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!
[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.
