Endless forgiveness?

Imagine someone asks you this: “My spouse belittles me, hits me, and forces me to do what I don’t want to do. How many times should I forgive them? As many as seven times?”

I wonder how you would answer that question.

Over the centuries, the answer from many in the church has been, “Keep on forgiving. Keep on going back.” The reason is because Jesus himself seemed to preach unending forgiveness. "If someone sins against many, how many times should I forgive them?" asks the disciple Peter. "Seven times?" "Not seven times," Jesus replies. "Seven times seventy times".

But I think most of us, instinctively, know that it is wrong to advise the abused person to keep going back into the arms of the abuser. Despite Jesus’s words about endless forgiveness in Matthew 18:21-22. This seems to be just a way of letting the abuser off the hook.

Like anything, to make sense of Jesus’s words, they must be read in the context of the rest of scripture. It pays to notice, for example, the words that come immediately before the famous “seven times seventy” call to forgiveness. From v 15, we get instructions on how to deal with people in your community who hurt others. It is a call not to put up with bad behaviour infinitum, but in fact to call it to account. There is a multi-step process, and in the end, if the offender continues to offend, they will be asked to leave.

There are powerful stories of forgiveness. Like Baptist pastor Ian Patterson, who forgives his daughter-in-law for trying to murder him with poisonous mushrooms. “Now I am no longer Erin Patterson’s victim,” he says, in court. “Now she has become the victim of my kindness”. In forgiving Erin, Ian releases any residual poison left within him. The poison that eats away, putrefies, and makes it impossible to move forward. He lets go of it, syphons it away. Gives himself the chance to heal.

Erin, however, remains in gaol. Forgiveness, it turns out, does not deny accountability.

Last Sunday, we read Jesus's words about forgiveness alongside another story: the story of the enslaved Israelites finally being released from Pharaoh’s grip, in the story of the crossing of the Red Sea. It is a story about the liberative power of God. Can Jesus’s words of forgiveness be Good News to the ones who are wronged? Yes. But first, we need to ask: “Does this forgiveness liberate?” And also, “What else might need to happen, so that we might, together, cross over into freedom?”

Words by Rev Andreana

Image by Nader Ayman, Unsplash