THE SCANDAL OF FORGIVENESS

11th Sunday in Ordinary Time

            Johann Christoph Arnold was strangely drawn to murderers and the victims of unspeakable horrors.  His accounts are preserved in his book, Why Forgive?  The stories I share with you today come from this book.  We begin with a murderer named Karla Faye Tucker.  Many of us will remember her as the pretty, petite young woman who had turned to God in prison, the young prisoner with the peaceful, angelic smile.  Johann Christoph Arnold interviewed a man named Ron Carlson.  He is the brother of the woman Ms. Tucker had murdered.  Ms. Tucker’s victim was named Deborah.  “Deborah was my sister,” said Ron Carlson, “and she raised me.”  The crime came about as the murderers had come over to the house where Deborah was staying.  Their goal was to steal motorcycle parts.  When they discovered Jerry Dean, the guy Deborah was with, they hacked him to death.  When they found Deborah, they killed her, too.  She had dozens of puncture wounds, and the pick-ax that made them remained stuck in her heart.  Eventually two people were arrested and convicted of Deborah’s murder:  Daniel Ryan Garret, who later died in prison, and Karla Faye Tucker.

            Let’s get right to the point.  What I want you to know is that Ron Carlson decided one day to forgive Karla Faye Tucker.  He forgave the woman who brutally murdered his sister Deborah.  Hard to believe.  It blows the mind.  Ron Carlson forgave Karla Faye Tucker.  Johann Christoph Arnold traces Ron’s spiritual journey from his desire for revenge to his decision to forgive.  “I was glad they were caught, of course,” Ron remembers, “but I wanted to kill them myself.”  Indeed, Ron wanted to do to them what they had done to his sister.  “I wanted to bury that pick-ax in Karla’s heart, just like she had buried it in my sister’s,” he later confessed.  Ron tried to cope by abusing alcohol, LSD, marijuana, or whatever he could get his hands on.  He was angry, understandably.  But because he wasn’t dealing positively with his anger, he would lash out at his wife.  He even desired to kill himself.  One night, when he couldn’t take it any more, he opened a Bible and he began to read.  After reading about how Jesus was crucified, he slammed the Bible shut.  “For some reason,” he later said, “it struck me like it never had before:  My God, they even killed Jesus!”  He dropped to his knees.  He asked God to come into his life, to be Lord of his life.  He meant it.  We can be sure, because he was a changed man.  He wanted to forgive his sister’s killer.  He wanted to forgive Karla Faye Tucker.  In person.  He learned that she was in town, at the Harris County Jail.  “When I got there,” he said, “I walked up to her and told her that I was Deborah’s brother.  I didn’t say anything else at first.  She looked at me and said, ‘You are who?’  I repeated myself, and she still stared, like she just couldn’t believe what she was hearing.  Then she started to cry.  I said, ‘Karla, whatever comes out of all this, I want you to know that I forgive you, and that I don’t hold anything against you.’  At this point,” Ron Carlson said, “all my hatred and anger was taken away.  It was like some great weight had been lifted off my shoulders.”  Ron had done what he set out to do.  He had forgiven Karla Faye Tucker in person.  Face to face.  He had forgiven the one who had killed his sister.

            Well, isn’t that like saying, “What you did doesn’t matter”?  When you look at it, it seems that forgiveness wipes the slate clean, as if the crime never happened.  It seems to gloss over the reality that a horrible thing has been done.  Forgiveness seems to diminish the harsh reality that family members of murdered victims suffer real pain and anguish and unspeakable loss.  Forgiveness seems to say, “None of this really matters.  It’s all forgotten.”  Well, it’s not all forgotten, nor should it ever be.  The senseless killing we see on the news happening all over the globe, it all matters.  Valuable human beings, all children of God, are being wiped out like ants.  But they matter.  They have families who grieve over their loss.  Such things must never be forgotten.  That’s why people erect memorials.  These memorials, great or small, cry out, “We will never forget!”

            Look!  Decent people have to stand up for what is right.  If the good people in the world were to forget all of the wrongdoing around us and simply say, “It’s okay; all’s forgotten,” we would only invite wrongdoing to flourish.  Can’t you understand the position of Simon the Pharisee in our gospel lesson?  He is a good and respectable man in the community.  He is a religious leader.  And here comes a woman of ill repute.  She’s known in the community as a sinner.  We can guess what type.  In any case, she’s an evildoer.  Jesus says to her, “Your sins are forgiven.”  We don’t even hear the woman ask for forgiveness.  We do know the inner thoughts of Simon.  “If this man were a prophet, he would have known who and what kind of woman this is who is touching him—that she is a sinner.”  Simon doesn’t think much of Jesus letting this woman ply him with her unseemly attentions.  Announcing forgiveness of this sinful woman seems to treat sin as if it were nothing, like wrongdoing doesn’t really matter.

