A sermon on Isaiah 43:18-25, Psalm 41 & Mark 2:1-12 by Nathan Nettleton

As most of you know, I have a dog named Jaz. Jaz is somewhat obsessive by nature, not unusual for a dog of her breeding, and one of her very favourite toys is a rather grotty old piece of rope with which she loves to play tug-of-war. A bloke once tried to find out how long she could keep it up, but he gave up after forty minutes with no sign of her backing down. If you just tied it to a post, she wouldn’t bother – it is important to Jaz that there be someone on the other end with whom to do battle, and she likes to do it with lots of vigorous jerking and shaking and plenty of growling sound effects. It gets especially noisy if our other dog, Rocky, gets on the other end, but he’s not usually as interested. Once when Jaz was still only about a quarter of Rocky’s size she lost several teeth when she refused to let go and he ripped the rope out of her mouth. The image of Jaz with her rope is obviously a common enough one, because the phrase “like a dog with bone” has become a common description for someone who hangs on tenaciously and won’t ever let go.

Now I want to suggest this evening that the image of Jaz and her rope might be one that can help us enter more fully into the experience of the gospel as we live it in the world and as we experience it the liturgy each week.

There was a line in the Psalm we read before that certainly made me squirm, and I imagine it did for many of you too. In the first part the Psalmist described how enemies had sought to make his life a misery, and how even some of his closest friends had turned against him. And then late in the psalm he prays, ”Pity me, God, restore me so I can pay them back!” That’s not a prayer we would usually associate with a mind shaped by the gospel. “God, make me strong enough to inflict as much cruelty on them as they’ve inflicted on me!”

It might not be very religious, but I bet we can all relate to it. Am I right? It is a basic expression of the desire for justice – an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. What goes around, comes around. You reap what you sow. And especially when we have been hurt or felt threatened by someone else’s evil actions, whether directly or through someone else we feel close to, then we all know within ourselves the hunger to see them repaid. And most of us would recognise within ourselves, at least in part, the desire to be the one who inflicts the retribution, or if not then at least to witness it. It is no surprise that in places where executions, floggings or judicial mutilations are public events, they always draw a crowd.

This desire for pay-back or retribution is not only more or less universal, it is understandable, and I’d even go so far as to say it’s OK. It is not a desire you need to feel ashamed off. If someone has genuinely wronged you it is OK to feel angry and to want to see them reap what they’ve sown. I am probably sailing pretty close to the winds of heresy here, but I don’t think there is actually any situation where we have really been hurt where God says “You must forgive.” God knows our anger. God knows our hurt. God knows our desire for justice, for just deserts for the perpetrator. I don’t think that God’s first response when we have been hurt is ever to start talking about our need to forgive. God’s first move, always, as we have seen in Jesus, is to get in there along side those who have been hurt, to stand in solidarity with the victims and cop the hurt with them. Forgiveness is an optional extra not a moral imperative. You are not committing a sin if you choose to stay angry and to continue to want pay-back.

BUT. Although you are allowed to do that, it doesn’t mean that it is good for you. As the Apostle Paul said, “All things may be lawful to me, but not everything is beneficial.”

When we we’ve been wronged or hurt by someone, that hurt nearly always becomes the dominating feature of the relationship for us. And the more we hang onto it and pursue it, the more we become like Jaz with her rope. The hunger for vengeance becomes something we sink our teeth into and we just won’t let go. We tug and pull and shake and growl and we don’t let up no matter what. And as I said, that is our right. We have been hurt and we have every right to pursue it. But when you see Jaz focussed on that rope, she doesn’t have a life apart from that rope. It becomes the only thing that matters. It becomes all consuming. And for us, the danger is that in our single minded pursuit of justice, we will end up destroying ourselves much more fully than we’ll achieve justice. We’ll end up losing our teeth as we cling to the rope.

The only way to end the struggle is to put the rope down. The proposal to put it down can come from either end of the rope, but only the victim of the hurt can end it. The perpetrator is tied to the rope – in fact for them it is more like a tail. All they can do is repent, apologise and ask the victim to put it down. If the victim says “No” and they have every right to say “No”, that’s just tough, the rope will continue to be tugged and there is nothing the perpetrator can do about it. You reap what you sow.

The victim of the hurt is the one with the freedom here. You can choose to put it down anytime, whether the perpetrator asks you too or not. The fact that they’ve never apologised doesn’t force you to live your whole life tugging on the rope. You are free to do so, but if you choose to do so you are allowing their actions to dictate the whole future course of your life and at some point you may want to ask whether it is worth it. To forgive is simply to put the rope down – to voluntarily lay aside your right to pursue just retribution for the hurt caused you. It is giving up the desire to repay the hurt, or even to keep tug tug tugging on the rope to constantly remind them of their guilt and thus extract revenge piece by piece. It is the willingness to “forget” and go back to relating as though you had not been hurt. You can’t literally forget, and there may be some permanent scars, but you can choose to pursue love instead of justice. The extent of love possible, is of course, dependent on the reaction of the one you are forgiving, but the ability to let go of the anger and hurt is not.

