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A couple of years out of college, I served AmeriCorps as a City Year member in Washington, D.C. City Year takes young adults and puts them into struggling schools in cities around the country to serve as mentors and tutors.
One of my duties was serving as co-math coordinator for our school, Winston. We did various things to help build up the math literacy and skills at Winston. Part of the way we did this was through events for the school.
My co-coordinator Sheri was much better at this role than I was. She was planning on being a teacher. I was not. So when we did any task, she had a lot of joy and energy. I, on the other hand, didn’t have the same know-how or enthusiasm. I was also more than a little jealous of how much better she was in our roles than I was. I was annoyed and angry. One day as we were trying to sort out a π day for the school, I did the one thing that you should never do when you’re mad at someone. I sent an email dictating how I felt.
When we went home that day, Sheri had a talk with me that spanned many Metro stops. It was the kind of conversation that really could have ended our friendship. In fact, that’s more or less what she told me. The only thing that saved our friendship, as she later said to me, was that she could see in my eyes that I was sorry for having hurt her. That was the only reason she was able to forgive me.
Of all my teammates that year, Sheri and I are still the closest. As friends, we’ve continued to stay in contact and support each other. She was there for my ordination, we attended each other weddings, and I’ve been to many of her children’s birthday parties. All this wouldn’t have happened if Sheri hadn’t forgiven me.
Forgiveness happens to be the theme of our readings today, and thank goodness it is. Forgiveness is one of the most difficult things for us to talk about. Sometimes it requires recognizing we have committed a wrong. Other times it involves accepting that we have been wronged. Either way, something has been broken in the relationship. Without forgiveness, those relationships can never be fixed.
Because Forgiveness is such a big subject, it helps that Scripture has a lot to say about it. Today we start with one of the biggest issues to tackle when it comes to forgiving others: Family.
This begins with Joseph and his brothers. As we saw last week, Joseph’s brothers threw him in a pit and sold him into slavery.
Now their relationship was broken from the beginning, and everyone was at fault here, including Joseph. Yes, Joseph was a brat to his brothers. Yes, he was also a narc. Yet, selling him into slavery? That was going way too far, to say the least. We also shouldn’t forget that the brothers’ original plan was to kill Joseph, until the oldest, Reuben, talked his other brothers down.
As he tells his brothers in this passage, Joseph rose from slavery, and even wrongful imprisonment to become Second-in-Command to the Pharaoh of Egypt. He to save Egypt and the nations surrounding from famine. Seeking help in this time of famine is why Joseph’s brothers are even in front of him now.
There is something we don’t see in the parts between this week’s Genesis reading and last week’s. Joseph is really struggling with what to do with his brothers. He wants to mess with them, but at the same time he wants to embrace them.
In today’s reading, we see Joseph finally forgiving his brothers. He knows what they did was wrong. He tells them just as much. Yet he also knows that God has used their actions to save them and many others. Ultimately, his love for them wins out in the end. It leads to a lasting renewal of relationship, even until after their father Jacob has died.
Forgiveness isn’t just about reforging our relationships with one another. We have a relationship with God and God forgives too. In Romans this morning, we continue the thread of the past few Sundays.
We continue to hear about God’s relationship with the Ancient Israelites. We have learned from Paul what we see throughout the Tanakh, that the Ancient Israelites, the ones God chose, time and time again go against the Lord and follow their own ways and desires. Time and time again, God called them back. Even when things got so bad that Israel fell, first the North to Assyria and then the South to the Babylonians, the Lord was there and brought them back to their homeland again.
Even now, with the rejection God has faced from the very people the Lord set out to have a relationship with in the first place, Paul assures us that, in the end, God will not reject them. God continues to work to show mercy to the Israelites, just as we spoke of two weeks ago. Not only will God show mercy to the Israelites, but through that mercy the Lord will share forgiveness with us all, as Paul tells us. Through that forgiveness, God not only repairs the relationship the Israelites broke with the Lord, God also forges the path so that all might have a relationship with the Lord.
There are these personal conflicts and our conflicts with God. There are also conflicts between peoples and nations, such as the conflict between the Canaanites and the Israelites. Their conflict was old and over the land. So many wrongs had been done to one another, that it might be hard to sort out which had more to forgive. This was a nationalistic, a tribalistic conflict. It was also a conflict over race.
These are all the reasons why the Disciples beg Jesus in today’s Gospel to send the Canaanite woman away. This isn’t someone deserving of help and mercy in their eyes. For them, this woman was a nuisance, a bother. She didn’t deserve interaction as far as they were concerned. They felt she deserved to be sent away.
Yet Jesus does recognize her. He deigns to speak with her, to have a conversation with her, even if it’s just to say He wasn’t sent there for her.
The Canaanite woman looks past their differences. She recognizes Jesus’ authority, even if He is an Israelite, a Jew. She is willing to look past their peoples’ past and lower herself to the Lord just to receive help for her daughter.
Her words don’t just lead Jesus to provide healing for her daughter. This begins to a turning point in Matthew. Before now, Jesus has only spoken of His work among the House of Israel. After this point, whenever He speaks of His mission, Jesus speaks of going forth to the ends of the earth. A great healing has happened here, a healing between nations even. That healing spreads beyond Israel and Canaan, going out to the whole world.
Forgiveness is hard because it involves recognizing a wrong. It involves recognizing a breach in relationship. That can be a personal conflict, a divide in family, or the rivalries between groups and nations. It can also involve our own relationship with God.
Forgiveness doesn’t come easy either. It can start as a lengthy conversation. It can take days and months of reconciling what has happened, like with Joseph. It is something that can span centuries and millennia, as we see in Romans and the Gospel.
To forgive is to accept we have been wronged. To be forgiven is to accept that we have wronged. The question for us is how important are our relationships? Do we want them to be mended, even if that means recognizing they have been broken? Is it even worth it to us to be forgiven or to forgive?
Scripture shows us that if we want to repair the broken relationships around us, we can do so through Forgiveness. If that is what we want, we can do it. Even more than that, Forgiveness has the power to go beyond us and bring about more good in the world.
Are we willing to take the time needed to forgive and be forgiven? Are we willing to take the steps Scripture lays out for us to do so?