Romans 14.1-12, Matthew 18.21-35
The Fourteenth Sunday after Trinity, 17 September 2017
West Camel, Queen Camel, Weston Bampfylde
Imagine a world where there is no debt. Imagine a world of absolute forgiveness.
You don’t need to imagine it. It already exists.
Let me tell you the story of Rami Elhanan. He is sixty-seven years old, a professional man, the seventh generation of a Jerusalem family. He is a Jew, an Israeli, “and before everything else”, he says of himself, “I am a human being”. [1]
When Rami Elhanan tells his personal story he begins and also ends it on one particular day of the Jewish calendar - Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar, observed by even the most secular Jews: 25 hours of fasting, prayer, and synagogue services focussed on atonement and repentance. This year Yom Kippur begins on the evening of September 29th, next week, so it seems timely to be telling Rami’s story today. [2]
On Yom Kippur in October 1973, Rami was a young reserve soldier finding himself all of a sudden in the midst of a terrible war. He set out in a company with 11 tanks which returned with only 3 tanks. “There, in the Sinai sands, I lost some of my very best friends,” he says.
“I came out of this war a beaten and battered young man - an angry and embittered, cynical and furious young man. I was determined to cut myself off from any sort of involvement - political, social, or anything else. I was released from the army and built me a life: studies, family, career.”
A decade later, on Yom Kippur evening 1983, a sweet new baby girl was born in Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem to Rami and his wife Nurit. They named their daughter Smadar, from the Bible, the Song of Solomon, meaning ‘The Grape of the Vine’. He said of her, “She was a very vivid, smiling, happy, full of life and active young girl who joined our calm, happy family, and so we lived complacently, my wife Nurit, my three sons and this princess, in a bubble that we built around ourselves.”
That was until, on the 4th September 1997, this bubble of theirs was smashed to smithereens.
On the first day of the school year, a few days before Yom Kippur, Smadar and her friends went to Ben Yehuda Street in Jerusalem to buy books for the new school year. There, they met their death, killed by two Palestinian suicide bombers who murdered five people that day, among them three little girls aged 14. Rami remembers it vividly: “It was a Thursday at three in the afternoon - and the beginning of a long night, cold and dark,” he said, and this is how he describes what followed:
“At first in the depths of your heart you hope that the terrible finger won't point at you this time. You find yourself running crazily through the streets, going from one police station to the next, one hospital to the next, until eventually, much later in that long accursed night, you find yourself in the morgue and this terrible finger is right between your eyes and you see a sight that you will never, ever, be able to blot out.”
On the following Sunday the funeral was held in Kibbutz Nachshon, on the green hill on the way to Jerusalem. Smadar was buried next to her late grandfather ‘Matti’ Peled, a well-known Israeli public figure who was, at various periods of his life, a Major General in the Israel Defense Forces, head of Arabic Language and Literature at Tel Aviv University, a respected member of the Knesset and a radical peace activist, a leading proponent of Israeli dialogue with the PLO and of complete withdrawal from the Occupied Territories in whose conquest he had personally played a major role. [3]
“The fact that the enemies of peace murdered his granddaughter drew huge attention in Israel and abroad,” says Rami Elhanan. “And as at his funeral, so at hers the mourners represented all the nuances that make up the wonderful mosaic of this unbelievable country - Jews and Arabs, left-wingers and right-wingers, religious and secular people, from the representatives of the settlers in the Occupied Territories to the personal representatives of chairman Yasser Arafat.”
After the funeral, at the end of the seven day traditional mourning period called the Shiva, on the eighth day after everyone disappeared and the family were alone, came the time of challenge for Rami. “Now,” he says, “you must marshal your strength, get up, face yourself in the mirror and decide: what's next? Where do you go from here? Where do you direct this new and terrible pain, this unknown and intolerable ache? What do you do with the rest of your life when suddenly you have become a completely different person, and all your previous priorities have dissipated in a trance and it's as though they never existed?
“And really there are only two options to choose from, only one of two paths to tread: the first is the obvious one, the automatic, and the immediate. When someone murders your 14 year old little daughter, the one and only thing you have in your head is unlimited anger and an urge for revenge that is stronger than death. This is a natural feeling, it's only human. Most people feel that way, it's understandable, it's clear and predictable. However, we are human beings and not animals. We have a head on our shoulders and inside that head we have a brain and when the first madness of anger passes, you begin to ask yourself penetrating questions: if I kill someone in revenge, will that bring my baby back to me? And if I cause someone pain, will that ease my own pain? And the answer is absolutely "No". Then, during a long and slow, difficult and painful process you gradually reach the other road, and you try to understand: what occurred here? What can drive someone to such anger and despair as to be willing to blow himself up together with little girls? And most important: what can you, personally, do to prevent this intolerable suffering from others…”
To reach that point of understanding took Rami almost a year. And then one day he met a man called Yitzchak Frankenthal. He told Rami about his son Arik, kidnapped and murdered by Hamas in 1994, and that he had established an organisation of people who lost children in the conflict but nevertheless want peace. Rami then remembered that this man was one of the thousands who had been to his home during Shiva and Rami was really cross with him. He asked: “How could you?! How dare you enter the home of people who have just lost a child and talk to them about peace?” Frankenthal was not offended, but “with great calm and patience” he invited Rami to attend one of these meetings to see for himself. Rami agreed, partly so as not to insult the man and partly from curiosity.
