Lent 2 February 28th, 2010 Should we always forgive?

Lent 2
February 28th, 2010
Should we always forgive?

Today is the second installment of our Lenten preaching series on forgiveness.
Last week, we looked at Jesus’ call for us to forgive others, epitomized in the words of Lord’s Prayer: “forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us.”
Today we’ll wrestle with a question inspired by the gospel—Jesus lamenting over Jerusalem, so sacred, so precious, so corrupt.
The question is: “Did Jesus really mean it? Is it true that we should always forgive? What about someone who has done grievous harm to me or to someone I love? To perpetrators of domestic violence? What about someone who rapes a child? What about horrific social violence—Nazis in Germany? Serb and Croat partisans in Bosnia, the terrorists of 9/11—should they be forgiven? Or would forgiveness in any of these cases condone the sin and brush aside the suffering of the victims?”

In her book Forgiveness: Following Jesus into Radical Loving, Paula Huston tells the story of Simon Wiesenthal. He was a Jewish concentration camp survivor who spent his life hunting down Nazi war criminals and bringing them to justice.
One night, as he was working as an orderly in a Red Cross hospital, a nurse came to him and asked him to follow her.
She led him to the bed of an SS soldier who was dying. He wanted to confess a terrible sin: under orders he had gathered scores of Jewish men, women, and children into a house and then set the house on fire.
But the dying soldier didn’t just want to admit what he had done. He wanted someone to forgive him. He begged Wiesenthal to forgive him.
He did not. He turned away. But for the rest of his life, his refusal to forgive that SS soldier haunted him.
It so haunted him that late in his life he asked a group of philosophers and religious people whether they thought he ought to have forgiven him.
The overwhelming majority argued that Wiesenthal was right not to forgive. Huston says, “Their primary reason for rejecting forgiveness as an option is a particularly powerful one, and has to do with fear of perpetuating evil. In order to prevent us from ever again going through a moral catastrophe on the scale of the Holocaust, they say, the blood of the innocent must continue to cry out forever. We must never forget—and forgiving assures that we will” (p.8, my emphasis).
A handful of people disagreed with the majority opinion. While they absolutely agreed with the majority that we must act to prevent anything like the Holocaust happening again, they argued that to answer violence with violence, cruelty with cruelty, unforgiveness with unforgiveness only serves to perpetuate and prepare the ground for more violence. We only have to look at the conflicts between Jews and Palestinians, Shia and Sunni, Christians and Muslims, representing centuries of slaughter where forgiveness is regarded as weakness and revenge is lifted up as strength.
This minority argued that though evil it can only truly be overcome when it is answered with good rather than more evil.

There are no easy answers here. But I want to raise some points that might help us think through the question of whether Christ ever lets us off the hook for forgiveness:
1. Forgiveness is not a warm and fuzzy “it’s ok. It really doesn’t matter” kind of thing. Forgiveness does not mean whitewashing the sin. We need to tell the truth about evil, the way Jesus told the truth about Jerusalem.
2. Forgiveness—and this is important!—forgiveness does not mean that we forget. Forgiveness does not mean that we—personally, nationally, internationally—that we need to make ourselves stupid and allow the evil to happen again.
3. Forgiving someone doesn’t mean they have to be your new best friend. In fact, you can forgive someone and at the same time make it clear that for your protection you do not want to be friends with or even in the presence of that person. This is true, for example, in the case of domestic violence.
And finally, 4, even when we forgive someone who has done grievous harm, that person can, if appropriate, be bound over to the legal system for prosecution and punishment. Forgiveness and justice can go hand in hand.

Forgiveness is a mystery. In some cases it seems unimaginable.
But sometimes reality succeeds in racing ahead of what we can imagine. I want to end with a story of heroic forgiveness. It’s a true story, one that you know:
In 2006 we were all shocked by the murder in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, of five little Amish girls by a non-Amish neighbor, Charles Roberts.
As a mother, I cannot imagine how I would react if my child was murdered. I strongly suspect that forgiving the murderer would not be first on my mind.
But you probably remember how the Amish mothers and fathers, the families and friends of the murdered girls immediately reached out to the killer’s family. They mourned with them over his suicide at the same time they were grieving their own children. They told Charles Roberts’ family that they forgave him.
People around the country were shocked and some were angry. How could these people possibly forgive a man who had brutally murdered their children? Didn’t they have normal human feelings? But in turn the Amish men and women seemed amazed that anyone would question their reactions.
According to Paula Huston, “[In response, they] tried to explain that forgiveness is simply a manifestation (sometimes, as in this particular case, a dramatic one) of a life lived according to Christ’s double commandment of love: ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength . . . [and] you shall love your neighbor as yourself.’”
Huston goes on, “The fact that the Amish could forgive when they were so grievously injured does not imply that forgiving is any easier for them than it is for us—only that they are fully convinced that Jesus’ teachings on forgiveness lie at the heart of what it means to be a Christian.” (22-23).

Do you agree with them? Do I? What about Jesus’ prayer: “Forgive us our sins, as we forgive those who sin against us”? Do we mean it? Should we mean it? Sometimes? Always? …………………………………………………………………………..Amen