A reading now from the Gospel of St. Matthew: "Then Peter came and said to Jesus, ‘Lord, if another member of the church sins against me, how often should I forgive? As many as seven times?’ Jesus said to him, ‘Not seven times, but, I tell you, seventy-seven times.’"

A college professor reports that whenever she asks her undergraduate students in her religion class what they believe to be the most important part of the Christian message, they unfailingly respond by speaking of forgiveness. Jesus came to bring a message of forgiveness, they say. Some of the more thoughtful students remember to add that he came to teach us how to forgive one another.

Two thousand years ago in the original school of Christian discipleship, an apostle named Peter was trying to rise to the top of his class. He understood that from his teacher’s point of view, there was no way one could over do the importance of forgiveness. Time and again Jesus had emphasized its indispensability in the Kingdom of God:

"Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy," he had preached. "Love your enemies," Jesus said. "Pray even for those who persecute you." And, "When someone strikes you on the cheek, turn the other one, as well."

Peter accepted the fact that if he were to follow Jesus, forgiveness simply had to take the place of vengeance in his heart and in the heart of every other disciple. But Peter still did not like the idea very much. He wanted to know how often he ought to forgive. He wanted a number to work with. So he asked, "If a member of the church sins against me, how often should I forgive that person? Seven times?" It seemed like a gracious plenty to Peter, that seven. But Jesus answered, "Not seven times, but seventy-seven times." Forgiveness is not a quantifiable commodity, according to our Lord. It is a qualitatively different condition of being, drawn from the very being of God, whose nature is to be forgiving and full of grace. As the Psalmist wrote, "As far as the east is from the west, so far does God remove our transgressions from us."

Jesus was afraid that Peter had not quite gotten the message and so he told him a story, a parable in which God appears as a king who forgives one of his servants a very large debt. Yet, immediately after this servant has been forgiven, the servant encounters someone who owes him a debt. He grabs the other man by the throat and demands that payment be made immediately. When the man cannot pay, the unforgiving servant has the man thrown into prison. News of this reaches the king, who calls in the unforgiving servant and orders him to be handed over to be punished until his entire debt is paid, which is an impossibility since the amount that is owed is fifty million times the average daily wage.

Oh, what a harsh story. Imagine, a story like this told by Jesus and yet surely he told it out of deep and abiding love, and out of a deep desire for people to wake up to the basic reality that divine mercy and human mercy are profoundly interrelated. We acknowledge that this is exactly the case every time we pray the Lord’s Prayer: "Forgive us our trespasses even as we forgive those who trespass against us." This is the only line in the entire prayer that has a condition upon it, which suggests that there is an intrinsic relationship between our ability to forgive other people and God’s willingness to offer forgiveness to us. In short, this matter of forgiveness is of eternal importance. And yet, how hard it is.

One theologian puts it this way: "We who follow Christ are always being commanded to do things we cannot do. We are commanded to love those who are not loveable. We’re called to serve without counting the cost. But the hardest commandment is the commandment to forgive. We are bidden to do it, not because it is humanly possible, but because as we try to do what God commands us to do, the ability to do it is given to us by the God of Grace."

Perhaps you remember the autobiography written by Corrie Ten Boom, entitled The Hiding Place. In this powerful book, Corrie Ten Boom, who has been imprisoned by the Nazi regime for her hiding and protection of Jews, tells of her experience of preaching at a church service on the very subject of forgiveness after the war was over and she had been released from prison camp. As she left the pulpit and came down to the center of the sanctuary, she noticed a man coming toward her with his hand extended and a bright smile on his face. She recognized him as the chief guard in the concentration camp where she and her sister had been incarcerated and where her sister had died. The guard’s face was beaming that night after the church service. "Oh, Fraulein," he said, "how grateful I am for your powerful message. To think that Jesus washed my sins away."

Corrie Ten Boom found herself paralyzed as the guard thrust his hand out toward hers. She could not raise her hand from her side. She writes, "Even as the vengeful thoughts boiled through me, I saw the sin of them. . . . and yet I could do nothing about it. I could not feel even the slightest spark of love or charity. And so I breathed this silent prayer. ‘Jesus, I cannot forgive him, please give me your forgiveness.’" And with that prayer she was able to lift her hand from her side and touched the hand of the man who had persecuted her. "From my shoulder," she writes, "along my arm and through my hand passed a current from me to him . . . and in that moment I discovered that it is not on our forgiveness any more than on our goodness that the world’s healing depends, the world’s healing depends upon God. When our Lord tells us to love our enemies, he gives us, along with the command to do it, the love itself" [New York: Bantam Books, 1971; p. 238].

Here is what I wish to say to you today. Forgiveness is not an act of will; it is a function of divine grace. You cannot make yourself forgive anyone, but you can make the intellectual connection between your own dependence on God’s acceptance of you and all your brokenness and inadequacies, and your reaction to those who have injured you—even deeply, terribly injured you. And if today you are at a point at which you simply cannot forgive, I do know one thing you can do. You can pray that the time will come when you can forgive [Garrett Keizer, Christian Century, 31 July 2002; p. 23]. Even if you cannot pray that prayer, you can be honest before God in confessing that you cannot. I have wonderful news for you: God can take you in whatever condition you are in.

I remember Golda Maier’s poignant confession, "I can forgive the Arabs for killing my son, but I cannot forgive the Arabs for teaching my son to kill Arabs." Which is to say, some things cannot be done by simply decision. We will have to wait on many things, the big things. We must open ourselves to receive from another realm that which we find humanly impossible to accomplish on our own. And if we can finally receive the gift of being able to forgive those who have done us serious injury, a spouse who has betrayed us perhaps, a parent who abused, a careless driver who killed, we will never want to forget that forgiveness is not to forgetting. To forgive is not to deny the pain or the wrongness of an act. To forgive is not to excuse that which is unjust or cruel. To forgive means this: to make a conscious choice to be unbound by evil. When someone does an injury to us, the first injury they do is their fault but if we hold on to a feeling of vengeance and hatred in our own hearts, then that person does a second injury, and the fault for that is ours.

In church we sing, Kyrie eleison. The word eleison in Greek means literally "to unbind." God, my friends, is willing to show you how to loose the deep bonds and cords that keep you from being the whole person that you are intended to be. With God’s help, the bonds that keep us in bitterness and anger can be released and to pray, "Lighten the load of our debts, even as we relieve others of their need to keep repaying." This is to step over the threshold of the transformation that comes from God.

The other evening as I was going to sleep, I had the television on to this very station. I watched a special program about British author and theologian, C. S. Lewis. As I was about to drift off to sleep, I remembered a line from one of journals. He wrote, "Last week while at prayer, I suddenly discovered that I had finally forgiven someone that I had been trying to forgive for over thirty years. I have no explanation, my friends, for this kind of thing except to turn to the words of the Apostle Paul, written over two thousand years ago: ‘All of this is from God.’"