Sermon for Proper 19, Year A
The people who hurt you don’t get to tell you who you are; God does.
I live with teenagers. And when you live with teenagers, the number one rule is: “Nothing edible is safe.”
If I go to bed with one scoop of ice cream left in the container, planning to save it for another day, there’s a good chance that it will be gone by the next afternoon. I grumble about it and get on with my life. Something was taken from me, but in the grand scheme of things, it wasn’t that important.
But then there are times when something gets taken from us that really is that important. Sometimes people hurt us in ways that leave marks on our lives for years after the fact. These hurts are harder to look past. When we live with this kind of hurt, it’s easy for it to become the defining fact of one’s life. The good news that Jesus gives us in today’s Gospel is that the people who hurt us don’t get to tell us who we are; God does.
In this reading, Jesus talks a lot about forgiveness, but he doesn’t talk about it in a very pleasant way. It’s a rather harsh story that has sometimes been used as a cudgel to beat victims of violence over the head, telling them that they just need to “get over it.”
They tell this story in a way that puts an extra burden on the survivors of harm, rather than calling perpetrators of harm to accountability. It’s a problem in the way that we Christians have interpreted this text. There is a world of difference between the Christian virtue of mercy and using the Bible as a weapon to excuse bad behavior.
They are not the same thing. We as Christians need to be careful about how we use the Bible, so that we’re not exacerbating the harm that has already been done in other people’s lives. If we look closely at what Jesus is saying in this passage, I think we will see that he is not advocating harm to those who are already hurting. He’s not telling the victims of violence to “just get over it.”
In this passage, we have the story of an enslaved person who owes a massive, impossibly huge debt to a creditor. This debt, the text says, is 10,000 talents. In today’s terms, that would be billions of dollars. Ridiculously impossible to pay back.
The debtor pleads with the creditor and the creditor, in a magnanimous act of mercy, grants amnesty to the debtor. The debt is forgiven and the debtor can go in peace.
Then that same person, who was just forgiven an impossibly massive debt, walks out and sees someone else who owes him money. 200 denarii. Now, a denarius was a day’s wages for a worker, so 200 denarii would be almost a year’s worth of salary. Still a lot of money for a day worker, but much smaller than the debt that was already forgiven.
This first enslaved person, who was just forgiven an impossibly huge debt, grabs his debtor by the throat and says, “You better pay me what you owe!”
What that says to me is that this person, who has just been set free, is still basing his future on the actions of another person. This person is still enslaved.
This person is still burdened with the weight of what is owed.
It’s that slavery of allowing another person to tell you who you are, and what your future looks like, that I see as the core principle behind Jesus’ emphasis on receiving and giving forgiveness.
At the end of the day, forgiveness is not something that we’re really doing for another person. We’re doing it for ourselves. We’re setting ourselves free when we let go of what is owed to us. That’s not the same thing as saying that “it’s okay,” or that what happened didn’t matter, or that perpetrators should be free from consequences, or that survivors should trust their abusers again.
None of those are the same thing as letting go of this other person, so that your future is not dependent on them.
In secular society, we often hear phrases like, “Don’t get mad, get even.” I think most of us can probably agree that’s not exactly the Christian way of approaching conflict.
But it sometimes feels like the only alternative is to tell someone, “You just need to get over it,” and I don’t think that’s any more Christian than the first one.
So instead, I’d like us to look at the process of forgiveness and the different stages of that process.
First and foremost:
Get Safe.
Get out of that relationship, that house, that job, or that situation, if you have to. You’re not going to be able to rebuild your life and your future If you’re just getting wounded, again and again. You don’t owe them that. You owe yourself safety.
Number two is:
Get Real.
Tell the truth about what has happened. Don’t gloss over it. Don’t say it’s okay when it’s not okay. Don’t say it doesn’t matter, because it does matter. You matter.
Next is:
Get Mad.
It’s a really important part of the process of forgiveness. If we’re not telling the truth about the effect that that action has had on us, then we’re not going to be able to work our way through it and build a better life. We need to get mad, at least for a while.
Getting mad also prevents us from turning the pain and blame inward, onto ourselves. As if somehow we deserved the bad things that happened to us, because the fact is that we didn’t.
A friend of mine recently called that, “Putting the shame where it belongs,” which is not with you. It’s with the person who did the hurting. Getting mad is a healthy thing.
Next is:
Get Better.
Seek the support you need. Get into therapy. Talk to someone you can trust. Learn the skills for coping, emotionally and mentally, with what happened.
And finally, in the end:
Get Your Future Back.
This is the end goal. Not telling the other person, “it’s okay,” when it isn’t. It’s getting your future back, so that you can stand in a healed place where you look back at what happened and say, “That was part of my story, but it doesn’t define who I am.”
Because the people who hurt you don’t get to tell you who you are; God does.
The healing can help you carry what happened to you without the hurt carrying you.
This, I think, is the good news and the goal that Jesus is ultimately talking about: A place where you can get your future back.
You are more than the worst thing that ever happened to you. You are not the victim of those who hurt you. You are their survivor. And your future is not defined by them.
A person who understands this truth very explicitly is Malala Yousafzai. This young woman from Pakistan, because she dared to speak up for the education of girls and women, was shot in the head by the Taliban on her school bus. They were intending to end her future right there.
Less than a year later, after a lot of healing and many surgeries, she stood up in front of the United Nations and said to that gathered crowd of world leaders, “I am the same Malala. My ambitions are the same, my hopes are the same, my dreams are the same.”
The Taliban failed to tell Malala Yousafzai who she is and they failed to define her future for her.
And she has gone on to be this incredible advocate for education, especially for women and girls. And to the Taliban who hurt her, she says, “I am doing this for the benefit of your children too.”
This is a person who has gotten her future back.
It didn’t happen by her saying, “it’s okay.” It didn’t happen by her sweeping the offense under the rug. It happened by her
getting safe,
getting real,
getting mad,
getting better,
and getting her future back.
And what is true for her is also true for you:
The people who hurt you don’t get to tell you who you are; God does.
Image credit: By flowcomm – flickrPhotoUrl=https://www.flickr.com/photos/flowcomm/53378313828/, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=154127695
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