Faithful Living, Faithful Forgiving

Luke 17:1-10

October 6, 2013[1]

"If your brother sins, rebuke him, and if he repents, forgive him. If he sins against you seven times in a day, and seven times comes back to you and says, 'I repent,' forgive him."  The apostles said to the Lord, "Increase our faith!"  He replied, "If you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mulberry tree, 'Be uprooted and planted in the sea,' and it will obey you. (Luke 17:3-5, NIV)

We sometimes hear about “mustard seed faith” and equate it with an ability to obtain miraculous results.  If you only believe, if you only have faith the size of a tiny mustard seed, you can ask for the impossible and it will be granted.  You can move mountains.  You can have this mulberry bush relocated into the sea.  If you are like me, this idea seems to leave me feeling inadequate.  I don’t know about you, but I haven’t moved any mountains lately.  Does that mean that my faith is too small?  Have I failed to pass the “mustard seed test”?

I have discovered this week that Luke’s use of this story from the teachings of Jesus is much more textured, much richer than that.  And in a specific way, Luke’s use of this story is even more challenging for us than moving mulberry trees.

First, let’s start with the idea of “size.”  I learned this week that there are variations among the existing manuscripts of Luke in the way they translate this paragraph concerning mustard-seed faith.[2]  The translation that we read this morning does indeed say “If you have faith as small as a mustard seed…”  (Luke 17:6, NIV).  But the footnotes to the text show that there is some variation among the manuscripts—with some using the word that simply means “like or as,”—“faith as a grain of mustard seed.”  There seems to be no dispute as to the request that the disciples brought to Jesus.  The translations agree that the disciples asked Jesus to “increase their faith” (v. 5).  Could it be that the disciples asked their question wrongly?  Were they asking a question about the amount or size of their faith, about the quantity of their faith when they should have been asking about the quality of their faith?  Is there something about our faith that suggests that you can’t use a ruler or a scale to measure the quantity of faith that you have?

Looking at the question in this light makes sense to me.  You have heard me speak before about faith as a verb—it’s not only about something that you have, but it is about something that you do.  If you have faith, you trust.  You place your trust in the person or thing in which you have faith.  When you take a step in faith, you step forward not “knowing” in an intellectual sense where your feet will land; but you trust that they will land on solid ground.  Do you remember the scene from Indiana Jones in which Indiana steps into what appears to us to be mid-air?  He can’t see anything beneath him; but his foot lands on something solid.[3]  This is the quality of faith, it is a matter of trusting in what we cannot see.  Faith is “being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see” (Hebrews 11:1, NIV), or, as I learned it in King James English, “faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen” (Hebrews 11:1, KJV).  If you can see it, it isn’t faith.

Let’s go back and look at the context for this discussion in Luke (it’s different than the context we find in the other Gospels).  Do you remember what Jesus was telling the disciples at the time they asked Jesus to “increase our faith?”  He was talking about forgiveness.  He was telling them that they had to forgive, and to forgive, and to forgive again (Luke 17:4).  Forgiveness is a part of faithful living—a central part—and those who cause someone to stumble because of their own failure to live faithfully—well, it isn’t very pretty (see v. 2).  This is what prompted the disciples to recognize their own shortcomings.  This is where the disciples had to acknowledge their own failure to forgive.  And I have to agree with them.  Forgiveness is one of the tough issues that we have to contend with.  And yet it is so central.  Jesus taught us to pray “forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us” (Luke 11:4; Matthew 6:12).  Jesus went on to say that “if you do not forgive others, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses” (Matthew 6:15).

This is why I said at the outset that Luke’s use of this story is so challenging for us.  Jesus links our own forgiveness to our own ability to forgive; He recognizes that it is not possible for us to receive forgiveness for the wrongs that we have done when we are holding on to the grudges we have picked up along the way.  But Jesus also recognizes that in order to forgive, we are stepping out into unknown territory, where we cannot see where we are walking.  We cannot take this step in our own strength.  We can only walk forward in faith and trust.

It is at this point that we start to explain why our situation is different.  We have a long list of reasons why we can’t forgive someone because what they did was so bad or hurt us or someone we love so much and besides, they haven’t even apologized, and we don’t feel that we can ever trust them again.  Sometimes these reasons are absolutely true.  Sometimes, people cannot be trusted.  Some people are evil.  I don’t believe that Jesus intended for us to assume guilt for the wrongs that have been done to us.  The victim should not be made to feel guilty for the crime.  Yet, so long as we fail to forgive, we allow those people to hold a chain that binds our own souls.

