Unforgiveness: A Loose Cannon Below Decks
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| Thirty six pounder cannon at the ready. Image by Antoine Morel Fatio. |
Therefore, as God’s chosen people,
holy and dearly loved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility,
gentleness and patience. Bear with each other and forgive whatever grievances
you may have against one another. Forgive as the Lord forgave you. Colossians
3:12-13, NIV, 1984.
French author Victor Hugo, best known
for Les Miserables and The Hunchback of Notre Dame,
was also the author of the novel, 93, (Quatre-vingt treize).
The book is centered on the year 1793, Year Two of the French Republic, which
saw “the establishment of the National Convention, the execution of Louis XVI,
the Terror, and the monarchist revolt in the Vendée, which was brutally
suppressed by the Republic.” (See Goodreads for a review.)
In a chapter entitled, “Tormentum
Belli,” which Hugo translates in the text as "war machine," is the
story of the corvette “Claymore.” The three-masted, square-rigged warship was
in rough seas when suddenly an awful noise arose from below decks. Hugo tells
us: “a frightful thing had happened.”
The vessel was equipped with thirty
carronades, short smoothbore cast iron cannons able to fire large shot at short
range. These had been fastened below deck by triple chains and the hatches
above had been shut. Now, one of the cannons had broken loose and had become
something akin to what Hugo calls an “indescribable supernatural beast,”
rolling, pitching, rushing, and crashing into the ship’s sides.
“Nothing more terrible can happen to
a vessel in open sea and under full sail,” Hugo reports, for a loose cannon is
“a battering-ram . . . [that] has the bounds of a panther, the weight of an
elephant, the agility of a mouse, the obstinacy of an axe, the unexpectedness
of the surge, the rapidity of lightning, the deafness of the tomb. It weighs
ten thousand pounds and, it rebounds like a child’s ball.”
“How to control this enormous brute
of bronze?” Hugo asks. “How to fetter this monstrous mechanism for wrecking a
ship? . . . The horrible cannon flings itself about, advances, recoils, strikes
to the right, strikes to the left . . . crushes men like flies.”
The whole ship was now in awful
tumult as the cannon, which is said to have appeared to the crew as owning “a
soul filled with rage and hatred,” tears apart the insides of the ship. Hugo
tells us that often, it is true, that more dangerous to a ship is a loose
cannon inside than a storm outside. And what is true of ships is also
true of human beings. God's Word invites us to go "below decks"
for a look at the turmoil that can result when the cannon that is unforgiveness
gets loose. And it is in the Word that we will find the help needed for taming
this "beast," this "battering ram" that - left uncontrolled
- can wreak devastating havoc.
Perhaps we might begin by considering
what acts can set the cannon of unforgiveness loose.
If author Lewis Smedes is right,
these are acts of disloyalty and acts of betrayal. Words like abandon,
forsake and let down are attached to such acts and capture the nature of the
hurting involved:
When your spouse has an affair with
your best friend.
When your mother or father fails to
show up at a banquet at which you’re honored with a hard-earned award.
When you fully dedicate yourself for
years to doing your very best work at your place of employment and a new
manager moves into play and tosses you out on your ear.
When a tornado sweeps through your
neighborhood and leaves your house in shambles. When you go into town for
supplies and return home only to discover that looters have taken what little
was left of your belongings.
When you’re diagnosed with cancer.
When you commit a colossal blunder or
fail to follow through on a promise to a dear and trusting friend or when you
speak a word you believe needs to be spoken and it’s received as an attack.
When your loved one contracts a
debilitating illness that lingers on for years.
When faced with these challenges of
life, we may feel betrayed by the spouse, the parent, the friend, the authority
figure, the neighbor, our bodies, ourselves, God.
Bitterness. Bitterness is what you
get when you leave anger out to rot. It’s what results when injury is added to
injury. It begins to root when you go to bed angry, when somebody rubs you the
wrong way and the rubbing turns to chafing. It grows in the fertile fields of
jealousy, abuse, and vengeance. It hangs in the air. It’s heard in the “us and
them,” in the “you did this to me,” in the “he said, she said,” in the “I can’t
forgive myself for….” You fill in the blank.
Anger is a natural reaction to injury
real or imagined. Bitterness, resentment and unforgiveness are the sins that
grow out of unresolved, unhealthy anger. The antidote for these sins is
forgiveness.
