Homily for the 24th Sunday of Ordinary Time
Who is the person I need to forgive?
When I asked myself that question no one came to mind. I consider myself a forgiving person. I don’t hold grudges. Then I thought about the person who disagreed with me last week and made me mad. The various people in my life that make regular appearances in my thoughts at night. A neighbor, who every time I see him, I remember painfully how out of nowhere he started yelling at me five years ago. Every time I think about my early career as an engineer, I remember my first boss who did nothing but belittle and criticize me.
Yes, indeed. There are people I need to forgive. If I journaled about this each day, I am now thinking the list would go on and on.
I hear the words of Sirach in his teaching on forgiveness: “Wrath and anger are hateful things, yet the sinner hugs them tight.” (27:30) I am indeed clinging tight to a few areas that stir up wrath and anger.
Forgiving others is hard. If it were easy, Jesus would not have included the topic in his two main teachings. In the Beatitudes, Jesus said: “Blessed are the merciful for they will be shown mercy.” In the Lord’s Prayer, he taught us to “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive others.”
Jesus offers a long parable on an unforgiving servant. The servant is handed over to the torturers, and the parable concludes with an ominous warning, “So will my heavenly Father do to you, unless each of you forgives his brother from his heart.”
Forgiving others is important for our health and well-being. Forgiving is important to God.
The big question is “How”? How can we forgive? Sirach finishes this little instruction on forgiveness with a short and practical answer to this question. After a long exhortation on forgiveness (remember your last days… set enmity aside… remember death… hate not your neighbor…) he summarized the ‘how’ with two words “Overlook faults.” (28:7)
Overlook faults. Is it that easy?
This phrase, “Overlook faults” is an interesting combination of words. Over and look. Said differently might be ‘look over’, or look beyond the faults. If I look beyond the faults of a person, I might see their humanity, their frailty, and their struggles. How might that change my unforgiving heart? In Spanish, there is an equally interesting combination of words. It is translated as, “Paso por alto las offenses.” Translated as “Pass by high the offenses.” It conjures up a vision of a person walking by the fault, seeing it from a higher altitude, and avoiding descending into the muddy trench.
Brene Brown, a research psychologist and a trendy author and speaker, poses the question a different way: Are people doing the best that they can? She says about half the people respond, “Heck no, people are not doing the best that they can!” She finally asked her husband. He responded, “I have no idea. But what I do know is that my life is better when I assume they are.”
She then did a thought experiment with a bunch of ministers. Think about someone you think is not doing their best. Someone who irritates you. Someone who you get mad at for not doing their best. She then asked, “What if God came down and told you that person is doing their best that they can? How would that change?” For the people I have in mind, I would move from “wrath and anger” to compassion and sympathy. Part of me would want to understand how I might be able to help.
In the parable of the unforgiving servant (Mt 18:21-35), the servant owed the king an impossibly huge debt, which the king ultimately forgave. The king “overlooked faults”, the debt. It is easy to imagine the king representing God, the huge debt is all that we owe God for his infinite love and unending mercy, an impossibly huge debt we could not pay off without the sacrifice of Jesus. The servant, after being forgiven this debt, refused to forgive the trivial debt another servant owed him. He throttled the guy and said, “Pay me back now!” If the servant said, “I’m doing my best,” you can rest assured that the servant who was owed the money would say, “Heck no. You are not doing your best!” He threw the other servant into prison, where he would never be able to pay the servant back. They both lose. One is in prison and the other will never receive what he is owed. The witnesses were disturbed, so there was another loss: a tear in the fabric of the kingdom. When we don’t forgive another person, it’s a lose-lose-lose.
If the servant followed the advice of Sirach and overlooked faults, and if he followed the advice of Brene Brown and assumed the person was doing his best, he would not have thrown him in prison and would have recovered his debt. The kingdom would be made whole.
I’ll finish with a little example, not of me with a person but of me with my dog. He is a little poodle. We go hiking in the woods a lot. Occasionally he would walk on the wrong side of a tree and his leash would get tangled. This would make me mad. I would yell, “Come on…” and then give the leash a yank. He was confused. He wanted to go forward to me, but the leash was pulling him back. I thought he’d figure it out. I’d get angry and he would get upset. I did this for months. Then I realized, “He’s not going to figure this out.” He’s doing the best that he can. When I overlooked this fault, I changed my response. I slackened the leash and walked back to him. I would say gently, “Are you tangled?”, and lead him around the tree.
That’s also the way God works with us. When we end up on the wrong side of the tree, God doesn’t yank us around and get angry with us. God sends us Jesus who gently comes to us and says, “Are you tangled? Let me show you the way.”
With those we are struggling to forgive, God wants us to do the same.