Forgiveness can be a long drawn out process ..... there's no quick fix

Matthew has kept the focus on St Peter for the last few weeks and Peter is rightly the proper subject for such focus.

He is the disciple who is a model of faithfulness. Clearly Peter is the leader of the twelve, the first to follow Jesus when called and never afraid to ask questions on behalf of the other disciples.

Peter promises to stick with Jesus no matter what, prepared even to accept death if that is the price of discipleship.

But Peter lets Jesus down as he lets himself down.

He denies Jesus after the arrest when challenged by a serving girl and then, reminded by the cock crowing, he leaves heartbroken and is nowhere to be found during the Crucifixion leaving Jesus to be supported by Simon of Cyrene, a stranger from out of town.

But in these failures Peter is just like we are.

And so in the gospel there is an irony that it is Peter who suggests that a seven fold forgiveness is sufficient.

Peter’s ignorance of the forgiveness he will need in the trying days ahead also reminds us as we read the parable that forgiveness cannot be counted like a formula:

Seven times? Asks Jesus.

Forgiveness does not belong in a countable category, it is not for an auditor to calculate or as happened to me the other day, locked out of my banking app because my face recognition failed to work correctly.

No, forgiveness in Jesus’ response to Peter, including in the parable he tells, takes forgiveness out of the countable and sets it far more challengingly in the realm of the incalculable.

As this was hard for Peter so it is hard for us. Grievances can be held onto and multiplied where there is no forgiveness.

It is important for us to ask of ourselves do we recognise the ways in which we can harm other people, by what we say? By our actions? By our taking exception to advice or directions?

And it is interesting how we are often unaware of our own sinfulness whilst being only too aware of how others sin against us.

Individuals can be isolated when people hold grievances over sometimes trivial matters.

Families can be torn apart.

Communities can be left at war one with another.

Sides can be taken when there are no sides. 

What the parable tells us that the forgiveness to which Jesus points is beyond anyone persons capacity to keep account of, beyond anyone’s capacity to offer in their own strength or ability. 

It is God’s compassion and abundant mercy that make forgiveness possible, whether transgressions are large or small.

The servant in the parable having been the object of his master’s forgiveness refuses to forgive a much smaller debt. The servant having been forgiven his debt is punished for his lack of forgiveness.

Here the parable speaks a truth that is familiar to many who have experienced injury or trauma at the hands of another, one’s ability to forgive does not always come easily, nor is it necessarily a quick or simple process. 

At times it is necessary to forgive from a distance. Some wounds are so deep, some “debts” so large, that human forgiveness is next to impossible.

But for us as followers of Jesus it must be tried, I know myself how difficult it can be, as Dylan Thomas’ poem about his father’s death is suffused with rage at the ‘dying of the light’.

It may need intervention or even counselling to work through, but Peter’s answer is inadequate not seven times but four hundred and ninety times and as Jesus answer makes clear, for each one of us forgiveness will not be a week long project but a long and difficult process. 

Even (and especially) when our own efforts fall short, God’s mercy is beyond imagining. This is a truth proclaimed by the parable as well as by the testimony of Jesus’ own life and ministry. 

So the sooner we start ………..