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Forgiveness: The Hospitality of God
A sermon preached by the Reverend Dr. Stephanie J. Nagley at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, Bethesda, Maryland, June 13, 2004.
One of the hardest lessons to learn in life is that we may very well be right and wrong at the same time that in being absolutely right we can be dead wrong.[1] Jesus goes to Simon’s house for dinner. A pleasant enough evening was at hand between two people who were earnestly seeking to be right with God.
Simon was a Pharisee. Pharisees have probably gotten a bum rap in the Church. They’re often depicted as the bad guys, the ones lacking faith, the smelly recalcitrant goats among the woolly obedient sheep. The truth is they were probably the most earnest of all the people in their desire to live rightly. It was their desire to be holy, to follow God faithfully, to live a life pleasing to God. That’s why they studied hard and drew up so many rules for a holy life.
But at this dinner party the tables were turned, the rules flew out the window. A woman found out that Jesus was in Simon’s house and without so much as a “howdy do” she crashed the party. If that wasn’t enough, she began to cry, her tears running onto Jesus’ feet which she wiped with her hair. Then she kissed and bathed his feet with ointment.
Simon, the Pharisee, was appalled. Surely Jesus knew the law. Surely Jesus understood what it meant to be right with God. Surely Jesus wouldn’t risk being unclean by allowing this unclean woman to touch him.
The story is about two men, two men of God in the presence of a sinner. Two men who are righteous. One has an understanding that to be right he must distance himself from this woman. The other man understanding that being right with God compels him to move toward her with openness, forgiveness and love.
Sometimes you can be dead right and still be dead wrong. Simon was dead right. Jesus was dead wrong and right as rain. This may be one of the hardest lessons we have to learn in life and it comes from living into one of the hardest ways of our faith.
Being right has very little to do with following the rules and thinking our way to righteousness. Being right has everything to do with giving ourselves to the way of forgiveness. Being right has everything to do with a kind of openness and acceptance of the other so that in us God’s acceptance and love are imaged.
Jesus told the woman her sins were forgiven. Again, Simon and the others were appalled. They misunderstood. They thought Jesus was zapping her on the spot. He wasn’t zapping her. He was merely stating a fact. He was acknowledging what the woman already seemed to know. Her tears and the ointment were testaments to her understanding that she was loved beyond all the wayward ways of her life. She was forgiven.
Forgiveness is a loaded word. There is the tendency to regard forgiveness as a kind of amnesia to what is truly wrong or evil. To forgive is not to forget. There is a tendency to see forgiveness as nothing more than laying down and letting bad behavior flatten us. To forgive doesn’t erase consequences for bad behavior. There is a tendency to confuse forgiveness with reconciliation, to think that nothing is forgiven until you find your new best friend in the one who has hurt you so. We may never reconcile with those who have done mean, hurtful things to us and yet we can forgive.
Forgiveness is releasing the judgment we have of another or of ourselves. Forgiveness is releasing the need for retribution, the corrosive anger that turns us into judge and jury.
To forgive is to trust that the Spirit of Life, the Spirit of God, does indeed have the wisdom to know what is needed for a person to heal and be whole. To forgive is to let go and trust that God’s way of dealing with our brokenness may be more wise and merciful than anything we might devise.[2]
Maybe another way to think about forgiveness is to consider forgiveness as a kind of hospitality.
That’s what was happening with the woman who bathed Jesus with her tears. The forgiveness she felt emerged in hospitality, a hospitality that Simon couldn’t offer Jesus.
Forgiveness is the hospitality of receiving each other and ourselves as the beloved of God. The extraordinary hospitality of God is that of being accepted and loved whether we’re right or wrong. Consider the word “forgiven”. We are forgiven. For — before it ever even dawned on us that we may have been wrong we are Given – love and acceptance.
Forgiveness is being hospitable to the fact that, in the Spirit of God, mercy will always trump retribution. It may not seem right. It may not agree with our sensibilities but that’s the deal.
Forgiveness is receiving the hospitality of God who softens our hearts and makes it possible for us not to forget but to move on and live.
We can’t force ourselves into the hospitality of forgiveness. We can’t think our way there. We can’t follow some prescribed set of rules or laws. We are helpless to the presence of grace, to the presence of God. We don’t get to control the agenda or decide the outcome.
Oh, how hard that it is. For many of us forgiveness goes against ever fiber of our being. Forgiveness is counterintuitive. We may know what we called to do but we find ourselves unwilling or unable to call it forth. We are too hurt. We are too angry. We are too ashamed. We are too wrong to be held in the arms of a loving right. We have been too wronged to be the loving arms of what is truly right.
Even the most faithful struggle with letting go. Once upon a time there was a desert brother. He was infuriated with another brother. He wanted revenge. The injured brother stomped across the desert to the house of the Abbott. He knocked on the Abbott’s door. The Abbott invited him in. Before either could sit down, the brother told the Abbott what had happened and said: I am going to get even. The Abbott begged him to leave the situation to God. No, said the monk, I will not give up until I have made him pay for what he said. The Abbott stood up and began to pray saying: O God, You are no longer necessary for us, and us no longer need you to take care of us since, as this brother says, we both can and will avenge ourselves. With that the brother decided to give up his need for revenge.[3]
To err is human, to forgive divine. To forgive is the genuine letting go of what we’ve done or not done, what others have done to us or failed to do by giving way to the divine mystery, by relinquishing our need to be right to the rightness that is God.
There is one more awareness to makes that giving way, that relinquishing happen. There is another awareness that opens us up to the crazy hospitality of God. Our souls open, our hearts soften, when we get just how much we are broken and beloved. It is startling, astonishing to know that Mother of Teresa of Calcutta claimed she engaged in her ministry of love because she knew there was a Hitler inside of her.[4] How that realization must have haunted her. How that realization moved her to do what she did in the world. Such care, such commitment flowing from the sorrowful knowledge of her own sin.
The sorrowful knowledge of our brokenness. The painful awareness of our darkness. Maybe that’s what led the theologian Karl Barth to say that God sees even the most vile evil as an expression of suffering. In the presence of suffering the tables are turned. Suffering doesn’t call for revenge. Suffering doesn’t answer to who is right and who is wrong. Suffering calls for mercy, for compassion, for love. When we dig down and realize our common condition is that of suffering how different our perspective becomes. When we see ourselves in each other how real our care for each other becomes, how much more ready we are to receive each other as God has received us, how much more available we are to the hospitality of forgiving love.
To enter the divine heart of God is to recognize that each of us falls way short most of the time and when we fall short what we desperately need is to be accepted and loved, to receive mercy and compassion. Here we are the broken and the blessed, the fractured and the forgiven. Can we do anything less than to wash each other with our tears?
[1] Laron Hall, No Darkness at All. (Back to article)
[2] Marjorie Thompson, “Moving Toward Forgiveness”, Weavings, March-April, 1992. (Back to article)
[3] Thompson (Back to article)
[4] Thompson (Back to article)
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