The Economy of Forgiveness
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Introduction
South Africa is a strange place, to foreigners.
Imagine an Archbishop, dressed in purple and proudly wearing a large cross, heading up a publicly appointed commission, anywhere else in the world.
You see, it is highly unusual in other countries for words like "forgiveness" and "repentance" to grace public life. But these words, more at home in the church than in the parliament in most of the rest of the world, have a profound meaning for the experiment called "the New South Africa". For they signal its very possibility.
That possibility is always under threat. For we live in a world of grudges, of long memories and short tempers. We live in an economy where power and prestige are scarce resources, where holding on to what little we have-or however much we have-leads us to build walls and armies, rather than homes and schools.
This world is a far cry from the world for which God created us.
Jesus came to announce a new world-a world where our values are turned upside down and right-side up. This is a world where the blind see, where prisoners are set free, where poor are the recipients of good news.
In the first part of the 18th chapter of St Matthew, Jesus tells his disciples that this new world is a world they cannot enter, unless they change. This new community
This is not a community where the presence of God can be taken for granted, as Jerusalem supposedly was in Jeremiah's time. It is a community where agreement in prayer is the guarantee of the presence of God. But it is also a community of discipline, where inequalities and inequities are dealt with (15-17).
Peter wants to know the limits to this community. "How many times, Lord," he asks, "should I forgive my brother or sister who sins against me?" In suggesting "seven times", he probably thinks he's being especially clever. After all, seven was a pretty good number in biblical times. We read in the prophecy of Amos (2: 4, 6) that this was the number of times God said God would forgive Israel.
But Jesus says Peter must forgive seventy times seven. Now Jesus is not telling Peter that he should forgive 490 times, but rather that his forgiveness should not be determined by numbers. Peter is looking for "a legal determination" (Perkins). He wants something measurable. He is still operating according to the old economy. But in the economy of forgiveness, numbers are irrelevant.
Jesus illustrates his point in the parable we read this morning.
The parable begins with a king who wished to settle accounts. This king could have been any of the tyrants who ruled in the Ancient Near East. The first servant we read of owes a ridiculously large sum of money. A talent is fifteen years' wages and the king was owed 10 thousand talents! If anyone needs to be forgiven the seventy times seven, it is this man.
The king initially wants to enslave not only the servant but his family. This kind of enslavement would have been highly unusual within the Jewish community of Jesus' day. However it was what Jews expected the pagan kings around them to do to their subjects. Here we have a king who is every much the ruthless potentate. This is the kind of king who has people tortured for not paying their debts.
There was no way that this amount could have been paid off in a lifetime. And yet the servant promises to pay off everything (vs. 26). The servant humbles himself, asking for patience and mercy. Indeed, given the scope of his debt, he asks for patience and mercy greater than even the span of his life.
Then, to the surprise of Jesus' listeners (for this is not how kings are supposed to behave), the king forgives the debt.
The forgiveness of debts has a familiar ring to those attuned to the Biblical witness. Indeed, we pray it every Sunday as we approach the Eucharist-note not "forgive us our sins" (at least in the new version of the Lord's Prayer), but "our debts".
In the Biblical world, as in our contemporary world, indebtedness is a disease that keeps families, communities and even entire nations enslaved.
The forgiveness of debts recalls the year of Jubilee, spoken of in Leviticus 25. Every fifty years, according to the principle of Jubilee, slaves and prisoners were to be freed and land returned to its rightful owner. When Jesus announces his ministry, according to St Luke chapter 4, he does so by proclaiming "the acceptable year of the Lord"-the Jubilee.
The early church saw their community as the place where Jubilee was practised. In Acts chapter 4 we read that this community was "of one heart and soul, and no one claimed private ownership of any possessions, for everything was held in common."
