Forgiveness is a common word in our
faith vocabulary much like the words grace, faith, truth, love, and even the
word God. These words reflect
foundational elements in our faith yet I think we readily use them without
really knowing about what they mean.
This morning I want to look at what we mean by forgiveness because I
think what we think we mean by it isn't exactly what we find in the Bible.
So what do we mean by
forgiveness? In the last 25 or so years
something called forgiveness has made its way into the world of emotional
therapy and healthy lifestyles. Several
studies were done that demonstrated that forgiving can contribute to our being
happier and healthier whereas not forgiving and bearing a grudge can do the
opposite. So, it seems that there is
something cathartic or soul cleansing about forgiving. This is why if you look the word up in a more
recent dictionary you will find that the subject of feelings comes up. Forgiveness gets defined as a process one
goes through in order to stop feeling anger or resentment towards another or to
stop feeling like you need some sort of retribution for a wrong done to
you. You've heard people say, "Just
let it go." Definitions also
involve ceasing to require the repayment of debt.
When looking up what it means to
forgive in older dictionaries you often find the topic of pardon, to grant
pardon to one who has wronged you, to let them go without exacting
punishment. There's also the financial
side of things too. There's also the
idea of granting or allowing. If you go
way back to the Old English roots of "forgive" or
"forgiefan" it means "to give in marriage". Thus, it goes without saying that forgiveness
and marriage go hand in hand. The word
essentially means "to give completely". It is the act of giving with a huge sense of
finality to it. You can apply that to
wrongdoings, to debts, and so on. It is
to relinquish a rightful claim to something forever, to utterly give it
up.
If I were to philosophize on this a
bit I would say that forgiveness and trust go hand in hand. When a father gave his daughter's hand in
marriage it wasn't just an exchange of property as some want to see it. He was letting go of any claim he had to
rightfully be the one who provided for and protected his daughter and in turn
completely trust another man and his family with that task. When somebody wronged another, they in
essence broke trust with that person and with the clan. Therefore, to forgive was to give trust back
to the offender. Forgiveness led to
reconciliation not only with the one offended but also with the whole clan.
Summing this up, our modern idea of
forgiveness has to do with the cathartic process of letting go of anger and
resentment. The Old English roots of the
word, which goes back to just before the 1100's have to do with maintaining
trust in communities of people. There is
a bit of a narcissistic flip. Today,
forgiveness deals with me and how I feel.
Back, forgiveness dealt with us and how we trust each other. Keep this in mind and let's move on to the
Bible.
Looking at the Bible, when the word
forgiveness comes up it is usually associated with the forgiveness of sins and
therefore involves our relationship with God and with one another. This comes out in the Lord's Prayer when we
say forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors. Also in our passage from Mark when Jesus said,
"Son, your sins are forgiven" and then the Pharisees got upset
because Jesus was doing something only God can do. There is also our reading from the Psalms
this morning, Psalm 32 begins, "Blessed (or happy) is the one whose
transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered." We can see here an added dimension of our
own need to be forgiven not just to forgive.
To get our English translations of the
Bible we have to find words in our language that carry the same or similar
meaning as the words in Greek or Hebrew.
This is rarely an exact science and it quite often happens that essential
meaning gets lost or corrupted as the meanings of words change over time. A long time ago the church began to use the
Old English word "forgiefan" to translate into English a Latin not a
Greek version of the Bible. The Latin
word they were trying to translate was perdonare, which means to pardon. This had the unfortunate side effect of
getting the church to think of sins being a ledger of offences for which we are
guilty rather than as a disease in our humanity that causes a breakdown in our
relationships with God and one another and destroys our God-given dignity as
persons and rather makes us ashamed.
The Greek word Jesus uses which we
translate as forgiven does not mean a cathartic process of doing away with
anger and resentment nor does it mean pardoning a person of a ledger of
offences. The word is "aphiemi"
and it simply means "to send away".
Once a year the ancient Israelites had a particular day for dealing with
the sins of the people, Yom Kippur - the Day of Atonement. It involved sacrificing a bull and two
goats. One of the goats was called the
scapegoat. It was called this because
the priest would lay his hand upon its head and whisper the sins of the people
into its ear and then it was led away into the wilderness where it was then
sent away where it could be destroyed by whatever. When Jesus told the man his sins were
forgiven he meant sent away as in scapegoated out of existence. This is of course pointing to Jesus' death on
the cross.
That Greek word "aphiemi"
(to send away) is the word that the Jews in Jesus' day were using to translate
a particular Hebrew word, which we also translate as forgive. The Hebrew word is nasah and it means to lift
up and carry. Think scapegoat as
well. The scapegoat carries away the sin
of the people. Our sin is carried
away. I like to think NASA and the space
shuttle. The Psalmist also uses a word,
which means covered. This refers also to
the Day of Atonement. A bull and a goat
were killed and their blood, which represented their life, was taken. The blood now represented life that had
passed through death. The high priest
sprinkled it all over the temple and the priests and even the ark of the
covenant to do two things: to cover over or cleanse the stain of sin on the
people and the temple and to unite God and his people in the blood, this life
that had passed through death. This is
why the Psalmist says blessed is the one whose sin is covered over. This sprinkling of blood of course points us
to Jesus death and resurrection and our union with him in the Holy Spirit.
So, with all that in mind what was
Jesus telling this paralytic when he said! "Son, your sins are
forgiven". Was he saying that God
had gone through a process to cathart his anger at the man or that God now
trusts him again? I don't think so. Jesus said this when he saw the faith or
faithfulness or loyalty of the four men.
They had lifted up and were carrying the paralytic on his mat to bring
him to Jesus. Jesus saw that they were
nasah-ing this man and moreover removing every obstacle to bring him to Jesus
where they knew he could be healed. This
compassionate act by faithful, loyal friends of carrying or nasah-ing this
paralytic to Jesus is why Jesus says to the man that his sins are sent
away. This fellowship of friends were
showing this paralytic unconditional love and acceptance by lifting him up and
carrying him, bringing him to Jesus to be healed and removing every obstacle on
the way. Remember paralytics were viewed
in the same way as lepers and blind people back then. They were called unclean and cast out of the
community because people believed them to be cursed by God for some horrible
hidden sin that he or his parents had committed. People would even refuse to touch them for
fear of becoming unclean themselves.
Yet, here were these four men carrying this paralytic on the mat of his
disease to Jesus and willingly taking his uncleanness upon themselves because
they knew Jesus could and would heal the man.
Jesus saw their unconditional love in action and that's why he said,
"Son (meaning you're one of my people), your sins are forgiven." Whatever was keeping this man cut off from
loving community was obviously gone, sent away by these four men lifting him up
and carrying him.
So, seriously, what is forgiveness as
far as the Bible is concerned? It is not
the cathartic process of letting go of anger and resentment. It is not pardoning a person of their ledger
of offences. Forgiveness is what happens
when a small group of people unconditionally love and accept a sin-sick person,
bearing with him in all his weaknesses, bringing him to Jesus, removing all
obstacles on the way so that he may know unconditional love and acceptance in
Jesus name so that he is no longer outcast (though he may have deserved
it). Small groups of Jesus' people
unconditionally welcoming and loving others in their brokenness and helping them
to find wholeness in Jesus is what forgiveness is. If there is a cathartic process of letting go
of resentments, it is found while being nasah-ed by faithful Jesus people. If there is such a thing as having the ledger
wiped clean, it is found in the unconditional acceptance of faithful Jesus
people. Welcoming people into community
where the unconditional love of Jesus rules the day and helping them to find
peace in him is true forgiveness. So let
our way be the way of those four unnamed men.
Amen.