When he arrived at that first meeting he saw holocaust survivors, bereaved Jewish parents, and also what he calls “an amazing spectacle”, something that was completely new to him. He saw Arabs, bereaved Palestinian families: men, women and children, coming towards him, greeting him for peace, hugging him and crying with him. He says, “I distinctly remember a respectable elderly woman dressed in black from tip to toe and on her breast a locket with a picture of a kid, about six years old…”
“I am not religious - quite the opposite,” Rami says, “and so I am at a loss to explain the change I underwent at that moment. But one thing became as clear to me as the sun at noon: from that day on in 1998, I got a reason to get out of bed in the morning. Since that day on I have dedicated my life to one thing only: to go from ear to ear and from person to person and to shout in a loud voice, to all who are prepared to listen, and also to those whose ears are blocked: This is not our destiny! It is not a decree of fate that cannot be changed!!! Nowhere is it written that we must continue dying and sacrificing our children forever and forever in this difficult horrible holy land. We can - and once and for all must - stop this crazy vicious circle of violence, murder and retaliation, revenge and punishment. This never-ending cycle, with no purpose. With no winners and only with losers.”
The group he joined is called The Parents Circle Families Forum, a grassroots organisation of bereaved Palestinians and Israelis which promotes reconciliation as an alternative to hatred and revenge. Through that organisation Rami Elhanan, together with his Israeli and Palestinian brothers and sisters, put across this message of peace. They have created a world where these two peoples are committed to releasing the other from the debts they owe them. They have imagined a world of absolute forgiveness - and are working hard to bring it into being. [4]
Jesus told a story about a man who had been forgiven a great debt, but who then went on to act mercilessly towards someone who owed him a far smaller debt. This is a story about a man who had been shown the door into a world of absolute forgiveness, but having received its benefits, immediately turned his back on it and returned to the old world of unforgiving repayment and retribution. This is a story fit for contemplation at Yom Kippur, a story fit for our consideration today and every day.
Imagine a world where there is no debt. Imagine a world of absolute forgiveness. We don’t need to imagine it. It exists. And the door to it is open to each one of us. It is for us to step inside; it is for us to decide whether to stay there or return to the old world of unforgiveness. And… it is for us to face the consequences of our choices.
Jesus taught his disciples to pray, “Forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.” [5]
Notice how that prayer is phrased. It seems to be saying that The Father will forgive us in the same way and to the same extent as we forgive others. This is why the parable of the unforgiving servant ends as it does, with him being punished just as cruelly as he punished the servant who was indebted to him. How does God judge us? By our own standards. So that if we choose to reject the way of forgiveness and release from debt then God sadly leaves us there in that world of condemnation and punishment of our own making. But if we step through the doorway - which God always leaves open to us - then that debt-free world of absolute forgiveness can be ours.
An interesting detail in the story Jesus told, is the size of the debt which the first servant was released from. It was enormous. Ten thousand talents, in the time of Jesus, was the ‘largest debt imaginable’; entire provinces such as Galilee or Perea usually made annual payments to King Herod Antipas of just two thousand talents; so forgiving ten thousand talents is at the level of releasing an entire nation from financial obligation. [6] This suggests that the characters in Jesus’ story were at the level of senior politicians or top civil servants, and invites us to read the story not just as a moral tale about how individuals should act towards others - but as a parable addressing the behaviour of nations towards other nations. It reminds us that nations also have the choice whether or not to release other nations from their indebtedness to them.
In 1917 the British government, through the Balfour Declaration, approved the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people without prejudicing the rights and freedoms of the resident Palestinians. [7] The hard truth of history to date is that only half that bargain has been kept. This year’s centenary is a necessary time to review that declaration, it is time to ask just how can the world community help Palestinians and Israelis now build a peaceful future based on equal rights for all; and the parable of the unforgiving servant may just help us in that task.
The Reform rabbi Jonathan Romain recently wrote, “To be a good Jew you do not have to believe in God, just do what God says.” [8]
This is sound wisdom for people of all faiths; it reminds us that when Peter asked jesus, “How many times should I forgive one who has sinned against me?” Jesus told him, “Not seven times, but seventy times seven.” In other words, forgive without limit, forgive every time, make it your practice to always set free those who are in debt to you.
Notes
[1] The story of Rami Elhanan which follows is an edited version of Rami Elhanan, Replacing Pain with Hope, The Parents Circle Families Forum - Personal Stories, 1/1/2006. Rami Elhanan is, at the time of this sermon (Yom Kippur 2017), Israeli General Manager in the Israeli Office of The Parents Circle Families Forum.
[2] Wikipedia: Yom Kippur.
[3] Wikipedia: Mattityahu Peled.
[4] The Parents Circle Families Forum.
[5] Matthew 6.12.
[6] See my 2014 sermon on this passage, The Parable of the King Who Failed to Keep Forgiving, or ‘What if the Messiah Came and Nothing Changed?’ and William R. Herzog, Parables As Subversive Speech: Jesus as Pedagogue of the Oppressed, p.147.
[7] Wikipedia: Balfour Declaration. See also The Balfour Project: Contributing to justice, peace and reconciliation in the Middle East.
[8] Quoted in William Whyte, Power of a good story, a review of Jonathan Romain's Confessions of a Rabbi, Church Times, 8 September 2017.
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