September 11, 2011
(Thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost;
Proper 19A)
(From The Lectionary Page)
Pretending Not to Know
by The Rev. Canon Susan Sommer
So, fascinating thing about the end of a hot dry summer in Kansas City: crab grass is growing in profusion. Okay, maybe not in lawns that received regular tending and faithful watering. But definitely in, oh say, those hard compacted portions of our yard adjacent to our driveway. The portions that not only get blasted by the sun, but by the reflected heat of the concrete. Right on schedule, taunting me with its radius of vigorous, green tentacles. Didn’t I yank it up last year and the year before? How often do I need to keep on doing this? As many as seven times? Seventy-seven times?
The emergence of broadleaf weeds in a stressed lawn at the end of the summer is something I routinely pretend not to know about. I am skilled in averting my gaze from things that are inconvenient. Maybe some of you can relate. Certainly when it comes to inconvenient Scripture, the gospel passages appointed for last week and this week top the list. You’ll recall that last week, Jesus instructs his disciples on how to reconcile with fellow members of the church who have sinned against them. The disciples are to speak directly to that person in private, and if they are not listened to, to take along 2 or 3 others to serve as witnesses. If he or she still doesn’t listen, they are to bring it to the attention of the church and if that doesn’t work, they are to “let such a one be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector.”
In other words, give it your best shot 3 times and when that doesn’t work, throw the bums out, right? Well, no, actually. If we think about those to whom Jesus primarily ministers in the gospel of Matthew, it’s Gentiles and tax collectors. It is to unregenerate sinners that the bulk of God’s grace and mercy in the ministry of Jesus is directed. So what Jesus may actually be counseling his disciples to do when faced with intractable sin, is not to draw a line in the sand, not to throw the bums out, but together to go back to the drawing board. When we’re talking about a faithful response to sin, it has never been about excommunication; it has always been about reconciliation.
And when we view the whole of the gospel through the lens of reconciliation, today’s passage makes more sense and, paradoxically, becomes that much more scandalous. Jesus has once again placed the primacy of reconciliation squarely on the table. He didn’t invent the concept, by the way. The Torah called for forgiveness as well, though by the time of Jesus the accepted practice was – interestingly enough – to forgive 3 times but not 4. Peter probably figured that to forgive 7 times would be the height of generosity, but Jesus blows those limits wide open with an absurdly large number, variously translated as either seventy-seven or 70x7. And then he tells the parable of the slave who was forgiven a debt amounting to a ridiculous sum of money but who then, in turn, failed to extend forgiveness for the comparatively tiny debt of a fellow slave. The parable, suffice to say, does not end well for the forgiven, yet unforgiving slave.
And I daresay that these two passages may be about as welcome to our ears this particular morning as the sight of crabgrass sprouting along the edge of our driveway is to my eyes. Fundamentally, these 25 verses together open up for us the uncompromising invitation to live fully in God’s gracious economy, an economy in which forgiveness is limitless. The whole of the Good News is, as one writer put it, about stepping away from our desire to balance the scales of justice (by which often we often really mean payback) and instead embracing God’s system of grace[1]. It is about making relationships, reconciliation and community our first priority. It means radically rethinking our bone-deep human desire to withhold forgiveness until the guilty have earned it.
Let me be absolutely clear. To forgive is not to condone the wrong that was done. To forgive is not to invite more offense to come our way. To forgive is not to appease or enable the perpetration of evil. To forgive is to set down the burden we have been carrying. It is to be released from the bondage in which we were living. It is to say, “It ends here and it ends now.” It is to live a different way.
Jesus is steadfastly making his way to Jerusalem. And Matthew reminds us every step of the way that the kingdom Jesus ushers in is centered in God’s radical forgiveness and reconciliation. It’s about the Jubilee. Oh yes, that’s the reference to 70 – the commandment we find in Leviticus 25 that every 70 years, debts were to be forgiven, land restored to original owners, slaves set free. The whole of creation was commanded by God to be regularly set free from bondage – a sort of Sabbath rest from all that oppresses. We pretend not to know the truth of this. We spiritualize forgiveness and reconciliation and in so doing require nothing of ourselves.[2] We allow the offense to define our response and our response too often is to dismiss or to dehumanize. And when we do this – and it is a trait common to all humanity – we find that we are in bondage, in a hell of our own making, where offense must always be met with counter-offensive.
Jesus shows us a different way. Shows us with his life and shows us with his death.
Each summer, I pretend not to know about crab grass. It is a scandal I prefer to ignore, but cannot. It symbolizes forgiveness – life emerging from scorched earth, stubbornly, counterintuitively, hardwired to spread in all directions. Like all good symbols, it is ambivalent and unsettling. As ambivalent and unsettling as the gospel passage the lectionary gives us today of all days. Invites us to deal with it. Invites us to stoop down and gather it up. And while we’re in that posture of humility, perhaps to do what we can to soften up the ground and plant some seeds.
Amen.
