with condemnation but with grace and forgiveness granted which she attributes to their common faith in Jesus Christ.
(Scripture)
Today’s scripture text (Matthew 18:21ff) is a lesson and then a story.
Jesus has just been talking to his disciples about how to encourage someone to step away from sinning and then one of his disciples ask him, “How many times Lord should we forgive someone?” (Seven times?)
Jesus response, not just seven times but (seven times seventy)
The number seven symbolizes completeness and repetitions of the number intensify the results – not just completely but really completely leaving no room for question.
Then …
Jesus goes into a story about a lord who forgives a man of a great debt because he took pity on the man. The money that the man owes the king is an incomprehensible amount – it would be unlikely that this man could ever repay in a hundred lifetimes let alone one.
As the forgiven man leaves the court he comes across a man who owed him an insignificant sum (a hundred days of labor) compared to what he had just been forgiven and refused to offer the same grace – he throttles the man and has him imprisoned until he can pay the debt.
News travels fast and when the lord discovers how this man handled such a small debt when he was forgiven so much more, he calls him into account, and has the man punished for his lack of mercy.
People surrounding Jesus were probably nodding their head �
– yes that is fitting justice for the man who lacked mercy.
Then the zinger – “So my heavenly Father will also do to every one of you, if you do not forgive your brother or sister* from your heart.”
Forgiveness in this context means to ‘give up or let go’. To “let go” of the hurt, pain, the desire for getting back what was taken, certainly not to take but revenge.” It cuts to the heart, literally, of the matter.
Easier said than done — certainly.
And yet, there really isn’t any wiggle room on this one. �
Try as I might I just can’t find it anywhere.
In fact if anything, what Jesus says here undoes a lot of teaching from the Hebrew scriptures regarding how wrongs are corrected.
The earliest instance of revenge/retribution being allowedwhen God confronts Cain for killing his brother Abel the ramifications toward Cain is banishment. Cain complains to God that if he is banished he will come to harm and God assures him that if any harm comes to him the perpetrator will pay seven times (completely) for their wrong against Cain.
Cain’s son Lamech determined that if anyone tried to harm him he would harm them even more so – seventy seven fold.
Jesus choice of words to forgive others not just seven times, but seventy seven (seven times seventy) completely, may have reminded the people gathered around him that day of this ancient teaching is no longer an option.
Exodus 21 outlines a “life for a life, eye for and eye, tooth for a tooth…” was written with the intention of reigning an act of revenge/retaliation more comparable to the initial crime/infraction.
Jesus’ words imply that when a wrong is done to you, an eye for an eye doesn’t work. He even says so much in the Sermon on the Mount (Mt 5.38-48) ” You have heard it said an eye for an eye … but I tell you then when someone strikes you, you are turn the other cheek … ”
Not forgiving someone rates up there with the only other unpardonable sin of blaspheming God’s Holy Spirit – (Mt 12:31,32; Mk 3:28-30; Lk 12:10).
For followers of the way, forgiveness is the only choice.
Easier said than done
(Reason)
Socieity has set up courts of law which now have a role to play when injustices takes place.
At the end of WWII, an International Military Tribunal in Nurenburg, Germany spent five years to either sentence (some up to life imprisonment, others to death) or acquits Nazi leaders for war crime against humanity.
In contrast to the the Nurenburg Trials, when South Africa’s Apartheid ended (For the young people – a system of legal racial segregation enforced by the National Party government in South Africa between 1948 and 1994, under which the rights of the majority black inhabitants of South Africa were curtailed and minority rule by whites was maintained) South Africa set up a Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
In his book “No Future without Forgiveness” Archbishop Desmond TuTu, argues that true reconciliation cannot be achieved by denying the past. Rather than repeat platitudes about forgiveness he recognizes the horrors people can inflict upon one another, and yet retains a sense of idealism about reconciliation. The commission allowed people to come forward and share what they did and be absolved from punitive repercussions. “When one look the beast in the eye” Tutu writes, “only them can we move forward with honest and compassion and build a newer and more humane world.”
(Easier Said than Done)
Corrie Ten Boom, a Christian woman who survived a Ravensbrück concentration camp during WWII said, “Forgiveness is to set a prisoner free, and to realize the prisoner was you.” prisoner free, and to realize the prisoner was you.” In her book Tramp for the Lord, Ten Boom tells the story of how, after she had been teaching in Germany in 1947 she was approached by one of the cruelest former Ravensbrück camp guards. While reluctant to forgive him, she prayed that she would be able to. She wrote “for a long moment we grasped each other’s hands, the former guard and the former prisoner. I had never known God’s love so intensely as I did then.”
Reflecting on her post war experiences, Ten Boom also wrote that her experience with other victims of Nazi brutality – it was those who were able to forgive who were best able to rebuild their lives.
Easier said than Done.
We ask, “Who are the five people we don’t want to meet in heaven?”
And yet this question speaks to more to our unforgiveness than God”s.
God’s answer is, “It just doesn’t work this way”
God wants us all …
The next verse after this our scripture text for today says
(Matthew 19.1 – When Jesus had finished saying these things he left Galilee …)
He started his journey to Jerusalem … he was heading to a cross
On the cross, as David shared last week, your sins were forgiven. To which I might add, not only yours but also the sins of those five folks we don’t want to meet in heaven. Such is the forgiveness of God toward all of humanity (through millenium until eternity!) … it might take a lifetime to understand and emulate the mercy which God does … but we are called to do so all the same.
Please know that sometimes forgiveness is a slow process.
But we’ll know the work of forgiveness is complete when we experience the freedom that comes as a result (like Ten Boom’s experience).
We are the ones who suffer most when we choose not to forgive. When we do forgive, God sets our hearts free from the anger, bitterness, resentment hurt and yes sometimes fear that previously imprisoned us.
-Easier said than done but no one ever said that the life you were called to was going to be easy.
Filed under: tough questions on January 31st, 2010 | 6 Comments »
