Few of us will have the opportunity of granting forgiveness on any kind of a grand scale. CNN will probably never pester us for an interview, offering us a stage on which to express our magnanimity. Instead, our challenge is to make both repentance and forgiveness part of the fabric of our daily lives. Why? Because sin is so daily.
Some of the most difficult offenses to forgive, whether they are large or small, are committed by people I call "beloved enemies," the people we live with, work with, and attend church with--the people we care about most. Family and friends have the ability to hurt us in ways that strangers often do not. For one thing, they know us well. That means they are aware of our vulnerabilities. For another, we are in far more frequent contact with them. As a result their offenses pile up. It's one thing to forgive a past offense but quite another to forgive something that has happened more than once and that might happen again in the future. The husband who has a habit of belittling his wife; the mother who berates her children; the teenager who pushes every boundary in sight--habitual offenses can take time and effort to change.
In Matthew 18:21 Peter asks Jesus how many times he should forgive someone who sins against him, tentatively suggesting that perhaps seven times would be about right. This would have sounded generous to Peter and his contemporaries. But Jesus does not commend his star pupil for answering correctly. Instead he replies,"I tell you, not seven times, but seventy-seven times." The note in the NIV Bible suggests an alternative translation of "seventy times seven," which is 490 times! But the advice Jesus gives Peter is even more extreme than this. By using the phrase "seventy-seven times," Jesus is deliberately alluding to the only other place in the Bible where this particular phrase appears.
You may remember that the first murder is recorded in the fourth chapter of the Bible, which tells the story of Cain and his unfortunate brother, Abel. Then, in Genesis 4:23-24 we meet one of Cain's ill-tempered descendants, a man by the name of Lamech, who promises to pay back his enemies not just seven times (a number of completeness in the Bible) but seventy-seven times. Clearly Lamech's thirst for revenge went far beyond anything that would have been considered fair or complete by his contemporaries. By repeating the distinctive phrase, "seventy-seven times," Jesus was invoking the story of Lamech, only he was advocating a complete reversal, implying that his disciples should let their forgiveness exceed what anyone else might think of as complete or fair. They were to forgive lavishly, generously, persistently.
The forgiveness Christ advocated and practiced is disarming, surprising, and creative, opening paths to peace both inside the one who forgives and inside the one who is forgiven.
Do you remember the story of one of the Bible's most dysfunctional families? It's the story of Joseph and the brothers who sold him into slavery (Genesis 37; 39-50). The roots of the story stretch back into family history, with a dynamic of favoritism that began with Abraham, continued with Isaac, and then carried on into the life of Jacob. This plague of favoritism reached its apex with Jacob's preference for Joseph above all Jacob's other sons. Consumed by jealousy, the sons conspired to sell their brother into slavery.
In one of the great reversals of history, Joseph, the slave, becomes a man of wisdom and power, a great ruler in Egypt. His unwitting brothers come to Joseph during a famine, begging for bread. In one of Genesis's most memorable scenes, Joseph reveals himself to his brothers, saying, "I am your brother Joseph, the one you sold into Egypt! And now, do not be distressed and do not be angry with yourselves for selling me here, because it was to save lives that God sent me ahead of you. For two years now there has been famine in the land, and for the next five years there will be no plowing and reaping. But God sent me ahead of you to preserve for you a remnant on earth and to save your lives by a great deliverance" (Genesis 45:4-7).
Notice how Joseph reframes the memory of his painful exile, placing it within the context of God's larger purposes. Then he treats his treacherous brothers with shocking grace, extending forgiveness and welcome. Joseph's gesture is so unexpected and so powerful that it has far-reaching effects, helping to halt the transmission of the family sin of favoritism to future generations. Finally, the "beloved enemy" has been transformed into the beloved.
