Forgiving the Outrageous: Matthew 18: 21-35
Ordinary Sunday 24: 5th September, 1999
Rev'd Dr Colin Holden, St Peter's Eastern Hill
While there is little argument that forgiveness is the central theme of the parable in this portion of the gospel, we may still ask, how are we intended to read this situation? Are we just to read it in the light of the seemingly interpretative comment by Jesus at the end (And that is how my heavenly Father will deal with you . . .), as though these words and the parable belong together, and the king settling accounts is a metaphor for God? We can read it, and normally understand it, in the context of a framework of mutual responsibility: the failure to treat others as we have been treated, particularly when it comes to fairness or seeming generosity, is not part of way of the kingdom of God . The figure in the parable normally designated as the unjust steward is generally seen as someone who failed to exercise generosity/forgiveness towards others in a small matter, when the same forgiveness and generosity had already been shown to him on a grand scale. Doors were open for him in a big way, which he refused to open for others in a much smaller way: hence the doors shut on him, seemingly forever. And seemingly rightly so. Mercy shown and not responded to becomes mercy withdrawn.
But the withdrawal of forgiveness should make us somewhat uneasy about the kind of interpretation of the parable I have outlined. Why? We might begin simply by asking about the quality of the forgiveness that is attributed to God in the context of the whole proclamation of the Gospel. Mainstream theologians of various kinds, conservative, broad and radical unite to say that one of the basic understandings enshrined in the Gospel is that Gods love and forgiveness is not conditional. Is the parable a contradiction of this? Or, more likely, may we be reading the parable in a wrong way when our interpretation becomes consistent with a conditional forgiveness? I think this latter to be likely.
When I have examined this parable on other occasions, I have suggested that there is indeed an outrageous element in the behaviour of the socalled unjust steward; but that the core of the story is not in his behaviour, but that of his master. On the surface, the kings withdrawal of forgiveness is logical enough. But what is really going on? The stewards debt amounts to a sum more than he will ever be able to earn in a lifetime (the debt, expressed in talents in the Greek, is the equivalent of millions in our own terms). This gives a rather unpleasant meaning to the masters instruction that the servant be handed over to the gaolers (literally: torturers) until he pay the last small unit of currency of the debt. The unjust steward is being given a life sentence with no way out; the story does not have built into it some emergency release mechanism for the steward at this point. It is really a story about outrageous behaviour (theservant) being responded to with more outrageous behaviour (the kings) masked as outraged behaviour. And if this is the way we are to read the story, there is no equivalent to God in it: it is a story designed to illustrate the worst case scenario that can occur when forgiveness of a remarkable kind, the forgiveness of the outrageous, doesnt, or cannot, operate.
What does this have to say for us today about forgiveness? Sometimes we hear around us an impatience when forgiveness is raisewd as a possibility in the face of outrageous behaviour of one kind or another; what, the challengers reply, of justice to victims of various kinds, a response often made with some degree of anger. Certainly, talk of forgiveness can be glib and facile just as talk of rights and responsibilities can also be facile. But this doesnt mean that any of these concepts or expectations should be ignored or minimised.
When it comes to glibness in any discussion of forgiveness , I would have some large degree of sympathy if an East Timorese person were to say to any of us in Australia: dont talk to us of forgiveness or how to respond in our current situation, since you have no inside understanding of the kind of situation we face. Truly, there is nothing in the history of our own nation that parallels the degree of outrageousness involved in recent events. Yet perhaps we can enter into some dialogue with others about forgiveness, even if it might at first have to avoid glibness and come closest to the truth if it were one in which we were to admit the difficulties we ourselves have in applying the same critical standards to aspects of our own life, when we been prepared to apply similar standards to others. After all, Australians, through their political leaders or through others, have considered it appropriate to point out failings in the ways of other communities that are serious and need amendment (I think of our criticism of the apartheid regime in South Africa) but we have been slower to accept the possibility that within our own nation. The need for acknowledgement of wrong done, and a purpose of amendment in European-Aboriginal relations, is an obvious case in point. And I wonder at the moment whether it isnt time to say sorry to those Australian servicemen who returned from Timor to live disturbed and broken lives in the wake of obeying the decisions of their political and military leaders, later to witness subsequent governments undermine the freedoms for which they were told that they were fighting. I wonder whether an honest statement of the failing of past governments to uphold the rights of East Timorese people might greatly increase the effectiveness of our involvement in the current crisis in Timor. .