When God says “Vengeance is mine,” I don’t think he’s saying it’s none of your business, I think God’s saying, “You can let it go and don’t worry about the quest for vengeance.” Because if that perpetrator doesn’t respond to forgiveness with repentance, then what they’ve done will destroy them anyway. You can forgive, get on with your life, and leave the justice and repentance issues to be sorted out between the perpetrator and God. You don’t have to worry that if you forgive and they don’t repent they get of scot free. A lack of repentance will destroy a person’s life much faster than a lack of forgiveness, because a lack of repentance is a refusal to live in reality, and that sort of denial screws you right up. Lack of forgiveness, by contrast is simply a fixation on one bit of reality that can prevent us from living freely and fully. At least it is in touch with reality – it just may not be the best part of reality to spend your whole life in.

Now, let me bring this back to our experience of the gospel and particularly to the way we celebrate that in the liturgy each week. The whole issue of forgiveness, and the grace that offers forgiveness where it is not deserved and perhaps not even requested, is central to what we gather to celebrate and to what we experience more and more deeply as we live more fully into this worship.

As I’ve said before, and you know well enough, in celebrating this liturgy we are undertaking a journey from the places of our ordinary lives to the banqueting room of heaven and then back. And when we undertake that journey we are inevitably confronted with the wrong we have done and the hurt we have caused. We hear the question, “Who shall ascend to the hill of the Lord and who may stand in God’s holy place?” And we know the answer, “Those with clean hands and pure hearts, who do not act falsely and do not swear deceitfully.” And already we know that we are in trouble. We have just ruled ourselves out from undertaking this journey. “How then dare we approach God’s holy presence?” And we hear the assurance that we have freedom to go into the most holy place because Jesus has opened a new way, a way which is not based on our righteousness but on his graciousness. And so, rejoicing in our identity as those baptised into this new way, we enter the gates of heaven with a song of joy on our lips.

But the minute we enter those gates we feel unworthy to be there. In the joyous light of God’s presence we feel naked and ashamed. Suddenly we are conscious deep in our bones that God has searched us and known us, that everything we are is open to God. It is like our whole life flashes before us and we are horribly aware not only of the wrong we have done, but of the right we have turned away from and left undone. Suddenly we feel like a dog with a mouthful of rope and a serious case of lockjaw. So we fall to our knees in crying, “Lord have mercy. Christ have mercy. Lord have mercy.”

And at that point comes one of those amazing and holy moments of revelation. God says, “Well I’ve already put the rope down.” In the words of our reading from Isaiah, “Though you have not brought me offerings and though you have piled up your sins, I, the Lord, am the one who blots out your wrongdoings, for my own sake, and I will not remember your sins.” It’s done, whether you repent or not. Jesus was just making a statement of fact when he told the bloke lowered through the roof, “Your sins are forgiven.” The healing had to be done on the spot, but the forgiveness was just bringing him up to date on what God had already done. God, who you had wronged, has already put the rope down and if you don’t feel forgiven it is because you haven’t followed suit and put your end down. You’ve got rope still tangling round your ankles!

You are welcome into the banqueting room of heaven because God has forgiven you. Everyone is welcome in the banqueting room of heaven because God has forgiven them. God has put down the rope, unilaterally, with no conditions. You are now free to put down your end and walk into that banquet as a free person. But not everyone will. Some are not willing to let go and refuse to respond to grace by living as new people, freed from the entanglement of their particular patterns of sin. You can lead a horse to water…

And let me add one strange fact here, before closing. When you’re tangled up in rope and not letting go, it becomes impossible to see which bits of rope are which. When we pray in a few moments saying to God, “Forgive us our sins and we forgive those who sin against us,” you begin to see how tangled the rope gets. At one level that’s an unnecessary prayer, because God has forgiven us, does forgive us and will forgive us whether we ask for it or not, and whether we forgive others or not. But our ability to experience forgiveness and to therefore walk free in the joy of forgiveness is another matter. And when we are talking about our experience of forgiveness, suddenly that prayer makes perfect sense. “Let us experience you putting down the rope as we put down the ropes of those who sin against us.” Unless you experience the liberation of voluntarily forgiving others, you’ll probably never really believe that God is forgiving you. Most people don’t believe in forgiveness until they try it. If you want to enjoy the fullest possible experience of forgiveness, don’t hold onto any ropes. Ask forgiveness or offer forgiveness, which ever end of the rope you’ve got, and thus set yourself free. You don’t have to, and even if you do, the person you forgive may just as likely refuse your forgiveness and live as they always lived, spurning their invitation to the banquet of new life. Those who aren’t into forgiving usually refuse to be forgiven, but what they do to themselves is beyond your control.

The unchangeable fact that we celebrate here every time we gather is that God has put down our rope. We are forgiven. We are set free. We are welcome to eat and drink at the table of life with heads held high. And if that experience enables us to become people of grace who can forgive others then our enjoyment of the bread and cup of mercy will be all the sweeter.

Jaz will never put down her rope, but before we even asked God has put down our ropes. So come, let’s celebrate God’s forgiveness at the table and stop tugging old ropes around.