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McDonald Road SDA Church

Steve Bauer

The Price of Forgiveness

In March of 2009, the headlines were saturated with the name of an Austrian man, Josef Fritzl, who was arrested in Austria for imprisoning his 18-year-old daughter Elizabeth and holding her captive in less than a thousand square feet under the backyard for 24 years.

During that 24 years, he fathered 7 children with her down there.

3 of the children he snuck out as newborns with forged notes saying, I belong to this religious organization, they won't let me have a baby, would you please raise the children?" And they would mysteriously appear on the front doorstep during the night and his wife or he would discover the baby in the morning.

And so his wife not knowing what was going on and he were raising these 3, what she thought were grandchildren from an absent seed daughter.

The other 3, he left with their mother in the dungeon and for until 19, correction 2009, they had never seen the outside world, just that 800 or so square feet that they lived in with mom.

The seventh child died as an infant, very young, because Fritzl would not allow him to be taken to a hospital for fear of getting caught himself.

And so it died and he found ways of disposing of it.

Now, if you are Elizabeth Fritzl, spending over half your life being raped by your father and raising your father's children through you, imprisoned for 24 years in a dank and dirty place, what would it mean to forgive your father?

Let me push the issue slightly from a slightly different angle.

Early in my ministry I was involved in a case, I'll call her Samantha, whose stepfather abused her from age 7 to 15.

At age 15, she tried to commit suicide by jumping in front of a city bus, except that she miscalculated its braking power and it stopped before it hit her.

Shortly thereafter, she set their apartment building on fire And so that led to a trip to the school counselor where finally the sordid details came out.

What would it mean for Samantha to forgive her stepfather?

And a more generic angle to approach the case from, take the battered spouse, their husband or wife gets angry or feels that you've not stayed duly under control and they take it out on you physically over a period of time and you are battered, bruised and assaulted, what Would it mean to forgive?

Does forgiveness simply mean dropping charges and let's pretend it never happened?

If that's the case, does dropping charges and pretending it never happened relegate me to a life of perpetual victimhood, always forgiving but never delivered from the problem.

The problem is further complicated by the fact that we use the term forgiveness in more than 1 way.

For example, Our two-year-old in the high chair happens to, ah, and there goes the cup of juice all over the place and we're not happy, but we know it wasn't malicious.

They don't have good judgment on, you know, spatial things.

And so we say we forgave them for spilling the juice.

And it becomes kind of the equivalent of excusing.

But that doesn't quite seem to work for a case like Elizabeth Fritzl.

There's something bigger and more crucial at stake there.

Closely related to this is the more meaningful offense but we effectively equate forgiveness with amnesty.

Now amnesty comes from a Greek root literally meaning no memory.

But how could Elizabeth Fritzl or Samantha just forget it?

Something about that violates something in us.

There's something wrong that we can't quite put our finger on.

Or in a twist of the amnesty view, it's what I call the cost-benefit analysis.

And basically this says it's not worth it to hold all this anger, it's beyond your control, all it's going to do is eat you up so you might as well forget it and save yourself all this vexation.

There is a measure of truth to that, but that still has problems.

Because if you're Samantha or Elizabeth or the chronically battered spouse, how can you just say, it benefits me to let go?

Or to go in a different direction, we sometimes use it more in the context of a kind of penance thing, where if a person cries enough tears and says enough I'm sorry's and makes enough compensation, then we'll say we forgave them because they've kind of paid their dues.

But how do you compensate for 24 years of terror underground?

Particularly when you're arrested in your low to mid 70s for age.

And the probability is you're not likely to live more than 8 or 10 years.

Well, let me start with a basic definition and then I'd like to start unpacking.

I'd like to suggest that forgiveness is God's way of healthily healing a relationship between a victim and offender so that they can have a meaningful and healthy relationship after the offense.

This means it has to be more than just dropping charges and amnesty kind of stuff.

It's got to be more than just, let's pretend it never happened.

There's something deeper that we have to find.

But too many Christians today, I think, misunderstand what forgiveness is.

And it can lead to some severe hurt and dysfunction in homes and churches.

Because like Elizabeth Fritzl, there are deeper issues that these shallow approaches do not adequately address.

And yet at the same time we're not supposed to hold a grudge and be vengeful.

So what are we to do with this problem of forgiveness?

Now I'd like to introduce the element that I think is missing in the discussion up to this point and I will introduce it by having you turn to Revelation chapter 6.

We'll eventually come back to Matthew 18.

I guess the question I'm trying to ask could be put pithily this way.

When the wound is deep and it hurts like the dickens, what does it mean to forgive?

He opened the fifth seal, and I saw under the altar the souls of those who had been slain for the Word of God and for the witness they had borne.

They cried out with a loud voice, O Sovereign Lord, holy and true, how long before Thou wilt..." What?

"...judge and avenge." How long before you judge and avenge our blood on those who dwell on the earth?

What is it that the souls under the altar have not had resolved.

They have been unfairly and unjustly killed, And thus they are beyond the recourse to seek justice for themselves.

Someone more potent and more powerful has denied them justice.

They have been unable to secure justice and they've died without hope of justice.

And here they are symbolically represented as crying out to the Lord, Lord, we know You're just and are going to take care of it, but how much longer?

When will the wrong be righted and dealt with?

Justice is a near primal instinct, especially discernible in children.

They use a slightly different word, right?

And we don't like unfairness, particularly when we're the victim.

But it's 1 thing When something unjust happens to you and you have enough power to seek help and recourse.

But when you are powerless, now what happens?

That's what these souls under the altar and that's what's missing in the discussion of forgiveness with people like Elizabeth and Samantha.

When you suffer unspeakable injustice, what does it mean to forgive?

Now we need to expand this slightly because we were made with a sense of justice in order to protect us in a sinful world from unjust people.

So we can say, oh, he's starting to hurt me.

Let me take some precautions here, right?

But sin warps that good quality and we start to move from issues of justice and God-given rights that are violated to personal expectations.

And regardless of how reasonable or unreasonable my expectation is, I begin to invest that expectation at the same level as a God-given right, and now you don't fulfill my expectation, and I start to cry, injustice happened.

Now I'm not gonna go down that road so much today, though I think the solution is similar.

When we Think we've been treated unjustly, what do we do?

Well, we can try the excusing game again or 1 that I forgot a little earlier.

Sometimes we can recast the situation, you know, well they really didn't mean it.

They've had a hard day and we find some way to say, you know, we forgave and kind of excuse it away.

But there's no way Elizabeth Fritzl can explain away 24 years.

You know, this is intentionally malicious and inexcusable.

And when we cannot reframe and excuse and weasel our way out of it, when the wound and sense of injustice is so deep, what does forgiveness mean?

Well, Marlon Yeschke in his book Discipling in the Church suggests that in the modern church we tend to have 2 popular approaches to forgiveness, both of which are inadequate.

And this is probably the most popular view today.

And it's closely related to the amnesty concept.

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The Price of Forgiveness

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