But why forgive? How do
we forgive? If you’re like me, there are moments when I have prayed the Lord’s
Prayer and have found myself wincing when I’ve come to that part where we say,
“forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us,” or "forgive
us our debts as we forgive our debtors," or “forgive us our trespasses as
we forgive those who have trespassed against us.” If you’re like me, you may
well – like me – have found yourself shooting a prayer up from your spirit: “O
Lord, please do not forgive me in the shabby, half-hearted,
offer it one day, take it back the next day, ways in which I have ‘forgiven’
those who have trespassed against me.”
In the gospel of Matthew, Jesus helps
us understand the cost of unforgiveness as he relates the story of a king
who decides one day to settle accounts with his servants.
In Matthew 18:21-36, we read:
At that point Peter got up the nerve
to ask, "Master, how many times do I forgive a brother or sister who hurts
me? Seven?" Jesus replied, "Seven! Hardly. Try seventy times seven.
"The kingdom of God is like a king who decided to square accounts with his
servants. As he got under way, one servant was brought before him who had run
up a debt of a hundred thousand dollars. He couldn't pay up, so the king
ordered the man, along with his wife, children, and goods, to be auctioned off
at the slave market. "The poor wretch threw himself at the king's feet and
begged, 'Give me a chance and I'll pay it all back.' Touched by his plea, the
king let him off, erasing the debt. "The servant was no sooner out of the
room when he came upon one of his fellow servants who owed him ten dollars. He seized
him by the throat and demanded, 'Pay up. Now!' The poor wretch threw himself
down and begged, 'Give me a chance and I'll pay it all back.' But he wouldn't
do it. He had him arrested and put in jail until the debt was paid. When the
other servants saw this going on, they were outraged and brought a detailed
report to the king.
"The king summoned the man and
said, 'You evil servant! I forgave your entire debt when you begged me for
mercy. Shouldn't you be compelled to be merciful to your fellow servant who asked
for mercy?' The king was furious and put the screws to the man until he paid
back his entire debt. And that's exactly what my Father in heaven is going to
do to each one of you who doesn't forgive unconditionally anyone who asks for
mercy." The Message
So one man is brought before the
king. His debt? 10,000 talents. In The Message, Eugene Peterson
translates that amount to the contemporary equivalent of a hundred thousand
dollars. Whatever the amount, it was clear this man was hopelessly enslaved to
debt! Yet another person in the text is mentioned as owing a hundred denarii,
which today would be a few dollars.
The text also makes it clear that the
terrible consequence of being in debt was debtor's prison. When a bill went
past due and one couldn't pay, the creditor had the right to seize you and
throw you into jail until you either rotted or paid up. But, of course, if you
were in prison you couldn't earn any money to gain your release. Your only hope
might the mercy of the one who had the power to release you.
Ever been in debt? In debt now? Can
you remember -- or do you now know -- the fear, the worry? Things can look
pretty bleak, can’t they? Our passage is telling us that unforgiven sin is like
those unpaid debts. They weigh heavily upon us whether we’re talking about a
little sin, a great big sin, or a great many sins. Each of us, like the debtors
in the text, must settle accounts with the king, God Almighty Himself.
Well, the king, in our parable, calls
his subjects before him and the one who owes the thousands pleads for the king
to have patience and promises that he will repay the debt in full. The
king is moved to mercy and erases the debt!
The point of the parable is that God
is like that merciful king and He is willing and able to cancel impossible
debts. He is willing and able to forgive. As Stephen M. Crotts notes in his
exposition of this passage, the Greek word for forgiveness may also be
translated “let loose.”
“It's like a terrible knot that
suddenly gives and is completely untied. It's like a horrible bondage from
which there is sudden release.”
And what does this free man now do?
He goes out and happens upon a man who owes him a measly few bucks. He grabs
him by the throat and demands he ‘pay up!’ When the debtor says he can’t and
asks for patience, the man throws him in debtors' prison. And folks who witness
this go and tell the king.
What does the king do? He brings the
man back, chastises him for his unforgiveness and says, “Shouldn't you be
compelled to be merciful to your fellow servant who asked for mercy?”
Then he has the man tossed in jail where he will sit until he repays the
debt. The point of the parable is clear. If God forgives us, we must forgive
others. We must forgive as the Lord forgave us.
