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Then Peter came and said to him, “Lord, if my brother or sister sins against me, how often should I forgive? As many as seven times?” 22 Jesus said to him, “Not seven times, but, I tell you, seventy-seven[a] times. (21-22)
Many years ago when my friends and I cobbled together a variety of part-time jobs to pay the rent, one of my roommates would drag herself out of bed every morning at 4:45am for her shift at the coffee shop around the corner. There without fail, promptly at 5:30am, each morning, the same rude customer would storm in and demand a skim milk latte. Like a dragon. She grated on everyone who worked there.
And then one afternoon, my roommate turned to me: “Hey, you know the skim-latte-rude-lady who comes in every morning?”
I nodded, “oh yeah.”
“Well today,” she says to me all smug, “I made her latte with whole milk.”
“Woah,” I say, starting to grin.
“Yeah,” she says slyly. “She loved it. She actually complemented me on the coffee as she was leaving.”
I stared at her wide-eyed. “You’re amazing.” I said.
“No regrets,” she responded and we laughed.
For starters, never, ever mess with your waiter or your barista. I’ve worked in food service—I know what happens in the back room. But now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, oh vengeance feels so good, doesn’t it? If you mess with me? I’m going to make sure you feel it back!
All of us have it in us. We’ve all felt wronged at some point or another. And, all of us are guilty of having hurt someone before--sometimes intentionally, sometimes not. We when feel hurt or offended, we are hardwired to want to want to reach across the table and snatch our power or our sense of worth back
Michael McCullough is a research psychologist and I'm leaning on his work a lot across this message. He mused in one of his books that before humans developed criminal justice systems, societies managed themselves through revenge. Once upon a time your reputation as a hothead protected you and your family—mafia style. If someone knew you’d act on your anger, it was like an insurance policy that no one would mess with you.
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Revenge (even the whole milk latte kind of revenge) can make you feel like you have your hands on the wheel. Books have been written about this. Volumes. Billions of dollars in therapy processed over this. And one very irritating parable of Jesus’ has been told about this, that I’m going to get to…
But first, Jesus seems to be pulling on a much older thread in the scriptures he knew so well in this teaching from today. Jesus would have known the ancient story where Cain kills his brother Abel in this idiotic act of anger and grievance (Gen 4:1-16). The circumstances between Cain and Abel were dumb, petty (a story for another day) but after Cain kills his brother, God thunders in at him “what in the world happened?!” Cain rolls his eyes and effectively shrugs, “Who cares. Am I my brother’s keeper?” (Gen. 4:9)
Despite Cain’s awful answer, despite his inability to accept responsibility for what he did, he does experience consequences. As everything unfolds, he is ostracized. But, God mercifully protects him for the rest of his sad life and pronounces that “if anyone harms him, I’ll protect him seven times over.” In other words, while, yes, "Cain did an awful, awful thing, but keep your hands off him. The violence stops here.”
Jesus would have known how that story continued: That generations pass and the descendants seem to inherit the worst of Cain. Until one day, Cain’s wicked descendant, Lamech, kills a man (Gen 4:23-24). In Lamech’s case, no one even blinks an eye. Why would they? Lamech’s on top of the world. (Gen. 4:20-22) The Bible says his sons invented herding. Says they invented music. Invented metal working. (Maybe you didn’t know who invented herding, but after reading this, now you do). This family answers to no one. Lamech is unstoppable. And it sure seems that the more civilization advances and shines and shows off, the less anyone cares about what is the right thing to do. Moral conscience just dissolves. Who cares.(1)
Lamech murders a man and then brags to his wives that if God will protect Cain seven times over, just watch, Lamech will be protected, or rather avenged 77 times over. As in: “Touch me and I’ll bury you.” He is unstoppable.
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It’s not hard to hear the brilliant echo: “Touch me and I’ll bury you.” And Jesus says to Peter in our reading today, “wrong me and I’ll release you. Over and over and over. 77 times over.” Notice two ways of showing up in the world and each of them with profound repercussions: On one side, you’ve got unstoppable vengeance and unstoppable arrogance. While on the other, unstoppable mercy.
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I really don’t like this parable of Jesus’. Like at all. Give me the good Samaritan any day. If parables are supposed to provoke us, then guilty, I’m completely provoked. I would have never chosen this text for you this morning, the lectionary did. When I told Omar about this story the other evening, he actually grimaced and asked if I could change it, to which I pointed out that Jared has started printing the verses in the bulletins, so no, I cannot. So here goes:
In the parable, Jesus, pulls on that ancient, wise story of Cain and Lamech and tells us that a King mercifully forgives a man a debt of a gazillion dollars--unfathomable amount--owed to him by an enslaved man. (2) Good on you King, fantastic. But then, the forgiven man turns around to Another Guy who owes him a small debt and viciously demands it. When the guy can’t pay, Gazillion Dollar Man, in an act of vengeance, has him tortured. The king finds out about the derelict behavior, is furious, revokes his forgiveness, and punishes Gazillion Dollar Man severely. And Jesus ends the sweet story with “So my heavenly Father will also do to every one of you, if you do not forgive your brother or sister from your heart.” Gah.
