When You Just Cannot Forgive

Scripture    Matthew 18:15-22

When You Just Cannot Forgive

Part 3 of a 3-Part Series

We all have been there: We hear of a crime committed that is so egregious – so horrific – so vile, that the following scenario is easily imagined or even occurs:

A judge scowls down from the courtroom bench. From behind the black robe and over a pair of black glasses, we hear the magistrate’s words solemnly uttered to the convicted: “May God have mercy on your soul!”

“May God have mercy on your soul.” Translation: May God have mercy, because … none of us can.

And so it goes with each of us – the judge and jury over all we see. There are just some debts we cannot forgive. Even as we repeat – each Sabbath day – the following words: “(Lord,) Forgive us our debts, as we” – first – “forgive our debtors.” Attention, Jesus: Your Lord’s Prayer needs a footnote!



And then we hear of the hope – the mystifying hope – offered by our Amish friends in a place called Nickel Mines, PA.

They made it look so simple. Ten of their precious little girls, less than six years ago, shot by a madman who had stormed into their peaceful school. Five of them  died, as well as the gunman; five lay wounded. As TV crews rushed to the scene with their disaster faces and high-noon voices, the stricken Amish gathered quietly.

By spirit and by habit, they were not conditioned to respond with either outraged cries against the heaven or attacks upon the evils of society. No. Our Amish sisters and brothers enfolded their grief within their normal circle of prayer and daily communion. They didn’t speak out. They looked within. They did it together. They did not venture into complex theological waters to hide a shallow faith. They kept it all so simple because their trust was so deep.

Then they took a step that astonished so many. Without fanfare, they went to the killer’s home to speak words of forgiveness to that man’s family. Without fuss. Without hesitation. Without theological debate. They just up and went. Because that is what they believed what was right. That is what they did to keep up their  end of the bargain with God and their sisters and brothers.¹

If I were a betting man, I would wager a considerable sum that not one of these Amish faithful – not one – could forgive that murderer. Meaning, it was not in the power of any one of them to do so.

But what the Amish knew, and most of the rest of the world didn’t, was that they could forgive. They. Only they.

Not because they felt like forgiving. And not even because they would not feel free if they did not forgive.

The Amish traveled to that man’s home because they understood it was their biblical mandate – it was their ethical obligation – to take the forgiveness journey.

To take the forgiveness journey.


Matthew’s Jesus today keeps the matter of forgiveness wholly within the Christian fold. And therein lies a key clue – not only to the profoundly communal ethic of forgiveness, but where it must start.

“If another member of the church sins against you,” Jesus says, “go and point out the fault when the two of you are alone. If the member listens to you, you have regained that one. But if you are not listened to, take one or two others along with you …. If the member refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church … For where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them.” 

How clear the process is laid out here. As clear as it seems so hazy to us. How clearly Jesus understood – how clearly Matthew’s first century disciples understood – how clearly the Amish understand – what we in our rights-obsessed and responsibilities-impoverished individualism can scarcely begin to grasp about the mystery and the power of forgiveness. Two keys to forgiveness we can all learn from today – if we can agree, more than anything else, that God’s Easter desire is for all humanity to be restored.


First, the easier one: Forgiveness for the deepest of offenses cannot be offered alone. For Matthew’s Jesus and the Amish alike, a solitary individual offering of forgiveness – hard forgiveness – outside of a communal framework is not even on the table. Who I am is not even considered; whose we are is all that matters.

And just who are the “we”?  None of us can pretend – or should pretend – to live in the closed world of Matthew’s church, or the Amish, where the “we” is so clearly defined and the communal lines are hardly blurred. In our social networking world, perhaps we can extend the biblical ethic of forgiveness in this way. I would invite us to consider that regardless who offends us – and even how we have been offended – that that offender be considered part of the “we” of God’s people. Part of the “we” – becoming, with all the Spirit-power God gives us, the subjects of restitution and not the objects of retribution.

That when someone blind-drunk would enter Bethesda Cares’ Saturday lunch at our church, that person at least receives bread outside the door – as has happened here, more than once. Or – as it happened among our own several years ago – that even when a church member commits a heinous crime, that person at least gets the bread of life offered to him.

In each real-life case here of forgiveness-as-restoration, great care was taken at Bethesda Presbyterian Church not to put innocents in harm’s way. That being said, great care was also taken to put the guilty ones in heaven’s way, lest we harm the way of God’s created intention: the inviolable dignity of every human being.


Which leads us to the second understanding of the power of forgiveness offered by Jesus and by the Amish. One which gives me pause, even as I say it: Not forgiving for even the deepest offenses is not even considered an option.

I am well aware that each of us listening to me say this has each faced one or more intensely personal situations in your life – in church or out – that begs of you, screams of you, not to forgive the offender. Even if that situation in your life is so hauntingly personal you can only share it with one trusted other, Jesus makes the matter frighteningly plain: If God’s resurrection desire is for all humanity to be restored, we are mandated by love to travel the forgiveness journey together – in some fashion, however halting.


Two keys to forgiveness we learn from Jesus – and the Amish – here today: Not beginning the forgiveness journey is never even considered an option. Insofar as forgiveness – deep forgiveness – can never be offered alone.

God’s love command, in other words, has to take a community mandate to carry it out – it has to. Not because we feel like it. But because the healing of God’s creation demands we make the journey.

Note carefully that word: journey. For just as each of us, traveling alone, faces situations we cannot forgive at all, traveling together we must also know we can never forgive it all.

To put the matter still another way: Jesus’ journey of hard forgiveness – attempted alone – can never begin. And Jesus’ journey of hard forgiveness – a communal journey – we can never finish.

Hard forgiveness: What we offer in those times when you just cannot forgive. You don’t have to. But we do. With you. Even if we must carry you there with us.

Hard forgiveness: A road we must begin – that is not an option. A road that will never end – for that is not an option, either.

For it’s not about you. And it’s not about me. It’s about the “we”. It’s about the whole.


A whole that includes – it necessarily includes – the worst of the worst of all our offenders.

For how easy it is – too easy it is – to limit the power and freedom of forgiveness to the wise old chestnuts about how it frees an individual – the rest of the world be damned! Those feel-good, how-free-is-me statements such as these:

    Forgiveness frees me from the power of the other. (True.)

    Forgiveness stops letting someone live rent free in my head. (Not bad.)

    Forgiveness means I can stop taking the poison, hoping the offender will die. (I like that.)

    Forgiveness is unlocking the door to set someone free and realizing you were the prisoner. (I like that one, too.)

How free is me – how good I feel – when I go down deep, and become a more forgiving person. All good – and all fine …

… until we come to the time when I – you – just cannot forgive.

For it is then that we find that the good and the fine of how-free-is-me becomes the enemy of the best: Forgiving to restore who we cannot release.


Who makes the forgiveness journey, according to Jesus today? Two of us … then three … and then: Who knows, how many of us it might take?

How often do we make that forgiveness journey? Seventy-times-seven. The journey never ends.

To paraphrase a man whose life was as close to Jesus as any I ever heard or seen – Mohandas K. Gandhi: “Hard forgiveness, when it becomes communally active, travels with extraordinary velocity, and then it becomes a miracle.”

Whoever has ears to hear … let them hear.

¹From Kenneth Briggs’ companion book to the DVD series, The Power of Forgiveness (Minneapolis: Fortress Press), 9-10.