But those of us who frequent church
services know this -- at least on some level -- don’t we? So why do so many of
us have difficulty forgiving? Why do so many of us have difficulty saying two
simple words: “I’m sorry?” Why do we see so little repentance for sins? Why do
we see so little forgiveness in Christian circles when repentance and
forgiveness are the very foundations of our faith? Amazing grace is what saves
wretches such as we all. We, who have turned to Christ for salvation, have been
the beneficiaries of amazing grace, amazing love. We’ve been set free. And yet
too often we hold one another hostage with our own unforgiveness.
In the December 2012 issue of Leadership
Journal is an article on grace and redemption entitled, "Going to
Hell with Ted Haggard."
The writer, Michael Cheshire, recalls
sitting in a sports bar in Denver with a close atheist friend. During lunch,
the latter pointed at a TV screen on the wall that was set to a channel
recapping Haggard’s fall in a sex and drugs scandal. As he did, he said, “That
is the reason I will not become a Christian. Many of the things you say make
sense, Mike, but that’s what keeps me away.”
Cheshire assumed his friend was
referring to Haggard’s hypocrisy but he was wrong. His friend laughed and said,
“Michael, you just proved my point. See, that guy said sorry a long time ago.
Even his wife and kids stayed and forgave him, but all you Christians still
seem to hate him. You guys can’t forgive him and let him back into your good
graces. Every time you talk to me about God, you explain that he wants to
forgive me. But that guy failed while he was one of you, and most of you are
still vicious to him.”
Then Cheshire says his friend uttered
words that left him reeling: “You Christians eat your own. Always have. Always
will.”
That prompted Cheshire to investigate
what was being said about Haggard in Christian circles. Most shut down and
demanded he drop the subject while others dismissed as foolish or silly his
question, “Why can’t God still use Ted?"
As he lived within close proximity of
Haggard, Cheshire contacted him to see if he would be willing to meet with him
and a couple of the men from his staff. Cheshire found Haggard to be
brutally honest about his failures, filled with a wealth of wisdom, deeply
caring and pastoral. And Haggard had a growing church in the very city that
knew him and knew about his failures; God was causing that church to grow.
When other Christians learned that
Cheshire had reached out to Ted, they said they would distance themselves from
him if he continued to do so. Several people in his church said they would
leave. He was told that his “voice as a pastor and author would be tarnished”
if he continued to spend time with him.
Cheshire concluded: “It would do some
Christians good to stay home one weekend and watch the entire DVD collection of
HBO’s Band of Brothers. Marinate in it. Take notes. Write down
words like loyalty, friendship and sacrifice. Understand the
phrase: never leave a fallen man behind.”
Where is the love? Where is the
forgiveness?
In his wrap up, Cheshire wrote: “The
Ted Haggard issue reminds me of a scene in Mark Twain’s Huckleberry
Finn. Huck is told that if he doesn’t turn in his friend, a runaway slave,
named Jim, he will surely burn in hell. So one day Huck, not wanting to lose
his soul to Satan, writes a letter to Jim’s owner telling her of Jim’s
whereabouts. After folding the letter, he starts to think about what his friend
has meant to him, how Jim took the night watch so he could sleep, how they
laughed and survived together . . . Huck realizes that it’s either Jim’s
friendship or hell. Then the great Mark Twain writes such wonderful words of
resolve. Huck rips the paper and says, ‘Alright then, I guess I’ll go to
hell.’”
And Cheshire decides that “if being
Ted’s friend causes some to hate and reject me – alright then, I guess I’ll go
to hell.”
In our passage from Colossians, we
read: “Therefore, as God’s chosen people, holy and dearly loved, clothe
yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, and patience. Bear
with each other and forgive whatever grievances you may have against one
another. Forgive as the Lord forgave you.”
In my library is a book entitled, The
Sunflower. It’s a story, written by Simon Wiesenthal, with whom you may be
familiar. He is well known and well regarded for his activities in bringing
Nazi war criminals to justice.
In the book, Wiesenthal tells us that
he was a prisoner in the Mauthausen concentration camp in Poland. One day he
was assigned to clean out rubbish from a barn that the Nazis had improvised
into a hospital for wounded soldiers. Toward evening a nurse took Wiesenthal by
the hand and led him to a young SS trooper. The soldier’s face was bandaged
with rags yellow-stained with ointment or pus; his eyes tucked behind the
gauze. He was perhaps 21 years of age. He groped for Wiesenthal’s hand and held
it tight. He said he had to talk to a Jew; he could not die before he had confessed
the sins he had committed against helpless Jews, and he had to be forgiven by a
Jew before he died. So he told Wiesenthal a horrible story of how his battalion
had gunned down Jewish parents and children who were trying to escape from a
house set afire by the SS troopers.
