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I don’t know about you folks, but this parable, The Parable of the Unmerciful Servant, really troubles me. The lesson is brutally obvious. We, the disciples of Jesus, are to forgive as God has forgiven us. That seems only proper, right, and obvious, right? The underlying logic is that as God is forgiving and therefore, as we are the Body of Christ indwelt by the Holy Spirit, we too are to be forgiving. That doesn’t trouble me. It’s always better to forgive than to bear a grudge…and we’ll talk about that.
What troubles me here is how at the end of the parable the King in a fit of “wrath” turns the unmerciful servant over to be tortured until every last penny of his debt is paid. And you have to realize the futility in that…how do you pay off a debt when you’re in prison being tortured and can’t earn a wage. It’s impossible. In the real world, it would been his wife and children who paid the debt. Such is unforgiveness.
And then (Brace yourselves.) Jesus says, “So my heavenly Father will also do to each one of you, if you do not forgive your brother or sister from the heart.” Wrath? Prison? Torture? These are not necessarily words I associate with God the Father Son and Holy. If God is in God’s very self a communion of unconditional, self-giving, even sacrificial love, then wrath, prison, and torture don’t seem to fit.
But, Jesus is indeed saying that God will get us, his children, if we choose not to forgive. That there troubles me. For one, it says there is a wrathful side of God. I like a God who is full of patience and healing mercy and love and all that, not a wrathful God. This wrathful image of God plays too easily into the hands of evil people who use it to perpetuate fear and provoke acts of hatred against those who are different from themselves. We have to be careful when we tread the precarious ground of God’s wrathful side.
Another thing, Jesus says that God the Father will be wrathful towards us, the disciples of Jesus – his beloved children in Christ whom he has laced with his very self by the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. If we don’t take the path of forgiving one another from the heart, God will hand us over to be tormented. Moreover, this forgiving that Jesus speaks of isn’t just the lip service, legal transaction kind of forgiving we cop out with where the offender says “Sorry” and the offended says “Forgiven” and we either go on pretending nothing happened or never speak to each other again while claiming all is forgiven. The forgiveness Jesus is after is a deeper kind of forgiving, forgiving from the heart – you know, the place where our motives and drives come from. I’ll get to that momentarily.
We’ve also got to wonder what Jesus means by torment. If the penalty for that servant being unforgiving was prison and torment, what’s that mean for us when we’re unforgiving? What does Jesus mean by torment? Well, let me lighten the moment and go Greek for a minute. The Greek word for torment originates in the world of commerce as the word for a coin tester, the person who bites coins to test their authenticity. The coin-biter torments the coin and the coin owner if it’s fake. The concept’s scope of meaning grows to include testing the character of a person by torment. Ultimately, it can be the obvious evil of torment for the sake of torment. In this parable it is clearly the latter – torment for the sake of torment – but, I wonder if Jesus might be wanting us to think more along the lines that when we are unforgiving, we can expect that God will let the unfolding of the consequences of our unforgiveness, which may seem like torture, be for us a test of our character to show our authenticity. Does Jesus let us suffer the consequences of being unforgiving until we have had enough and decide to mature and begin working to forgive? Chew on that.
This concept of torment occurs in Matthew’s Gospel more than anywhere else in the Bible. It means afflicted with disease (4:24) and suffering to the point of psychosomatic paralysis (8:26). Jesus healed people suffering from these torments. The demons who possessed the two “Gerasene demoniacs”, when they recognized Jesus as the Son of God shouted out, “What have you to do with us, Son of God. Have you come to torment us before the time?” (8:29). Jesus delivered the men by casting the demons out into a huge herd of pigs who then did a mass drowning. Then immediately after that, Jesus fed the 5,000+ and sent the twelve disciples out on the Sea of Galilee in a boat by themselves where a perilous windstorm erupted. The boat was tormented (or battered) by the waves. Jesus came to them by walking on the water and after Peter’s failed attempt at walking on water, Jesus got into the boat and calmed the storm.
In all these cases Jesus ended the torment and healed its effects on people. Except for the demons, he turned the torment back on them and ruined the pork industry in the area that year. But in this parable of the Unmerciful Servant – and take a minute to scratch your head – Jesus goes the opposite direction. According to this parable, if we take the route of unforgiveness, we choose to revert back to the torment of a “prior-to-meeting-Jesus” state of being and Jesus will let us wallow in it…i.e., we lose our sense of his presence with us and we wallow around in prison muck trying to find something to replace it.
