I have a moral dilemma for you all, today. Purely hypothetical. Imagine that it’s January, and there’s just been a winter storm, and a snow emergency has been declared. The next day, you go to shovel out your car to get to a doctor’s appointment. You spend an hour digging it out, and then put out a cone or a chair as a space-saver, as you’re allowed to do in a snow emergency. When you come back, you find that someone’s moved it and parked in your spot. You drive around the block, and manage to find another space, while you consider what to do.
Now, you’re a good person. You don’t do what one friend of mine suggested, and smash the windshield of their car. No. The punishment must fit the crime. So you walk back to the space you’d saved, shovel in hand, and you start putting all that snow back. You shovel for about 45 minutes, carefully placing snow onto and around the car that had taken your space, and when you’re just about done, the owner returns, and says, “What are you doing???” And you tell them that you shoveled this space out, and they stole it, and so you’re just un-shoveling the space, so they get a chance to do some work. And they start yelling.
Are you in the wrong, or are they? Who thinks that they are in the wrong? Who thinks that you are? (Who thinks it’s hilarious, payback either way?)
Now consider some added context. The day before the snowstorm, you’d come home late at night, and parking spaces were few and far between. You’d managed to squeeze into a spot, but the next day when you went out to find it you realized that you’d blocked a driveway by about six inches. You find a note on your windshield: “I couldn’t get my car out this morning to go to work. I don’t have time to wait for a tow truck, so I’m taking the T. Please don’t do it again.” No damage to your car, no cash payment to get it back out of the pound. What you’d done was forgiven.
Does the prequel to the story change anything about what you did two days later, after the snow?
This very-Boston, 21st-century tale is almost exactly the same as the story Jesus told to his disciples two thousand years ago. Jesus’ story is unsettling: it’s a story of masters and slaves, violence and punishment. But the mechanics are the same. Someone owes a debt, but he cannot pay. (Matt. 18:24-25) He begs for patience and forgiveness, and he’s shown mercy. His payment of the debt is not just delayed, but forgiven. (18:26-27) But the same man is a creditor himself. He’s owed another, smaller debt, and he intends to collect. He turns around and immediately, violently, tries to take what he’s owed. (18:28) And when he’s asked for patience, he shows none, throwing his debtor into prison until he pays it off. (18:30) The aggression and cruelty he shows while he’s trying to collect this debt are reprehensible. But the fact that he’s just been forgiven for the same thing, in fact for a hundred times the amount, makes it much worse.
Now, there are several ways to approach this story. We shouldn’t ignore the horrors of this system of enslavement that forms the backdrop. There’s a startling resemblance to modern human trafficking, in which people are offered a way into a country like the United States in exchange for a fee, and then the traffickers force them to work off this “debt,” deducting room and board, and threaten them with deportation if they refuse. And the magnitude of the “debt” this enslaved person owes the king is astounding. A denarius was about a day’s wages; 10,000 denarii would be the work of twenty-seven years. You might consider, as well, the way in which such a system creates a vicious cycle of violence. The first slave, frightened and oppressed, unable to fight back against the king, turns around and takes it out on the second one, taking the trauma he’d experienced and inflicting it on someone else.
But Jesus doesn’t really discuss either of these things. Jesus doesn’t tell this as a story about slavery, debt, or violence. Jesus tells this is a story about forgiveness. And to our modern ears, that may sound strange.
We often associate forgiveness with reconciliation, with the restoration of a right relationship between the two parties. So you’ll often hear people say that you shouldn’t forgive someone, maybe you can’t forgive someone unless they apologize, unless they repent. And this makes life hard. We ask God to “forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.” But many of us have been wronged by people who have died, or who we don’t speak with; people who we never knew (think of the guy who cuts you off in traffic, then beeps at you) or who are convinced they’re right. (See last week’s sermon.) In these situations, there will be no apology: and yet Jesus warns us that we must forgive, if we want to be forgiven.
Or, we sometimes think that forgiveness is about our own emotional processes, that to forgive means no longer to feel pain or anger about what’s been done, or that we must have “come to terms” with what’s happened in some way. And this, too, is hard. Emotions are one of the hardest things in life to control, besides other people and the weather. You can’t choose to “just get over” something, as nice as that would often be. We all want emotional healing, but to say that being forgiven is conditional on it is a very tall order. It puts a huge burden on the one who’s been wronged: if you can’t forgive someone in your heart, you might think, then you cannot be forgiven.
But what if forgiveness wasn’t really about either of these things. What if forgiveness was about something else?
The Rev. Dr. Matthew Ichihashi Potts is a distinguished theologian: an Episcopal priest and scholar of literature and religion, he’s now the Pusey Minister in the Memorial Church and the Plummer Professor of Christian Morals at Harvard University. But in his recent book Forgiveness, Matt Potts asks a surprisingly simple question: What if forgiveness is not reconciliation or emotional wholeness? What if forgiveness is simply the habit of non-retaliation? He means this in a particular sense. “Retaliation” doesn’t just mean doing something to get back at someone; it means paying someone back in kind, an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. The law of retaliation sets limits on our actions by setting a exchanging revenge for payback. “A tooth for a tooth” means that if you knock out my tooth, I don’t get to chop off your hand, but I do get to knock out one of yours. The law of retaliation is the law of the space-saver: if you steal my spot, I don’t smash your windshield; but I just might make you shovel all that same snow.
And this seems to be the kind of forgiveness that Jesus is talking about. Think of the moment at which the king forgives the debt. There’s no sense of a reconciliation between the two characters. There’s no inner emotional work being done. The only forgiveness in this story is the choice not to collect the debt that the king is owed. It’s the decision not to demand what you are owed, not to make the other person pay, but to leave that snow where it is. Non-retaliation doesn’t mean inaction, or passivity. It doesn’t mean you can’t protect yourself for the future. It simply means you choose not to get payback.
“Forgiveness as non-retaliation” is much easier and much harder than the other kinds of forgiveness. It’s hard to rebuild a broken relationship and be reconciled with someone else. It’s hard to do the work of healing your own soul. It’s easy to do nothing. And yet in many cases, doing nothing is the hardest thing there is. Giving up the delicious satisfaction of payback is not always as easy as it seems.
And yet there is a lot of wisdom here. Because retaliation, as good as it may feel, can never fill that hole. A wrong was done, and it cannot be undone, even if restitution is made. Forgiveness, Potts points out, is something like grief. To forgive is to try to live in light of what’s been done, knowing that it cannot be undone. Nothing can take away the fact that I spent an hour shoveling and didn’t have a place to park. And in fact that process of payback can itself cause new pain. Because if I put all that snow back, then yes, I’ve made that other guy’s arms sore. He’s been paid back, in kind. But now my arms are twice as sore, and I still don’t have a spot to park my car.
This kind of non-retaliation isn’t the end of our response to being wronged. But it is a beginning. And, importantly, it’s this that Jesus asks for, when he asks us to forgive. Not that we feel good about what’s been done. Not that we excuse it, or allow it. Simply that we don’t turn around and repeat it, inflicting on someone else what was done to us. If we’re ever going to break that cycle of pain, if we’re ever going to forgive one another as we have been forgiven, it’s this kind of restraint that we need to practice: not seven times, or seventy-seven; more like seven thousand, seven hundred, seventy-seven.