(Preached 13 September 2020)

Once upon a time, there was a woman who was sitting praying. She was not praying in words exactly, but sitting in silence. Some would call it waiting upon the Lord, since prayer is not just speaking to God, but also listening. Sometimes such prayer is turbulent, like wrestling with God. And sometimes such prayer can be peaceful.

On this occasion, the prayer was relatively peaceful. And gradually, the woman realized that there was something floating through her mind in the midst of the silence. In fact, it was one of the parables of Jesus playing out in her mind, almost like watching a play. It gradually came to the woman that she was seeing the parable of the unforgiving servant, this story we heard Jesus tell about the servant whose master forgave him a huge, tremendous debt, and then the same servant refused to forgive another servant who owed him a meager sum in comparison.

This parable played out in the woman’s mind. And then she gradually realized that the Lord was, in fact, speaking to her. God was telling her that she was harboring resentment or anger against others and not letting go of it, but that her own sins were far worse than what she was angry about. She was like the unforgiving servant of the parable.

The Lord was not beating her over the head with this information. The woman did not feel as though God was telling her that she was an awful person, terribly wicked and such. It is more that the message was just laid there in front of her that she had been offered forgiveness, but that she herself was not forgiving. And the message came in the form of this parable.

I am, of course, the woman of this story. And this really did happen to me in prayer one evening. That it came from God was unmistakable to me. For when I sat down to pray, I was not thinking of this parable at all. I was not even thinking about forgiveness, and I was not angry at someone. But then this parable was just laid before me, including the message about my own unwillingness to forgive.

Forgiveness is at the center of the Christian faith, because it is crucial to finding the new life and freedom that Christ offers us. But it is oh, so very difficult. We pray all the time, “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.” It’s in the Lord’s Prayer, which we might just rattle off without realizing exactly what it is we are saying.

There are two parts to this line, reflected in the parable. We pray to be forgiven. And we also say we will forgive those who have wronged us. And what the Christian faith says, and what the Bible says in a few places, and what this parable says, is that unless we forgive others, we will not be forgiven ourselves.

Now I am not going to command you to forgive someone. In churches, I am often aware that I do not know all of what people are dealing with in their lives. Even if they choose to tell me of the troubles they are having, or have had in the past, even if they choose to tell me how someone has hurt them or tell me what keeps them awake at night, I recognize that I do not know a fraction of what they are dealing with. It is between you and God whether you forgive another.

What I am going to do is tell you that the Christian message about forgiveness is true, and to offer you another way to look at it, including at this parable.

This parable of the unforgiving servant ends with the servant being taken before his master after he has refused to forgive the debt of his fellow slave. (I do notice that it is the rest of the slaves who turn him in, essentially. It seems they themselves recognize the wrong he has done, to have been forgiven a huge debt, and then refusing to forgive another person a small debt.)

Anyway, there is the servant before his master, and the master is furious. “I forgave you all that debt,” he says, “because you pleaded with me. Should you not have had mercy on your fellow-slave, as I had mercy on you?”

And then the master hands him over to be tortured until he can pay off his entire debt. That means he’ll be tortured eternally, because the debt is so large, and the servant will have no way to earn anything to pay off the debt.

This fits with what we always hear, that if we do not forgive, God will not forgive us. It’s in our Prayer Book as an introduction to the Peace. I admit that I’ve never said it while leading worship, because while I believe it to be true, and I understand why it is offered as a prelude the Peace, because we are supposed to be making peace with our neighbors, it sounds just a bit jarring to me before the Peace.

But I offer you this thought about God not forgiving us if we do not forgive another, and about the slave being handed over to eternal torture. It is not that God will sit back, fold the divine arms, and say, “Well, shame on you. If you are going to be such an awful, wicked person and not forgive another, then I will turn away from you. You just see if I’m going to forgive you.” No, that’s more like what a human being would do, and God’s ways are far higher than human ways.

Instead, it is just what will happen. It’s a spiritual law. We have physical laws — ways that the world works physically — like the law of gravity so that if we drop something it will fall, and if we stand out in the rain we’ll get wet, and the cycle of the seasons. There is a spiritual realm, and it has laws too, ways that the spiritual realm works. And one of those is that as we forgive others, we are set free, and if we do not forgive others, we subject ourselves to eternal torture. God isn’t doing it to us, like an angry taskmaster. It just happens. We are immersed in a spiritual realm of negativity. The wrong done to us gnaws on us, and weighs on us, and clouds our vision and our judgment, and destroys our peace.

On the other hand, Scripture says, if we forgive others, then God will forgive us. Again, it’s not that God will say, “Well, good for you. You’re behaving properly now. There, now I’ll wave my magic wand and all your sins will be forgiven.” That’s not it at all. It’s not a matter of good or proper behavior. Again, it’s a spiritual reality, a law about how things work: if we forgive others, we have changed something in the spiritual realm, and our own sins are wiped away. It’s like rising above the mire and the muck of wrongdoing and hurt into a different land entirely. It’s like a cleansing. It’s like being set free.

Jesus Christ is the gateway into this spiritual realm. That is why he came, why he died, and why he was resurrected: to open a door for us into a way of thinking and living in which we are set free: set free of the pain done to us, and also set free of the wrong we have done to others. God is not a punishing taskmaster. Instead, through Christ, God shows us the way and invites us to follow.