What the king does in Jesus' parable is Jubilee-like: he releases the first servant and his family from enslavement, offering not only the servant but his family a new beginning. This is the new beginning of the gospel, and the end not only of old debts, but of the economic system that sustained them. Imagine if all kings behaved this way? It would be the end of the world as we know it!
But we see that it is only if forgiveness is practised as a way of life that we know we remain in this new kingdom, this new economy. For the forgiven servant then goes out and immediately uses his new freedom to oppress another servant, one who owes him about a day's wage. In a reversal of the Jubilee, the first servant throws the second servant into prison, "until the debt is paid". When would that be? For debts cannot be paid in prison.
The unforgiving servant shows that he has not yet entered the economy of forgiveness. And when the king finds this out-for his fellow servants are outraged-the unforgiving servant will feel the full consequences of being outside the economy of forgiveness. If he threw the second servant in prison, the unforgiving servant will be tortured. For that is how things are outside the economy of forgiveness.
What does this parable tell us, here at St Paul's Rondebosch, in 1999?
First, it tells us something about the nature of forgiveness. Being forgiven is far more than saying "sorry" or offering an apology. Offering forgiveness is more than simply saying, "Ag forget about it."
To forgive and to be forgiven is to heal a breach. To forgive is to forego a rightful claim-such as both the master had over the first servant and the first servant had over the second. It is to renounce power-over the other person in order to welcome them into the community again. Forgiveness is an invitation. Come... and well-come. But invitations have to be received. And forgiveness is more than simply that. It has to be lived out.
Perhaps the first slave was forgiven by the master; but had he received forgiveness? Had he joined the community of forgiveness and Jubilee? To receive forgiveness is more than simply a transaction, but a transformation.
Indeed, there is no forgiveness without transformation.
To be forgiven is to be given a gift. To receive that gift is to change. To receive the kind of forgiveness which cancels such an immeasurable debt is to recognise grace as a mark of life from now on.
Touched by God's grace we as individuals and as a community can never be the same. The economics of our former life are blasted into smithereens. A new economy replaces them. Our relationships can never be the same. To live in grace is to reciprocate by forgiving others.
This is what we celebrate when we partake of the bread and wine this morning: God's giving and for-giving. As we take the bread and wine, let us remember the lesson of the unforgiving servant.
Second, the parable speaks to us in our situation here in South Africa, where the economy of forgiveness remains a fragile possibility.
During the TRC we heard and saw many similar parables of grace and forgiveness, but little generosity in return. Indeed, it seems that many, if not most, of the beneficiaries of the previous system have chosen not to see themselves as part of the new economy of forgiveness and transformation-if the letters to the editor pages and the phone-in shows are anything to go by.
The parable has a special message for those of us who have benefited from having a particular skin colour and gender. Even though I've only lived here seven years, I include myself as a beneficiary of this very unequal society. The minute I stepped off the plane I became a beneficiary of apartheid, not because of my political convictions, my values or my history, but simply because I was a white male.
This is scandalously true in the church. The work I did for the TRC involved documenting some of the ways Christians oppressed other Christians, how victim and perpetrator sometimes were members of the same church, and how the former system was replicated at a local church and parish level. Not only whites as individuals, but white parishes have been beneficiaries of the past. The fact that we shared, and continue to share, the same bread and the same cup has sadly not changed this.
We as a parish have a tremendous opportunity and responsibility to demonstrate the economics of the kingdom of God. This is why the analysis of our community which the Parish Council has taken on is so important. For it will identify the sites where our generosity can be lived-out.
We also have a tremendous opportunity as individuals outside the church-as architects and engineers, scholars and labourers, shopkeepers and accountants, husbands and mothers-to witness to the reality of this Jubilee alternative.
Perhaps some of us this morning need to learn to live as forgiven people. Perhaps others need to forgive, to give up a rightful claim to justice or vengeance for the sake of a relationship or the community. But we are all called by the Word of God to live in Jubilee, and to remember the sacrifices and the Sacrifice that made it possible.
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