Children of Our Heavenly Father - Sermon for the 11th Sunday after Pentecost - The Parable of the Unmerciful Servant

St. John of Kronstadt once said that the spiritual life is not like school. In school we are taught to read and count and then once we know it, we’re good for life. We don’t have to keep re-learning how to read and count throughout our lives. But the spiritual life is not like that. We have to learn the same lessons over and over again. It’s not because we’re stupid. It’s because we are not merely putting facts in our minds, we are trying to allow God to engraft His divine grace in our hearts. Just like we begin Lent with the rite of forgiveness, this year we begin the Dormition fast being reminded by the Gospel on how important forgiveness is.

As Christians, we need to be reminded about our goal so that we have the right aim. Our Savior tells us at the beginning of His ministry what our goal is, “Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect”(Mt 5:48). What does this perfection look like? Jesus Christ tells us just a few verses previous.  It is to “love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you. That ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven” (Mt 5:44-45). This is the perfection we should aim at. If we are to love our enemies, we certainly must forgive them.

Father Roman Braga of blessed memory once said, “When you suffer a little, you become hateful and seek revenge. When you suffer a lot, you forgive everything”. These words come from one who suffered unimaginably at the hands of wicked men in the prison camps in Romania.

The twentieth century was the century of human suffering—untold millions suffered and perished in war, famine, disease, neglect, torture, execution. Prison camps, death marches, unspeakable horror at breakneck speed. And yet, probably the greatest lesson of the 20th century is the divine-human capacity for forgiveness. We have been given countless examples of saints, the martyrs and the righteous who suffered all these things and still forgave everyone for everything.

When we suffer a little, we often resist immediately, we fight back. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who spent years in the gulags, writes about this frame of mind that we carry in ourselves before we have learned to accept suffering, before we have learned to accept a lot of suffering. “Once upon a time you were sharply intolerant. You were constantly in a rush…constantly short of time….you never forgave anyone. You judged people without mercy” (Gulag Archipelago Vol 2, p 611). With such a mindset is our default setting, it’s very easy to desire revenge and to be hateful when wronged.

The Fathers teach us that anger is a secondary passion—it relies on other passions not being satisfied, whether that’s gluttony, lust, greed, or vainglory. Much of our lack of forgiveness, our grudges we nurse, our outrage against others, is simply our anger stemming from wounded egos. These are trifles that catch fire and we refuse to let it go until we get justice—immolating ourselves in the process. But the Fathers are clear that we can only be angry with someone if we think we are better than them in the first place. Pride fuels most anger. Demanding our rights against the other is just pride. And until we give up our pride, until we let go of our pretense to having rights, it will be difficult, if not impossible, to forgive.

Because we cling to our rights and refuse to let our ego die, we harden our hearts and refuse to forgive. We demand the other recognize that they were wrong, we were right, we were the victims. We want the impossible justice of them undoing whatever it was they inflicted on us. Because worldly justice feels good and seems like a virtue, we cling to our unforgiveness. We can even suppose that it must not be that bad, because we can still go to church. We can still pray. We can still fast. We can still be kind to everyone else in our life. We can even seem pretty put-together if the offender is not in our life anymore.

Beloved, our fathers warn us about such deadly deception an unforgiving heart can bring upon on us. In the days of the early martyrs, there were two friends who had a falling out. One was a priest, the other a layman. They refused to forgive each other. Finally, the priest was taken and arrested for being a Christian. The layman found him before the execution and desperately begged him for forgiveness. Yet the priest persisted in his refusal. God is longsuffering, but He would not allow a Christian—a priest, no less, to be given a martyr’s death with so grave a sin as unforgiveness. So God withdrew His grace from the priest. Just moments before he was to die, the priest suddenly changed his mind. Bereft of God’s grace, he no longer desired to die, agreed to sacrifice to idols, and died an apostate. We, too, can fall as quickly and as completely as he did if we persist in showing no mercy. 

In many ways the spiritual life can seem daunting and overwhelming. There are many ways that we fail—and fail spectacularly. There are many times when we realize we are much, much worse than we thought. But if we pay attention, God gives us many shortcuts. Elsewhere in the Gospel, Christ clearly says, “Forgive and ye shall be forgiven” (Lk 6:37). How simple! There are no other strings attached here—if we forgive those who have sinned against us, God will forgive us everything. God will forgive us everything—no matter how grievous. All 10,000 talents of our debt, like the steward owed his master. One calculation put 10,000 talents at roughly 2 and-a-half billion dollars—absolutely unpayable. And yet the Master was willing to wipe it all away if only his servant would be merciful like him.

But what about real suffering? What about the scars that don’t go away. How do we forgive? What if it’s not just a thousand little paper cuts, but deep wounds? Here is where we need the example of our Savior. 

Christ began His ministry teaching us what the perfection of the Father is and at the end, He showed it to us. What greater example could we have of loving those who hate us than Jesus Christ crucified by His creatures? Christ slapped, scourged, spat upon, by those He wished to impart eternal life. If we ever cannot find a place in our hearts to forgive people the wicked deeds they have done to us, let us remember what God went through out of love of us, His enemies. In the midst of all of this, Jesus Christ said, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do” (Lk 23:34). 

Sometimes we might want to dismiss such notions—after all, Jesus was God, what can I be expected to do? As I said, the 20th century provides us with a wealth of saints and confessors and pious Christians who were “tormented, of whom the world was not worthy (Heb 11:38)”, who saw in their enemies the face of Jesus Christ and forgave. I wish I could have just presented story after story of our modern-day saints and confessors who underwent such terrible torments and yet forgave. But I’ll limit myself to one.

I was asked to do a Pannykhida for a man who had died a number of years previous, whose name was George. I asked the man who requested it who George was. He told me George was a good, faithful Christian. He served in the Serbian Army during WW2 and emigrated afterward and eventually made his way to America. Once this man saw George lighting a candle in church in front of the Pannykhidnik with tears rolling down his eyed.

“George, if I may,” he asked him, “who did you light a candle for?”

“For the Nazi prison guards who tortured me,” he replied.

Here is man for us—not a martyr, not a great ascetic. Someone who lived an ordinary life unnoticed. I don’t know the extent of his torments in prison or how long it took him to forgive. But this is how we forgive—lighting candles, beseeching God to have mercy on those who knew not what they did, asking God to soften our hearts, too. Forgiveness is an action, not an emotion. We’re not trying to force ourselves to feel a certain way about other people or about what happened. We’re trying to keep an open line of communication with God. We’re trying not to slam the door of hearts against the other.

The perfection of Christian life is to love our enemies, to forgive those who wrong us. And it is in our failure to forgive that we realize it is only possible with God’s help, it’s only possible if we keep begging God to have mercy on our enemies and on us. This is a lesson we have to learn over and over. But in this struggle we will become children of our Heavenly Father. Amen.