Wiesenthal listened to the dying
man’s story, first the story of his blameless youth, and then the story of his
participation in evil. As the man spoke, Wiesenthal’s thoughts drifted to the
graves of the Nazi soldiers that he had seen nearby. Each one was decorated
with a sunflower and so each one was visited by butterflies. Wiesenthal
believed his place of interment would be different: a mass grave, where corpses
would be piled on top of him. No sunflower for him. No butterflies for him.
In the end, Wiesenthal jerked his
hand away from the soldier and walked out of the barn: No word was spoken. No
forgiveness was given. Wiesenthal would not, could not, forgive. But he was not
sure he did the right thing.
And some 30 years later he related
the story in the book entitled The Sunflower and he ended his
tale with a question: “What would you have done?” Thirty-two eminent persons
contributed their answers. Most said Wiesenthal was right; he should not have
forgiven the man; it would not have been fair. Why should a man who gave his
will to the doing of monumental evil expect a quick word of forgiveness on his
death-bed? What right had Wiesenthal to forgive the man for the sins he had
committed against others? “Let the SS trooper go to hell,” said one respondent.
Many of us, truth be told, feel the
same way when we are sinned against in far less horrible ways. As Lewis Smedes
rightly notes: “To the guilty, forgiveness comes as amazing grace. To the
offended, forgiving may sound like outrageous injustice. A straight-line moral
sense tells most people that the guilty ought to pay their dues: Forgiving is
for suckers.”
“What is the answer to the unfairness
of forgiving? It can only be that forgiving is, after all, a better way to
fairness.
“First, forgiveness creates a new
possibility of fairness by releasing us from the unfair past. If we do not
forgive, our only recourse is revenge . . . and revenge never evens the score,
for alienated people never keep score of wrongs by the same mathematics. Forgiveness
takes us off the escalator of revenge so that we can stop the chain of
incremented wrongs.”
Forgiveness brings fairness to the
forgiver. It is the hurting person who most feels the burden of unfairness but
he only condemns himself if he refuses to forgive. Forgiving is the only way to
stop the cycle of unfair pain turning in your memory.
Forgiving is not forgetting.
Forgiving is not excusing. Forgiving is not smoothing things over. Forgiving
is, what Smedes calls, “spiritual surgery.” When you forgive someone, you slice
away the wrong from the person who did it. You recreate that person in your
thoughts. God does it this way too: He releases us from sin as a mother washes
dirt from a child’s face, or as a person takes a burden off your back, lays it
on a goat and sends it into the wilderness. (From this, we derive our
understanding of the scapegoat.)
Mining the scriptures we discover
more than 100 references to the concept of forgiveness and our first lesson in
these is that forgiveness is God-initiated.
In Colossians 2:13 and 14, Paul
writes: “When you were dead in your sins and in the uncircumcision of your
sinful nature, God made you alive with Christ. He forgave us all our sins,
having cancelled the written code…He took it away, nailing it to the cross.”
Forgiveness is offered graciously and
readily by God.
In the gospel of Luke, we find the
story of the Prodigal Son who, having squandered his inheritance, returns home
seeking forgiveness and finds there the open and loving arms of his father who
welcomes him with great celebration.” So it is with our heavenly Father.
To receive forgiveness, we must
desire forgiveness and repent. This done, there is to be no limit to
forgiveness. In the 17th chapter of Luke, verse 4, Jesus tells His disciples that,
“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.” And in Matthew 18:22, Christ carries this further by
saying that even seven times is not enough, but seventy times seven.”
For the one extending forgiveness,
forgiveness is to be an attitude. Forgiveness, we are told in the 18th chapter of Matthew, is to come
from the heart.
In the passage from Colossians, we
find the commandment to forgive: “Bear with each other and forgive
whatever grievances you may have against one another. Forgive as the Lord
forgave you.” Be clothed with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and
patience. Be willing to forgive. Create the climate for forgiveness. Forgive.