At the very least, can we be in agreement that clearly forgiveness is a very big deal in this story? A shockingly big deal. Before this point in the scriptures, Jesus has been going on and on about how we all need to deal with conflict, repair our problems with each other and talk it out. Then he crescendos into this.
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Now, we don’t have Lamech sitting in our pews today--Lamech who killed a man in cold blood. But we do probably have the whole-milk-latte. Each one of us knows that small and delicious feeling of getting back at someone. Of turning a grievance over and over in our heads and polishing it like this precious stone. We know the feeling of nursing that certainty of how right we are and how wrong they are. We know the satisfaction going quiet, smug and withdrawing our presence to make a point.
Apparently, when you look at the brain scans of someone who has just been harmed by another—like harassed or insulted-- the part of the brain that lights up is the same part that activates when you’re thirsty or are about to get a piece of chocolate. (3) It’s a craving. Your brain craves retribution as a way to solve a problem when you’ve been wronged. But the brain also does something else: It turns out that while something in our brains is hardwired towards vengeance, another something in there is also hardwired towards cooperation.
Humans have survived and flourished because we’ve learned how to live with each other. We’re learned how to depend on each other. But (McCullough goes into this), one of the things you need for people to be able to cooperate is to be able to tolerate mistakes. We need to be able to live with people who sometimes disappoint us, misunderstand us, fail us, and at times, deeply wrong us. We need to be able to forgive each other. I don’t mean excuse everything or erase consequences. I mean stopping the cycle that Cain passed to Lamech which predicts that every injury provokes another and every wound becomes the beginning of the next one. We need to not answer every harm with vengeance.
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I think the hardest affronts to forgive are not actually with the rude lady at the coffee counter but with those closest to us like those in trusting relationships with us such as our family, church people, or friends. The problem is, Matt Skinner writes, that “people rarely find forgiveness as easy as our theology can make it sound.” (4) If anything this awful parable reminds us of how complicated, offensive and painful forgiveness actually is.
In this parable, everyone with power tanks: the king, the guy who owes a gazillion, everyone. No one reckons with their moral responsibility to their neighbor. (5) They all resort to playing by awful rules. The whole thing is a tragedy. (6)Vengeance is so much easier.
So what do we do with this?
One of you once asked me to pray for forgiveness for you. (I checked in before I shared this story). You told me that you sit in the pews week after week and you pray for forgiveness. It’s two steps forward, you explained, and one step back.
Forgiving someone rarely happens through a one time action. It happens progressively and sometimes slowly and indirectly. It’s something you hold in your hands, realize you’ve dropped and the pick it up again. Forgiveness isn’t a mood, it’s a practice. It’s a posture.It’s the daily bread that we pray for day after day. It’s the prayer that the painful affront may slowly loosen its’ grip on us.
and forgive us our trespasses
as we forgive those who trespass against us
over and over again…
Forgiveness doesn’t mean forgetting the past or acting like nothing ever happened. It doesn’t mean pain or distrust are just going to dissolve. They might linger and for good reason. I worked in a domestic abuse shelter for three years, and believe me, there are very good reasons that someone may need to be written out of the picture. Forgives involves accepting what happened and trying to keep it in the past. It means not letting resentment or vengeance grab the wheel and drive the car.
Jesus calls us to grow into people who practice this forgiveness. To build habits where we think through these hard questions of pain, guilt, accountability, conflict. Our churches are called to be a places that practices forgiveness, that tolerate mistakes and talk about them. We’re called to be a places that reaches towards cooperation—and this is not an easy call! We practice forgiveness because God tries to interrupt this age-old cycle where hurt produces hurt produces hurt produces hurt.
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Most of us don’t have Lamech in us. Most of our grudges are probably latte-sized. But they all hang in the same parking lot.
Here’s the thing about the whole milk latte. First, it’s a completely trivial example. But beyond that: the skim-milk lady never new, she loved it and complemented the coffee and returned to the café the very next morning. Nothing really changed. The the only place that grievance really lived was in my roommate. She and I texted about it a couple days ago, shared a laugh about it, and even polished the win 20 years later.
Lamech says: you hurt me and I’ll hit you back 77 times harder. Jesus says enough. You don’t have to keep track of it. You don’t have to keep polishing the win. Or pass the hurt on to someone else. And Jesus believes that by the grace of God, it can stop with us.
(2) Matt Skinner uses the word “gazillion.” I like it. "Matthew the gospel of promised blessing," Matthew Skinner, 2024. Ch. 3
(3) "Beyond Revenge" Matthew McCullough, (2008)
(4) Skinner, (2024). Ch. 3
(5) See again Sacks interpretation re: Cain and Able
(6) Skinner calls it a "tragedy"
