“Stephen Felker, How Often Should I Forgive?” is a story told of two friends who were walking through the desert. At some point in the journey they had an argument, and one friend slapped the other in the face. The one who got slapped was hurt, but without saying anything, wrote in the sand, “Today my best friends slapped me in the face.”
They kept on walking until they found an oasis, where they decided to take a bath. The one who had been slapped got stuck in the mire and started drowning, but the friend saved him. After he recovered from nearly drowning, he wrote on a stone, “Today my best friend saved my life.”
His friend asked him, “After I hurt you, you wrote in the sand, and now, you write on a stone. Why?” The other friend replied, “When someone hurts us we should write it down in sand where winds of forgiveness can erase it away. But, when someone does something good for us, we must engrave it in stone where no wind can ever erase it.”
So real forgiveness keeps on leaving the sins of others and our hurts in the past. Yet Jesus understands the difficulty of such forgiveness. To keep on forgiving is a God-like characteristic. It is contrary to human nature. So He gives a parable beginning in verse 23 that will help us obey His commandment to keep on forgiving.
Some while back someone visited an online greeting card website to send an electronic anniversary card to some friends. As they were glancing through this website’s menu of choices, they noticed they had a separate category of cards devoted to “Forgiveness.” Since that is a pretty vital theological category, they naturally were drawn to check out those cards. Mostly they were humorous and intended to be used for relatively minor hurts. “Forget about it” and “Don’t worry about it” were the sentiments of two cards. Another expressed forgiveness by saying, “Everybody is a work in progress.”
Strikingly, however, on this website, as probably in most Hallmark stores, forgiveness cards were categorized right along with birthday and get-well cards. That is, they were what could be called “Occasional Cards.” You don’t send a “Get Well” card just any old time, but occasionally, you need such a sentiment, and that’s when you purchase and send just such a card. So also you may not need a forgiveness card very often, but once in a while such a thing may be handy. Seen this way, forgiveness becomes a “now and then” matter. No doubt this reflects the way a lot of people think. But it cuts against the grain of the New Testament and of a passage like Matthew 18, where the assumption of Jesus seems to be that forgiveness is an ongoing, daily reality for each one of us. Not only are we ourselves forgiven on a regular basis by God and by others, but we must then turn around and forgive those who have hurt us. It’s not an occasional reality. It’s every day.
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