THE HARDEST ONE TO FORGIVE
Rev. Dr. Joyce Antila Phipps
2 Samuel 19: 1-23; Luke 15: 1-2, 11-32
On October 2, 2006, Charles Roberts, a local 32-year old milkman, walked into a school in West Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania, armed with a 9mm. gun, told the boys to leave and systematically tie up the girls and then proceeded to shoot them. The teacher had run from the classroom to call the police but by the time the police arrived four were already dead.
As officers ran around the school, Roberts then shot himself in the head. The Amish community responded by comforting Roberts’ widow. The incident became the foundation of a film entitled “The Power of Forgiveness.”
Beginning with the massacre of the young Amish schoolgirls, it examined five instances of terrible violence and how victims and/or their families worked out a process of forgiveness. In each instance, the victims had been objectified in some way. The film examines forgiveness in the context of Palestine-Israeli violence, Hutu-Tutsi slaughter, the Holocaust, and Catholic-Protestant conflict in Northern Ireland. It forces us to ask how do we forgive someone who has murdered our children, parents, brothers, and sisters?
I cannot even imagine what the experience of losing a person I loved through such terrible violence. But what I can imagine is how very, very difficult it is to forgive.
Now, wait a minute! That’s not what the pastor’s supposed to say. People who hold themselves out as so-called “religious leaders” -- like pastors -- are supposed to tell others how they need to forgive. After all, didn’t Jesus himself ask that his murderers be forgiven? Iis it easier to forgive when the injury is to oneself? Or to those we love? Or, is an injury to a person we love fundamentally an injury to oneself?
This morning’s readings contain two stories of children who have betrayed their parents. In the first, Absalom actually takes up arms against his father; he’s led a revolt. Had he beaten David, it would have been a revolution. Someone once quipped that the difference between the former and the latter was success.
But, had he won, he would have had to be prepared to kill his own father. We shudder at the thought, of course, but in the ancient world -- and in our own at times -- the thirst for power takes over the frail tie of human relationship. Absalom dies without being reconciled, and his father wails in grief, “O my son, Absalom, my son, my son Absalom! Would I have died instead of you!”
There is a better ending to the second story, of course, in that father and Prodigal are reconciled, but what of the older son? Of course, he was angry and rightfully so. He had stayed on the farm, working his not-so-little fingers to the bone; he had not gone off the Paris of the ancient world, debauching himself into ritual uncleanliness.
I wonder how long he held the anger within him and if it became a festering sore, like drinking rat poison and waiting for the rat to die, as Annie Lamott describes the inability to forgive.
It’s always been easier to forgive strangers than family. And I think that’s because we have to live with the family members as part of our own identity. If the person who has wronged us is a stranger, forgiving that person often becomes a way to further distance ourselves from the horrible kind of wrong committed.
We are not that person who kills, who maims, who destroys. But when we are dealing with family, it is different. We can’t distance ourselves in the same way. I think it’s one of the reasons why larger families, that is, families with more children practice forgiveness more easily. We can always identify with somebody else in the family, but when there are only two children, then there’s not another sibling with whom to identify.
How do we forgive? The old saying of time healing all wounds does not always apply. Some people carry anger to their graves and it can destroy them emotionally and spiritually. Think about the hardest person to forgive in your life. And what was the injury? More often than not, it’s an emotional one. The deepest scars of life are not those we can see but those that are hidden within us, internalized to the point that they become part of the fabric of our lives.
Now, I’m not going to offer some pious platitudes about how we just need to put the old hurts and the anger that results from them away although doing that does clean out our spiritual closets, an important task. In the spring, we look at the closets in our houses and think, “Gee, do I really need that, will I ever use it again?”
Let’s apply this to the people and the hurts they have caused us. Sometimes, we’ve gained a few pounds, or, as I’ve had the horror to discover, the weight stays the same, but the shape changes, and I can’t use that once favorite pair of slacks anymore. Old internalized anger is a bit like those slacks, not fitting my life now and, quite frankly, even if I lose the ten pounds, they may not still fit. I know that -- so it’s time to move on, time to donate the old stuff to the Calico Cat. But even if those old slacks did fit, I would be different. I would have shed a part of my old pudgy identity.
Learning to forgive is a bit like that. We remember the hurt in a different way. Instead of scratching the wound and keeping it open, we accept the scar and let it heal. We let it heal.
Let us pray: You, O God, who are always merciful and forgive us all our foolish ways, you who understand our deep hurts, help us to heal ourselves from the many hurts of life. Help us, O God, to forgive those who are closest to us and to reconcile ourselves with each other. In the name of him who teaches us to pardon as we were pardoned, even Christ Jesus, our Lord, Amen.