Enacting Forgiveness (Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost)
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Did you ever notice that the Bible is full of lies? Not lies from God, but lies that people tell. Sometimes, like the false prophets, people lie in God’s name. Sometimes, people lie about themselves. And sometimes, people lie about others.
And today’s reading from Genesis begins with a whopper! Jacob, the father of Joseph and his brothers, has died, and Joseph and his brothers have just returned from a long and elaborate burial. And as the trauma of their father’s death begins to subside a little bit, the brothers now wonder, “what if Joseph decides to pay us back for selling him into slavery, now that dad’s not around anymore?”
So they go to Joseph, who’s effectively the prime minister under the Pharoh and can do anything he wants, and they say to him, “you know, before he died, Dad asked us to pass along a message asking you to forgive us for everything we did to you.”
But it’s a lie! And Joseph knows it’s a lie because Joseph was with Jacob when he died, and Jacob had given Joseph a bunch of instructions, but “forgive your brothers” wasn’t one of them. And after all, if somebody really wants you to know something, they’ll tell YOU, not tell somebody with a self-serving interest to tell you later on.
So when Joseph heard those words, “he wept”! And probably, he wept partly because he realized that his brothers really hadn’t changed. They were the same lying weasels they had been decades ago, when they made up the story about Joseph being eaten by wild animals…
And it’s important to know that this request for forgiveness is based on a lie, and that Joseph KNOWS it’s a lie. It’s important because, even though he knows it’s a lie, Joseph does something totally unexpected – he actually enacts for forgiveness of his brothers.
I say that he “enacts” forgiveness, because forgiveness as Joseph understands it is different than the way we often think about forgiveness. Forgiveness, as Joseph understands it, is:
- not based on “repentance” or “change” in his brothers – they’re still the same lying weasels that they always were, and after all these years, they’re not likely to change. So Joseph doesn’t base “forgiveness” on their change, or even their potential to change. In fact, he makes no excuses for them – he says, “you intended it for evil”, not something like, “oh, we were all younger then and you really didn’t realize what you were doing …”
- not based on another lie that we often like to tell ourselves – “everything happens for a reason” or “God planned this.” Notice what Joseph says, “you intended it for evil, but God intended it for good.” That does NOT mean that God intended the thing to happen. The brothers intended it to happen – what God intended to do was to bring good even out of evil. Joseph understood that God could transform even the evil acts of his brothers into an opportunity – but that’s very different from rationalizing it by saying that God had some secret plan for his brothers to do evil …
- about being an agent of God’s transformation, instead of playing the evil game of the brothers. Joseph has a choice. He can either repay evil with evil, or he can take the opportunity that he sees God has made possible for him, and do something that brings life and healing, even for people who have harmed him. And when he does that, Joseph actually enacts forgiveness…
So often for us, forgiveness is hard, because we envision forgiveness as being about denial or rationalization, or even about believing comforting lies that somehow somebody didn’t really mean it, or somehow it must have been God’s plan.
But forgiveness is really about seeing God’s power to renew and transform life, in spite of evil in the world. It’s about breaking the cycle of lies. And it’s about living in a new way, even if we can’t change the people around us.
After all, that’s what God did, and continues to do, in Jesus. When Jesus tells us to forgive others as we’ve been forgiven, Jesus calls us to enact forgiveness based on the forgiveness of God which:
- calls us to “repent” but isn’t based on our success at repentance – sometimes, we have trouble understanding and accepting God’s forgiveness because we like to tell ourselves that we’ve changed – or at least that we’re making progress! But like the brothers of Joseph, most days I’m pretty much the same person I’ve always been. And you probably are, too. God knows that and accepts that. And even though he calls us to struggle against the ways we’d like not to be, our success is not what God’s forgiveness is based on …
- seeks to transform us, even when we’re caught up in evil and even when we’re the cause of the evil. We get distracted, however, from that transformative power, whenever we get caught up in the comforting lies, “maybe God let this happen or made this happen for a reason we can’t see.” That’s NEVER a helpful thing to say to anybody in distress, and can really only be answered in retrospect for yourself. But it could end up being something like, “this was a terrible thing that happened. But now that I’ve endured it, I actually see an opportunity God is giving me to help somebody else because of it …”
- participates with us, in us, and through us, to enact transformation in the life of the world around us. Jesus, Paul says, came into the world while we’re still sinners to actually enact transformation – even the transformation of death into life through the Resurrection. And if God can do that, then God can also work through us to enact “mini-resurrections” – like the kind of new life Joseph was willing to be a part of, even in the lives of his brothers…
Living as forgiven people – and being people who forgive – can never finally be based on lies, denial, or wishful thinking. Instead, the kind of forgiveness Jesus is always calling us to accept and share is the kind of forgiveness in which we accept others for who and what they are. The kind of forgiveness that Jesus calls us to accept and share is the kind of forgiveness that looks for and expects God’s power to transform evil into new life. And maybe most importantly, the kind of forgiveness Jesus calls us to accept and share is the kind of forgiveness in which we’re willing to be God’s partners and agents by enacting forgiveness in the life of the world around us.
Amen.