So why do we see so little
forgiveness both inside and outside the church community? David Augsburger, in
his book, The Freedom of Forgiveness, offers us some clues. He says
forgiveness is rare because it is hard. It is the hardest thing in the
universe. It is hard because it is costly. The one who forgives, he says, pays
a tremendous price – the price of the evil he or she forgives.
Forgiveness is costly because it is
substitutional and this substitution was perfectly expressed in Jesus Christ.
Jesus Christ substituted himself for us, bearing His own wrath, His own
indignation at our sin. That’s what forgiveness costs. The sinner either bears
his own guilt – that’s cold justice – or the one sinned against may absorb what
the second party did – that’s forgiveness. And that’s what God did in Christ on
Calvary.
Bear with each other and forgive
whatever grievances you may have against one another. Forgive as the Lord
forgave you.
Forgiveness is hard. Forgiveness is
costly because it demands that kind of substitution, not the literal
substitution of our physical lives on a cross but the willingness to relieve
others of the burden of their sins against us as we reach out to them with
loving and forgiving spirits.
As Augsburger notes: “God paid the
immeasurable cost of your forgiveness. How can you hesitate to pay the
infinitely smaller cost of forgiving your brother or sister – or your enemy?”
You will know you are moving in
forgiveness when you no longer need to rerun over and over again the hurt you
suffered, when you no longer need to punish those who hurt you by rehashing the
details over and over again with whomever will listen.
You will know that you are moving in
forgiveness when you no longer have daily conversations, daily battles in your
head, with those who hurt you.
You will know that you are moving in
forgiveness when you find yourself praying that those who hurt you will be
blessed and will no longer have to suffer for the evil that they did to you or
to others.
Forgiveness can be a very slow
process and, while we may come a long way in forgiveness, we may well find
vestiges of bitterness many years post injury. We need to keep forgiving.
C.S. Lewis learned how long a process
forgiving can be. He tells the story of a perfectly awful teacher he had as a
boy. He hated what he described as that sadistic person most of his life but, a
few months before his death, he wrote to a friend: “Do you know, only a few weeks
ago, I realized that I had at last forgiven the cruel schoolmaster who so
darkened my childhood. I had been trying to do it for years.”
Essentially we cannot forgive but,
with attention to prayer and with the help of God, eventually we can. The Lord
works the miracle in us as we yield to His transforming power.
And we all want forgiveness for
ourselves.
And we all want forgiveness for
ourselves. There is a marvelous example of this desire for forgiveness in
Ernest Hemingway’s short story, “The Capitol of the World.”
In this, a father traveled to Madrid
to find his son Paco who had left the family farm after a misunderstanding.
Keep in mind here that the name Paco is a very popular name in Spain. Well, the
father, in order to meet his son, placed an ad in the newspaper which read,
“Paco, meet me at noon Tuesday in the newspaper office. All is forgiven.
Signed, your father.”
Hemingway reports there were 800
young men named Paco who arrived that Tuesday and stood in line, waiting to see
if the man might be their father who had granted them forgiveness. 800
Pacos! How many of us, if such an ad had been placed at certain times in our
lives, an ad that carried our name, wouldn’t have leapt at the opportunity for
reconciliation with our own fathers.
Well, our heavenly Father offers that
opportunity today. It is as though He has placed that same ad - the newspaper
is the Bible - and when we answer and stand before Him, He is there like the
father in the story of the Prodigal Son, ready to offer unmerited forgiveness -
the gift of forgiveness. He delights in enfolding each of His repentant
children in His loving arms. Have you called on God to forgive you? Have
you faced God and told him you're helplessly a debtor to sin and prayed for
mercy? You can be let loose from your sins in Jesus.
And God’s ready forgiveness stands
also as an example for us in our relationships with others. Forgive as the Lord
forgave you.
If you're
harboring unforgiveness, harboring grudges and hatred, you're playing with
dynamite. You're playing with fire. Just like the loose cannon in Victor Hugo's
story, unforgiveness can crash around inside you tearing your guts out, messing
with your mind, tormenting you!
In Victor Hugo’s story, the loose
cannon had to be brought under control and chained so that it couldn’t do any
more damage.
Right now, why not ask Jesus to take
you below decks? Tell him that you are willing to forgive, willing to go with
Him to take care of all the troubling things within. Tell Jesus you’re willing.
Ask Him to give you power, power to repent, power to turn from your sins, power
to say you’re sorry, power to forgive. Pray…
