Granting Forgiveness

Highland Avenue Church of the Brethren

Pastor Katie Shaw Thompson – March 27, 2022

Granting Forgiveness – Luke 15: 11-32

This is not the first time we have read the story of the Prodigal Son together since I have been your pastor. We have come to this well-known story several times in the past six and a half years, and over the years what I have heard from a number of you is how much you identify with the older son.

Truth be told, I do, too. Like many of you, my identity was formed early as a rule follower, a good student, and a compliant member of my community. I have been guilty, like the Pharisees, of expecting that all my good rule-following would make me favored by God and get all the good things I deserve. Like the older son and the Pharisees who are grumbling at the beginning of this chapter because Jesus is eating with tax collectors and sinners, I, too, have been disappointed and even angry when I have learned that God and life don’t work the way I expected.

Mean, mistaken, and even violent people sometimes seem to have all the luck in the world. And those who are suffering at the hands of their own mistakes or from a human-made system that puts only bad choices before them, are the ones in Bible times and now for whom Jesus has a special concern.

In the story, the older brother refuses to join the feast. He’s too angry. We don’t know if the father’s explanation moves him or not. We don’t know for sure if he ever goes in. Perhaps it’s up to the original hearers, the Pharisees, and today’s hearers, us, to decide what we will do. All I know, is that when I sit with the older son, refusing to go in, I realize that my refusal to soften my heart locks me out of the party and puts me in the position of the lost.

Like the Pharisees, if I set up a dichotomy in my mind of myself as all good and my brother as all bad, I lose sight of our shared humanity and I lock myself out of the party in a world of hurt. It’s only when I allow myself to hear the heart of the parent who rejoices in the returned sibling, that I can accept that it’s okay for me to be my own flawed and forgiven self, and it’s okay for others to be their own flawed and forgiven selves, too. It’s a hard lesson for me and for the older brother to hear: that it’s not my striving for goodness that saves me from that locked-out fate. Rather, it’s my acceptance of the healing power of forgiveness for us all that allows me to come to the party.

After all, if we’re honest, I think we all have parts of us that are the younger son, too. We have made mistakes. We have hurt others. Even if we have kept a balanced household budget, the degradation of our shared planet shows us how we have collectively lived beyond our means for far too long, and our generation will have to answer to our children and grandchildren for that all too “loose living.”

Destitute and humiliated, the younger son remembers that the nature of his father is to take good care of even the lowliest members of the household. So, he decides to return home to humbly ask forgiveness.

This lesson is the one the tax collectors, mistake makers, and social outcasts learn, too, I imagine, when they are welcomed to the table alongside Jesus. They learn that persistent graciousness, joy, and festivity are characteristics of the nature of God. Like the father who sees the younger son coming from far away, God, too, runs to meet us and gathers us up in the warm embrace of forgiveness, no matter what we have done or where we have been.

God forgives. God forgives. God unconditionally forgives.

Sometimes, we can, too.

In the Tutus’ The Book of Forgiving, “granting forgiveness” is the third step of the four-fold path of forgiveness after we have first told the story and named the pain.

In the movie Encanto it’s the song Mariposa in which Mirabel is able to see her grandmother’s shared humanity and forgive her for the unreasonable expectations that have caused real harm to her family.

In The Book of Forgiving, Ben Bosinger tells his story of granting forgiveness for his father.[1] For the first eleven years of his life, he writes, all he remembered was fear–life or death fear of his violently abusive father who tortured, humiliated, beat, and terrorized Ben and his siblings until his mother was able to leave.  

Ben grew up angry, too. Ben caused hurt to his own children, hated himself for it, and hated his dad all the more. His dad never apologized. His dad never made amends. His dad never became a different person. But one day, Ben decided to forgive his dad anyway. He turned spontaneously up his dad’s driveway on his motorcycle. There in the driveway he talked to his dad about their shared love for all things motorcycle. There in the driveway he noticed his dad’s growing wrinkles and long gray hair. There in the driveway he saw another flawed human and without saying a word out loud to his dad, forgave him.

It didn’t make everything okay. It didn’t change his dad in that moment. But it changed Ben. “I felt lighter. The world seemed a more hopeful place. I learned not to take things so personally, and I learned that I was the only one responsible for what kind of father I turned out to be to my children…When I forgave my father…I was free… It saved me.”  

In church, we often talk about God’s forgiveness for us saving us. I haven’t heard so much talk about how saving and healing it is for us to grant forgiveness the way God grants forgiveness. But even when I read Ben’s words I feel lighter. And when I imagine myself in the place of the father running to meet the younger son I feel joy. I feel it in my body, in my bones, in my heart, and in my gut.

That’s what the story says about the father. It says, “But while he was still far off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion.” The Greek word for compassion here is splagchnizomai. One of its meanings is “to have the bowels yearn.”

It reminds me of all the neuroscience in The Book of Forgiving about how the body processes trauma and about how healing it is–in scientifically measurable ways–for the brain and body to release that trauma by granting forgiveness. It doesn’t require repentance. It’s not reconciliation. That’s a different choice we can choose to try for or not. We’ll talk about that next week.

But forgiveness is a profound expression of compassion–the yearning in our guts to loosen our hold on the pain and to not have to carry the weight of the world in our muscles and bones. We can let go. Let go. Let go.

We will be all the characters in this parable in the course of our lives.

We will be the jealous brother in need of humility.

We will be the wayward brother in need of forgiveness.

We will be the wronged one with the opportunity to forgive.

Whatever turn we are taking right now, God invites us to the party of graciousness and joy. What will it take for us to accept the invitation to join the feast?

                                                   May we all be welcomed in by and by. Amen.

[1] Desmond Tutu and Mpho Tutu. The Book of Forgiving. (New York: Harper One, 2014), 129-132.