Let My People Go! Exodus into Forgiveness - Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost.

A sermon preached by the Reverend Holly Huff at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark on September 17, 2023, the Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost.

Forgiveness is something God does. When Joseph asks his brothers “Am I in the place of God?” he means his brothers to answer “no,” of course. Though they are fearfully trying to make him their master, Joseph claims his place among them as a brother. In jealousy, they had tried to kill him—they threw him down a well—and then when that didn’t work out they sold him into slavery, expecting never to see him again. But what they intended for evil, God was tending for good, and years later, perhaps Joseph weeps because he’s already forgiven these would-be murdererous kin of his, yet they are still flinching, expecting him to act out of a desire for retribution and revenge. He weeps I think because he’s already forgiven them and they do not know it. They’re still cowering in fear. “Am I in the place of God?” No, he’s one of them, and they all serve God together. But of course, on another level we might answer yes—Joseph is showing us something of the character of God who even when we human beings gang up to kill him has already reached out to us not with hostility but hospitality. God desires to receive us, to see us flourish, and has been pouring out forgiveness to us long before we thought to ask. Joseph’s forgiveness of his brothers is an image of God’s mercy toward all of us. He speaks kindly to them, and reassures them, dries their tears. To forgive is divine. Not something human beings know how to do but something God does in us by grace. To forgive like this is to participate in the forgiveness of God. It’s the merciful action of one who longs to see the captives set free. 

Working as a hospital chaplain at the beginning of the pandemic was a bad scene and terrifyingly holy at times. I’ll never forget being present at the deathbed of one particular older man. I was garbed up like I was going to the moon, and holding the iPad for his kids to be with him virtually. I felt the poverty of this substitute, of course. Only a couple of this man’s several children had any sort of relationship with him, and fair enough—he’d been cruelly abusive and had served time in prison for it. The nurse’s station was awash with gossip. Reportedly he’d changed enough to become a good grandfather in the last decade of his life, at least for the family members who agreed to see him. I didn’t know what to believe, and it wasn’t my business anyway. He was in and out of consciousness but seemed to recognize the voices from the iPad. He was laboring to breathe, no longer aided by a ventilator. He was really suffering. They were talking to him, watching his struggle on their screens, and finally his son said: “Dad, it’s okay. We forgive you. You can go.” And this man took a shuddering breath in and breathed out and immediately died. Shocking. Perhaps the most merciful act I’ve ever been privileged to witness.

I’m always afraid forgiveness is a dodge, that it will somehow excuse the inexcusable. But what this man’s son said and did was not a dodge and not an excuse. His words didn’t change any of the horror that had happened in their family, he wasn’t justifying it or saying the abuse was okay, and yet in that moment his pronouncement had power to unbind the living dead. It wasn’t a cowering or handwaving forgiveness but a firm insistence that they had all suffered enough: No more of this! Let the prisoners go! Mercy like that I think is born from the understanding that there is no way to hold someone else in the prison of unforgiveness without locking ourselves there, too. In that moment FaceTiming into a hospital room that man, like Joseph, was in the place of God, participating in a mercy wide enough to wipe out all our painful accounting. A mercy committed to our flourishing in love and freedom. 

Forgiveness is something God does in us. It arrives, perhaps surprises us, when it’s already done: a lump sum, a debt cancelled, the loan sharks called off, the end of Pharaoh’s rule over the heart at least in this matter. Lord Jesus Christ, son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner. Lord Jesus Christ, son of God, forgive me. a sinner. Just as God already has mercy on you—to pray the Jesus prayer is to step into unshakeable assurance that mercy is simply flowing and overflowing, new every morning—just as God already has mercy on you, God has already forgiven you. It’s in the word itself. Fore-giveness. Given, as a gift. And given beforehand. Already given, given before, fore-given. This fore-givenness arrives as the gracious action of God for us and for others. Knowing ourselves as forgiven sinners—and knowing ourselves “caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny” in Dr. King’s words—there comes a point where holding a grudge doesn’t make any sense. The knotted logic of unforgiveness starts to unravel when we see ourselves in each other. When we know deeply the truth of our interrelatedness, our inescapable connection to each of our neighbors—human and non-human alike—as part of our own very being—forgiveness becomes the only way forward. 

Sin is collective and so is forgiveness. Forgiveness is a group project. Sin is collective—in the obvious ways, the structural forces of systemic racism and a carceral state, the degradation of the good earth, and consumerism so out of control it threatens to consume us all. No way to opt out of these forces of evil as an individual, we suffer together and we struggle together and we desperately need forgiveness and mercy. So too in our supposedly more private interactions—in intimate relationships we are caught in inescapable mutuality, we are tied together, complicit in each other’s failings actually, and eventually it’s absurd to hold onto a grudge because we see ourselves implicated in the other. Who is holding a grudge over who? Unforgiveness requires an illusion of separateness, an illusion that doesn’t stand up to the slightest inquiry. The wind of the Spirit knocks that one over pretty quick. 

Jesus’s parable of the unforgiving servant is a work of hyperbole, a parable of extremes where Jesus stretches every detail to make his point. The first slave’s debt comes in at 10,000 talents, in a time when a common worker might earn a single talent over the course of 20 years’ hard labor. One talent. 10,000 talents is an impossible sum, an impossible debt, he owes a billion billion dollars, with no way to ever pay it back on his own. It’s not a matter of working harder trying more effortfully: he is stuck, imprisoned, and released only by the gift of another. Meanwhile his fellow slave owes him a few denarii, equivalent to a few months of labor. The freshly forgiven slave released from debtor’s prison goes immediately to condemn his brother for a debt that is miniscule by comparison. When the king hears, he casts the first slave back into prison where he is tortured, presumably forever since his debt is so impossible. Remember, this is hyperbole: God is not out to torture us. Quite the opposite: Jesus is using extremes to illustrate the extravagance of God’s generosity toward us—and to highlight the urgency of accepting and receiving and embracing what is being given. The unforgiving servant has been relieved of an impossible debt. The year of Jubilee—a proclamation of freedom, making the exodus, he’s in the clear! and rather than rejoice or praise in gratitude or turn outward to pass on this incredible gift and generosity—he seizes his fellow slave by the throat. His unforgiveness is a refusal to pass on the mercy that has been given to him, and unforgiveness is itself captivity, a captivity God wants to free us from. 

This freeing happens slowly and by grace. Forgiveness is a group project, and it’s God’s work in us. Forgiveness is what Jesus does in those who follow him. Not once, not seven times, but seventy-seven times. The church is a community of forgiveness where we come to recognize that we belong to each other as servants of the same master, as members of one Body. We have all received mercy from God, and we are practicing extending it to each other. Accountability is part of this: a community of forgiveness has to witness to hurt among its members and redress it, acknowledge and face the wound along our winding exodus into freedom. 

We have all received mercy—and having received mercy, let us be mercy. Rather then clenching the fist around the neck of another, a fellow child of God who can’t breathe, we can let God’s forgiveness for us flow through us to be poured out for others as well. We can join Joseph and the man FaceTiming his father and Jesus the forgiving victim in insisting on open hands and merciful proclamation of reversal: let the prisoners go! 

Amen.