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Forgiveness (22 September)

Our Thought for the Week comes from Sean Fountain, minister at Pier Avenue and EBA trustee

Have you had the experience of a certain word or theme that keeps cropping up?  It has been happening to me.  The word that kept haunting me is ‘forgiveness.’

At one level, this is not surprising.  Forgiveness is one of the key themes of Jesus teaching and ministry.  But, at a personal level, it is caused me some serious reflection.

It happened, again, the other day.

I was spending time, praying with scripture.  I did that one thing that ministers instruct their congregations never to do.  I just opened the Bible at random.  The passage I landed on was Matthew 18 vs. 21 – 35.  The story is of a servant who owed the king a vast sum of money, he was forgiven the debt.  On his way from the king’s presence, he meets another servant.  The second servant owes a paltry sum to the first.  The first demands payment.

Jesus tells this story as a response to Peter’s question: “Lord, how many times shall I forgive my brother or sister who sins against me? Up to seven times?”(Matthew 18 vs. 21)

I have preached on this passage countless times and I have, previously, understood Peter’s question to be asking what is the limit of love? when can I walk away?

As I began to pray, something really struck me. The closeness of the person who needed to be forgiven.  The NIV uses the term “brother or sister”, whereas the NRSV uses the phrase “another member of the Church.”

To be honest, I struggled with this phrasing because, it drags me back to an emotional place that I do not, readily, want to go.

I am one of those ministers who, sadly, had to leave a previous pastorate due to bullying (if anyone from my current Church is reading this, I genuinely mean a different Church not you!).  My experience of bullying, inflicted some wounds that run very deep indeed.  I have found that healing is not always instantaneous.  It is, sometimes, an ongoing and painful process.

I had some business to do with God, some things that needed to be said.  God, in grace and mercy, was more than able to cope with what was said.  I was grateful for the peace that was found that day.

A couple of days later I came across this quotation from the Lebanese-Canadian activist and poet Najwa Zebian;

“Today I decided to forgive you. Not because you apologized, or because you acknowledged the pain that you caused me, but because my soul deserves peace.”

(Najwa Zebian)

Image by Jeff Jacobs on Pixabay