Brad
Sullivan
4 Lent,
Year C
March
6, 2016
Saint
Mark’s Episcopal Church, Bay City, TX
2 Corinthians 5:16-21
Luke 15:1-3, 11b-32
The Parable of the Extravagantly Forgiving
Father
Everyone needs forgiveness. We need to give forgiveness, we need to
receive forgiveness. We need the grace
and healing that comes with forgiveness.
That’s because we all have scars and wounds inflicted upon us over the
course of our lives, and we are also all the cause of other peoples’ scars and
wounds. As much as we need food, water,
and air, we are starving and suffocating without forgiveness. Without forgiveness, our past wounds keep on
hurting us over and over, and they keep us from living the life of God’s
kingdom. Everyone needs
forgiveness. That’s why God gives forgiveness
so extravagantly.
We call the parable which we heard
today, “The Prodigal Son,” or the wasteful son.
He spent his inheritance wastefully and extravagantly and then came back
to his father, penniless and starving, begging for his father to let him work
as one of his servants. The father ran
out to him, having already forgiven him, and restored him, not as a servant,
but as a son, and he threw a huge party in celebration that his son was back,
essentially back from the dead.
So, the title “the prodigal son”
makes some sense, although, “the extravagantly forgiving father” might be a
better title. Calling the story “the
prodigal son,” however, ignores the other brother, the one who stayed with his
dad, helped around the house, and then was indignant when his brother came home
and was given a party. That, and the anger
he had? Totally understandable. It wasn’t fair, he was basically saying, and
he was right. It wasn’t fair. Of course he was angry, and forgiveness isn’t
about being fair. Forgiveness is about
what we need.
Archbishop Desmond Tutu wrote a book
on forgiveness which came out of the process of healing and the choice of
forgiveness after apartheid in South Africa.
He begins the book with a story of a woman and her daughter whose
husband and father had been tortured, beaten, stabbed, dismembered, and killed. They were speaking to the Truth and
Reconciliation Commission about the murder of their husband and father during
apartheid in South Africa. They ended by
saying, “I would love to know who killed my father. We want to forgive them. We want to forgive, but we don’t know who to
forgive.”
The perpetrators of this crime
didn’t deserve forgiveness, but they needed it, wherever they were. The mother and daughter, also needed
forgiveness. They had a need to give forgiveness. That was their desire. Archbishop Tutu wrote about them in his book,
The Book of Forgiving: The Fourfold Path for Healing Ourselves and
Our World. He wrote about the need
we have to be forgiven and the need we have to forgive. He writes:
To forgive is not just to be altruistic. It is the best form of self-interest. It is also a process that does not exclude
hatred and anger. These emotions are all
part of being human. You should never
hate yourself for hating others who do terrible things: The depth of your love is shown by the extent
of your anger.
However, when I talk of forgiveness, I mean the belief that you
can come out the other side a better person.
A better person than the one being consumed by anger and hatred.
Remaining in that state locks you in a state of victimhood, making you almost
dependent on the perpetrator. If you can
find it in yourself to forgive, then you are no longer chained to the
perpetrator. You can move on, and you
can even help the perpetrator to become a better person, too.
The brother in Jesus’ parable had a
need to forgive. After rumbling with his
anger and resentment for a while, he needed to release those emotions and
forgive his brother so that he was no longer consumed by the anger and resentment,
so that he was no longer hurting himself.
Forgiveness is the key to the parable Jesus told: Our need for forgiveness, our need both to
give and to receive forgiveness. The
parable really should be called the parable of the extravagantly forgiving
father. Then the focus is not on how we mess
up, but the focus is on who God is, our extravagantly forgiving Father. How beloved are we of God that he forgives us
so extravagantly?
All this is from God, who
reconciled us to himself through Christ, and has given us the ministry of
reconciliation; that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself,
not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting the message of
reconciliation to us. So we are ambassadors for Christ, (1 Corinthians 5:18-20)
God knows that we only hurt because
we have been hurt. We only break others
only because we have been broken. As
Archbishop Tutu writes:
People are not born hating each other and wishing to cause
harm. It is a learned condition. Children do not dream of growing up to be
rapists or murderers, and yet ever rapist and ever murderer was once a
child…Forgiveness is truly the grace by which we enable another person to get
up, and get up with dignity, to begin anew.
So, God has given us forgiveness
and reconciliation to him, and then he has granted us to be his ambassadors
that we might give forgiveness and reconciliation as extravagantly as he. Our ambassadorship is not easy, of course,
because forgiveness is not easy. It was
not easy for God to forgive and to reconcile the world to him. We hear time and again about God’s vengeance
and his wrath. You can bet our sins
anger God.
Just as with our rumbling with our
anger and resentment, God was angry at humanity for the harm we cause each
other. Rather than exact vengeance on
humanity, however, God took that anger and vengeance upon himself, becoming
human, becoming Jesus, and suffering himself, suffering his own anger and
vengeance on the cross. God’s
forgiveness of us was not easy, but it was and is extravagantly given.
The anger and resentment we feel
when we have been hurt is, like God’s anger and resentment, understandable and
justified. We need, however, to rumble
with it and eventually to release it so that it no longer poisons us. Such is our need for forgiveness, both to
give and receive forgiveness. And so we
are ambassadors for Christ, constantly working to give and receive forgiveness,
and constantly telling others of the extravagant forgiveness God has given us
through Jesus, and of the healing that comes through forgiveness and
reconciliation. Such healing is not
easy, because forgiveness is not easy.
We see in the cross of Jesus the difficulty of forgiveness, and whenever
we forgive something in us has to die in order for that forgiveness and new
life to happen. Forgiveness is not easy,
but it is needed, for restoration, for resurrection, for healing and new
life. And we are ambassadors of Christ
in his extravagant gift of healing through forgiveness. So I leave us with this prayer from
Archbishop Tutu, called “The Prayer Before the Prayer.”
I want to be willing to forgive
But I dare not ask for the will to forgive
In case you give it to me
And I am not yet ready
I am not yet ready for my heart to soften
I am not yet ready to be vulnerable again
Not yet ready to see that there is humanity
in my tormentor’s eyes
Or that the one who hurt me may also have
cried
I am not yet ready for the journey
I am not yet interested in the path
I am at the prayer before the prayer of
forgiveness
Grant me the will to want to forgive
Grant it to me not yet but soon.
Can I even form the words
Forgive me?
Dare I even look?
Do I dare to see the hurt I have caused?
I can glimpse all the shattered pieces of
that fragile thing
That soul trying to rise on the broken
wings of hope
But only out of the corner of my eye
I am afraid of it
And if I am afraid to see
How can I not be afraid to say
Forgive me?
Is there a place where we can meet?
You and me
The place in the middle
The no man’s land
Where we straddle the lines
Where you are right
And I am right too
And both of us are wrong and wronged
Can we meet there?
And look for the place where the path
begins
The path that ends when we forgive.
Amen.
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