Seen in this way, forgiveness means that we are no longer going to let someone else have the power to dictate our own lives.  We are no longer going to let someone else have the power to prevent us from experiencing the abundant life, the life of joy that God offers to us.

How do we do this?  I don’t want to oversimplify such a difficult matter.  The obstacles may be different for different people and different situations.  Let me offer a couple starting points, each of which could be developed into a sermon in its own right:

First, develop an awareness of the wrongs that you hold on to.  Where have you been hurt?  We learn to live with pain, and we develop calluses to protect us from the pain, but the pain still is present.  Sometimes we can’t see the many ways that past wrongs continue to control us.  Part of the process of forgiveness is to become aware of the pain that we are experiencing so that we can let it go.  We need to see who we need to forgive and what we need to forgive them for. 

Second, ask God to help you see the other person as God sees that person—as a child who is beloved and cherished by God just as much as we are, and will be judged by God just as we will be judged by God.

If you say that it is not possible, then I think that you are recognizing what the disciples recognized.  On their own, they could not forgive.  They could not see how they ever could measure up.  That is exactly why they asked Jesus to “increase their faith.” 

The September issue of Guidepost Magazine has a story that illustrates my point.[4]  Marcus Weaver had grown up in some tough circumstances, and he had bounced around quite a bit in his life; but things seemed to be getting better when he took a friend named Rebecca to see a movie one evening at a theater in Aurora Colorado.  In the middle of the movie, a silhouette seemed to emerge from the movie screen, holding several weapons, but this silhouette was not part of the movie.  He began firing his weapons.  Marcus was injured; Rebecca was killed.  In the days and weeks that followed this terrible incident, Marcus struggled with this question of forgiveness.  He mouthed the words of forgiveness, but he felt numb inside.  And the reporters continued to ask “Do you forgive him, Marcus?  How can you forgive something like that?”  Marcus struggled and struggled with this question.  The memory of that man silhouetted against the screen kept reappearing.  Yet, all the while a quote from 2 Corinthians that kept coming back to him:  “For God, who said, "Let light shine out of darkness," made his light shine in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ” (2 Corinthians 4:6, NIV).  Marcus began to recognize the voice of God speaking to him, asking him “Who do you need to forgive, Marcus?”  The answer may have seemed obvious; but at a terrifying moment, Marcus was able to see that there was more than one face appearing to him in that silhouette.  He also was able to see the face of an abusive stepfather, whose unspeakable acts of cruelty had left scars on Marcus’s soul for years.  Marcus had to forgive a killer; but in order to find peace, he also had to forgive a stepfather who now was only a shadow from his past.  The stepfather could no longer hurt Marcus, but Marcus had to let him go.  Marcus writes, “The silhouette was gone.  In its place I saw plain old Herbert Weaver, a man who lashed out at others because he couldn’t face his own torment.  His fate was in God’s hands too.  I could let him go.  I could let God’s light fill the shadow in my soul.”[5]

On this World Communion Sunday, I would suppose that most of us, perhaps all of us, have some memory that haunts us, some pain that continues to hurt us.  As we come to the Table of Our Lord, Our Lord invites us to come forward in faith, opening the windows of our soul to let God’s light fill the shadows.  Faithful living means faithful forgiving.  It is difficult.  Lurking within the shadows are silhouettes that we would prefer not to face.  It may take time.  We ask, as the disciples asked, “increase our faith.”  But Jesus says that it isn’t a matter of how much faith you have.  It’s a matter of trust—of trusting in the God who said “Let light shine out of darkness.”  That same God is calling to us, pleading to us to let His light fill our souls.  Are you able to open your hearts and let God light shine upon you today?

May it be so!

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[1] Preached at Cunningham United Methodist Church in Palmyra, Virginia on World Communion Sunday.

[2] M. Eugene Boring and Fred B. Craddock, The People’s New Testament Commentary (Louisville:  Westminster John Knox Press, 2009), 246.

[3] Steven Spielberg, director, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (Paramount Pictures, 1989).

[4] Marcus Weaver, “A Different Man,” in Guideposts (Vol. 68, Issue 7, September 2013).

[5] Marcus Weaver, “A Different Man,” in Guideposts (Vol. 68, Issue 7, September 2013), 55.