            Of course, those who think that way don’t understand the meaning of forgiveness.  Forgiveness never means that wrongdoing doesn’t matter.  Forgiveness never diminishes the reality that someone has been hurt because some horrible wrong has been done.  No.  Instead, forgiveness has to overcome the hurt that is felt.  Forgiveness has to overcome the desire to exact revenge.  Forgiveness, indeed, is giving up one’s right to seek revenge.  “When we forgive someone for a mistake or a deliberate hurt,” Johann Christoph Arnold writes, “we still recognize it as such, but instead of lashing out or biting back, we attempt to see beyond it, so as to restore our relationship with the person responsible for it.”  He continues, “Our forgiveness may not take away our pain—it may not even be acknowledged or accepted—yet the act of offering it will keep us from being sucked into the downward spiral of resentment.  It will also guard us against the temptation of taking out our anger or hurt on someone else.”  Arnold tells the story of Jane, a woman who claimed she could no longer love.  Her husband lay dying, but somehow she was unable to comfort him.  She was “as unfeeling as a rock,” Arnold writes.  “She really could not love.”  Why not?  After months of counseling it was learned that Jane was unable to forgive.  “She couldn’t point to a single large hurt,” Arnold notes, “but emotionally she was tied down—in fact, almost completely incapacitated—by the collective weight of a thousand small grudges.”  Eventually Jane was able to overcome this problem, and she was able to rediscover the joy of living.  Forgiveness, you see, is not saying, “Oh, it’s okay.”  No.  Forgiveness says, “It’s not okay.  I was hurt terribly.  Nevertheless, I give up my right to take revenge.  I let go if it.  I let go of it for your good, and I let go of it for my own good.”

            Maybe we should stop right here and see who we are.  We saw ourselves as decent people like Simon the Pharisee.  And we are.  Sometimes we may be like Simon in that we may overlook our own need of forgiveness.  Still, we are the ones who are forgiven.  We should be glad that Jesus turns to people, like that sinful woman at Simon’s dinner party, and says, “Your sins are forgiven.”  That’s what we need to hear!  Aren’t we sinners?  I am.  How about you?  I have memories that haunt me, memories of stupid and wrong things that I have done.  I’m not always a decent person.  I am also a sinner who is a beggar for grace.  I’m like the sinful woman at Simon’s house.  I don’t deserve forgiveness.  But Jesus Christ says to me, “Your sins are forgiven.”  He says the same thing to you, too.  “Your sins are forgiven.”  Not because we deserve it.  “. . . I know people don’t think I deserve forgiveness,” Karla Fay Tucker said.  “But who does deserve it?” she added.  No one who has rebelled against God, of course.  Forgiveness is always given as a free, yet costly gift.  It cost God his own Son dying on the cross for us.  Divine forgiveness overcomes the power of sin to cause us to be estranged from God by our rebellion.  Forgiveness comes “at the right time,” according to the apostle Paul.  “For while we were still weak,” Paul wrote the Romans, “at the right time Christ died for the ungodly . . . God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us.”  And so Karla Faye Tucker said what any of us could say:  “I’ve been given a new life, and the hope—the promise—that this is not the final reality.”  You see who we are now?  We are the sinful woman at Jesus’ feet.  We’re the ones who need divine forgiveness.  We’re the ones who hear Jesus, the Son of God, say to us with divine authority, “Your sins are forgiven.”

            That being so, there is something we must do.  We who are the forgiven must become the forgiving.  We who have received grace must now offer forgiveness to those who have wronged us.  It is not fitting for the forgiven to withhold forgiveness.  Jesus’ instructions are radical but unmistakable.  “Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you. . . .  Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful.”  That night when Ron Carlson turned his life over to God, he was reading the Bible, remember?  Ron read the line from the Lord’s Prayer that says “forgive us as we forgive.”  Ron remembers his internal struggle that night.  He said to himself, “I can’t do that, I could never do that.”  But God seemed to be saying back to him, “Well, Ron, you can’t.  But through me you can.”  That’s when he decided to see Karla Faye Tucker in jail.  “People just couldn’t understand it,” Ron later said.  “They said something was obviously wrong with me—that I should hate the person who killed Deborah, not reach out to her.”  Karla Faye Tucker spoke to a Dutch television crew shortly before her execution.  About Ron’s forgiveness, she said, “It’s unbelievable.  Amazing.”  It is, isn’t it?  But it is the fitting thing.  God’s forgiveness of us is amazing.  So why shouldn’t our forgiveness of others be the same?