And where does talk of forgiveness fit in with a frequently voiced demand in our own and other Western societies for perpetrators, particularly of crimes of violence, to accept punishment as an issue of responsibility and accountability? Is talk of forgiveness just a glib evasion of the need for people to face responsibility for actions, to change their course of life, and to make amends? I would say no. That action entails accountability and responsibility is certainly reasonable; but we need to be cautious lest the demand for bearing of responsibiity should move imperceptibly from a theory of accountability, to becoming an exercise of self-righteous judgement, fuelling a neverending fire that is satisfied by responses that in the end become outragous because they envisage no alternate way out, just like master in parable, and reject the possibility of genuine change in perpetrator, the possibility of what in Christian terms would be described as repentance and conversion. How much does the support in certain quarters for the return of capital punishment mask an enjoyment in punishment that can be hidden behind talk of responsibility?
Forgiveness, particularly of the outrageous, is a capacity that is not to be taken for granted. On the surface, it may seem illogical; and it is a capacity that is not easy to exercise. Is it a great human attribute that has to be carefully cultivated in order to be able to work to full advantage? Or an extraordinary, mysterious quality, whose presence opens up new undreamt of possibilities the kind on which Christians have traditionally bestowed the term grace? And in our day, we have to ask, is it still a possibility, in face of traumas and abuses experienced not by individuals like the unjust servant, but by broad categories whole classes, races, those of particular political and religious affiliation? Or is it just an outmoded value of limited relevance?
Many situations in our century actually remind is of its continuing importance, and that it is something which encounters us and does not cease to surprise us as it opens up new, and sometimes the only worthwhile possibilities, in face of awful alternatives and after one would expect that people had reached a point of sheer exhaustion and numbness beyond which forgiveness would hardly be a question. In Christian terms, grace still operates. The forgiveness of the outrageous keeps on manifesting itself as empirical fact, as attitude and act in lives of many people; not a theory, but something visible in action. What of World War II and the holocaust. what applies here? While trials over events fifty years past sometimes demonstrate the fallibility of human memory, this still has to be balanced alongside the indelible scars that remain for victims, survivors and families. But forgiveness remains a possibility: accompanied by the imperative that the perpetrators of abuse should acknowledge their actions and their culpability. One specific instance is the encounter between Corrie ten Boom and the guard from the Ravensbruck concentration camp in which she herself had been prisoner, and where her sister had been brutalised and killed. Corrie ten Boom deliberately chose to express forgiveness, and acknowledged the possibility that she could have chosen other attitudes and responses. Much closer to the present, there is the comment of Isabel Allende: the families of victims of Suth Americas political terrors do not primarily seek revenge, but truth; they want to know what has happened, to know where the bodies of their loved ones are. And there is a similar kind of response from a number of those who suffered or whose families suffered at the hands of the South African apartheid regime.
These responses, coming from situations of a kind that we can hardly envisage,(and perhaps with our responses already complicated by the numbing effect of many images of international violence and abuse brought to us through the media),offer remarkable encouragement to me because they demonstrate the survival of the potential for forgiveness in situations in which forgiveness to all intents and purposes might well have perished long ago.
To conclude, if my understanding of the parable is correct, and its core is not the outrageous behaviour of the steward but the failure of his master to continue in the path of forgiveness in which he began, then it is particularly relevant to many of the more disturbing events of this century, including those over which we feel so helpless and frustrated as they unfold so close to our northern shores. What I find alarming is not the forgiveness of the outrageous, which can seem like weakness, but which demands very great resilience and inner resource. What disturbs me is that I fear that if we cannot cultivate the way suggested by Jesus as He introduces this parable, the alternatives lead, in their more extreme forms, to the kind of attitudes and behaviour that we currently deploreas outrageous ones in other parts of our world today.
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