P ♰ C

– by Jean Allen

We have all read this text about the slave that was forgiven a huge debt by his master but then went out and demanded repayment from those who owed money to him and refused to forgive them their debts and thought, “What a terrible person!” But it doesn’t occur to us that every single one of us has refused to forgive someone who offended us, even though God has lavished his forgiveness on us. We think we have a right to be offended. We think that forgiveness is a weakness, that our rights will be abused and that if we forgive, we are just giving that person permission to be a jerk. We chew on the wrongs done to us and we struggle with the stress these ruminations create. Every time we remember what the person did, our brains think it’s happening again in the present moment and we are filled again with anguish, pain and anger.

Which brings us to the disturbing conclusion of this week’s Gospel where Jesus said that if we don’t forgive, God will hand us over to be tortured. Is this the compassionate God that Jesus teaches and preaches about?

The thing is, when we won’t forgive someone, we have already excluded ourselves from the Kingdom and, from the above description of what happens to us when we refuse to forgive, we can see that we keep ourselves in a place of inner torture. God is not full of wrath like the master in Jesus’s parable. He does not take us and throw us into a place of torture. We put ourselves there by refusing to leave the arena of violence of unforgiveness. Yes, unforgiveness is violence and the Kingdom of God is a Kingdom of peace, mercy and forgiveness. We exclude ourselves and we torture ourselves. There are lots of individuals who live their whole lives in a tortuous existence simply because they refuse to forgive. Some cultures even see unforgiveness as a virtue and holding onto offences as a strength. 

The torture is real and the torturers are us.