When Jesus comes into our lives, he sets us free from our inclination towards unforgiveness and by the power and presence of the Holy Spirit gives us a new heart that desires to forgive; a heart that desires to be at peace with God, with ourselves, with those who have hurt us and also with those whom we have hurt. If this parable does one thing, it points us to the fact that reconciliation, which means working the process of forgiveness, is our primary relationship task as Jesus’ disciples. Being faithful people means being forgiving people, people who work at reconciliation. In this world of sin-broken relationships, the restored image of God in us who are the disciples of Jesus looks like people working towards forgiveness. When we choose to be unforgiving it is, frankly, a deeply personal renunciation of Jesus himself, his presence in our lives, and his healing work in us. We can’t expect things to go well when we do that.
In the last few decades there have been a number of studies done on the effects of unforgiveness on our health and relationships that add some depth to our discussion. An article by the Mayo Clinic entitledForgiveness: Letting Go of Grudges and Bitterness lists the relational effects of harbouring unforgiveness which is what is known as bearing a grudge. It can cause us to: 1) bring anger and bitterness into every relationship and new experience; 2) become so wrapped up in that past wrong that we can't enjoy the present; 3) become depressed or anxious; 4) feel that our life lacks meaning or purpose, even make us feel at odds with our spiritual beliefs; 5) cause us to lose or not form valuable and enriching connectedness with others. To sum that up, it basically says that if we choose to be unforgiving in one relationship in our lives it will affect every relationship we have from here on out.
Looking more at the realm of physical health, unforgiveness increases the levels of stress hormones in our bodies. This in turn leads to increased blood pressure, higher cholesterol levels, weaker immune systems, and anxiety and depression. All of which put us at a greater risk of stroke, heart disease, cancer, and chronic pain. Unforgiveness has a huge health cost. Speaking frankly again, there’s been a lot of work lately on the destructive effect that emotional trauma has on us and our bodies. Unforgiveness does the same.
My summation of all this is that being unforgiving leads us into a life of lonely, bitter isolation and sickness and the costs are deadly. As I see it, the path of unforgiveness follows the same destructive course that addictions do on our health and relationships. Harbouring unforgiveness will quench any sort of connectedness we have with others, leave us isolated and bitter, and make us sick. Moreover, my unforgiveness doesn’t affect just me. In a marriage or a close friendship you have two people who love each other. Something happens and now one or both of them hates the other. Instead, of working to reconcile things happen to further the hurt; retaliation and so forth. Now they both are suffering a world of hurt and not only them each but everybody they are close to suffers with and for and because of them. And the emotional effects of that unforgiveness gets carried forward into every new relationship they both have.
Unforgiveness is a choice, so also is forgiveness. It is remarkable that Jesus uses the imagery of debt to define unforgiveness. Unforgiveness is pridefully holding on to a feeling that we are owed something by someone who has or whom we believe has wronged us. In the end, unforgiveness will cause us to become the hate-filled person that we believe the person who wronged us is. There’s a saying: “Be careful whom you hate because you will become just like them.”
Forgiveness, on the other hand, is letting go of this pride-filled demand for retribution and the need for the restitution of honour. An eye for an eye only works as a deterrent. It does not bring healing the way that forgiveness does. Forgiveness is striving to be in a reconciled relationship with those who have wronged us, making the effort to understand each other, working to restore trust, and even more so, wanting one another to know the peace and love we have in Jesus in the presence of the Holy Spirit.
Forgiveness is a process, a spiritual practice that we must work at. This will be the first and probably only time I will agree with Joyce Meyer, who is a populist Christian writer and speaker. She gives some helpful practical advice on how to forgive in an article entitled The Poison of Unforgiveness. First, decide to forgive. Decide to make amends. We won’t do it if we wait until we feel like it. Decide to forgive, desire to forgive, and start working on it and God will in time heal our emotions. Second, we are powerless over unforgiveness so we must depend on the power of the Holy Spirit to help us forgive. Third, do what the Bible tells us to do: pray for our enemies and do good to them and bless them rather than curse them.
I add to her advice that we should also follow Jesus’ direction in Matthew 18:15-18. As a matter of first course go to the person and address the situation. If that doesn’t work, take two others. If that doesn’t work, announce it to the church. If that doesn’t work, then you’re done with them. Let God deal with them, but still keep praying and hoping.
To be faithful disciples of Jesus is to forgive. There’s no way around it. There's a cost if we don't forgive. Amen.