H. Michael Brewer
Crescent Springs Presbyterian
13 November 2005
MOVING DAY
Matthew 18:21-35
In a book entitled Mistreated, writer Ron Lee Davis tells about a wealthy man who owned a lot in
an exclusive residential suburb of a large city. The lot was a freakish piece of land hundreds of feet deep
but only a couple of yards wide. The man wanted to get rid of the useless property so he offered to sell
it to the neighbor on one side. The neighbor didn’t really want the lot, so he offered a ridiculously low
price. The millionaire was incensed because he figured the land was worth ten times that much.
So he approached the neighbor on the other side, who also offered only a token payment. “Sure, I
want the land,” he said, “but why should I pay a premium? You can’t do anything else with that lot, so
I’ve got you over a barrel. Take it or leave it!”
The wealthy man was enraged and so he hired an architect and a contractor to build one of the
strangest houses ever conceived. The house was only five feet wide and ran nearly the whole depth of
the property, a string of tiny rooms that would barely accommodate a few skimpy sticks of furniture.
The neighbors complained that the bizarre house blighted the neighborhood, but apparently the house
didn’t actually violate any existing zoning codes.
When it was finished, the rich man moved into his cramped and wretched house. He spent the rest
of his life there just to spite the neighbors. I understand the house is still standing, and in that
neighborhood they call it “Spite House.”
I’ve never moved into Spite House, at least not lock, stock, and barrel, but I have visited there
occasionally, and I can tell you that Spite House is a lousy place to live. For that matter, it’s a lousy
place to spend the day. Which makes it remarkable that so many people would rather huddle in Spite
House than forgive someone who has wronged them.
Not that forgiveness is easy. Peter was thinking of just how hard it is to forgive when he asked
Jesus, “How often must I forgive someone who has wronged me, Lord? Shall I forgive as many as
seven times?”
Seven times! That’s pretty generous. A few weeks ago I ran out to a shopping center for
something. I was in a hurry and as I got out of my car, my door tapped the car next to me. No harm
done, but of course the guy was sitting in his car waiting for someone. He looked at me and I gave him
the sorry face and went on with my business. When I came out of the store, the guy was still sitting
there and I was determined to be extra careful but my hands were full and would you believe a big wind
came out of nowhere and knocked my door into his car again. I was mortified, but he just looked at me
and raised two fingers. From the look on his face, I wouldn’t have wanted to push it. I can’t picture him
sitting calmly behind his wheel and raising seven fingers.
So, yeah, seven servings of forgiveness is pretty good. I’m sure Peter expected a gold star, but
poor Peter has once again underestimated the wideness and the wildness of God’s grace.
“No,” says Jesus, “not seven times. More like seventy-seven times.”
Or it could be seventy times seven. The Greek is tricky right there, but the point is pretty much the
same either way because Jesus isn’t trying to set a ceiling on forgiveness. Just the opposite, Jesus names
a number too large to realistically keep track of. He’s telling us there are no limits on forgiveness. Let’s
be very clear. There may well come a time when a follower of Jesus says, “I won’t let you hurt me
again,” or “I won’t be used anymore,” or “I refuse to live with this any longer.” A follower of Jesus
might say any of those things, but there is never a time when a Christian can rightly and faithfully say, “I
will not forgive.”
That may sound harsh or impossibly unfair, but the alternative is to live in Spite House, to spend our
days in that dark, cramped place where there is no room for peace or happiness, just enough room to
be right, to be miserable, to be forever wounded.
When the poet Edwin Markham neared retirement, he discovered that his broker had robbed him
blind. Markham was ready to take his ease, but he was nearly penniless through no fault of his own.
The poet became so angry and bitter that it consumed him. All he could talk about or think about was
how this broker had swindled him.
One day he was at his desk doodling. He wasn’t writing became he had become unable to write
poetry of any kind. As he sat there brooding, Markham later said that God spoke to him in that clear
but inaudible way that God sometimes addresses us. According to Markham, God told him that if he
didn’t deal with his hate, it would finish him off. He had to forgive the man who had robbed him.
So Markham said, “Okay, Lord, I forgive him.”
And having released the thing that was destroying him, Markham said he began to come back to
life. He started writing poetry again. In fact, he wrote one of his best known poems. I was required to
memorize it in the fifth grade, but I didn’t know back then what lurked in the background of the verse.
The poem is called “Outwitted” and it goes like this:
He drew a circle that shut me out—
Heretic, rebel, a thing to flout.
But Love and I had the wit to win:
We drew a circle that took him in.
Of course, Jesus said it better than I can in his story of the unforgiving servant. Notice that the
servant who refuses to forgive is handed over for torture at the end of the story. I don’t think that’s a
threat from Jesus; I think it’s a fact of life. The refusal to forgive always leads to torture—self-torture.
We lose sight of good things and fix our thoughts single-mindedly on what’s been done to us and the
one who did it. The refusal to forgive is always our undoing, and on the other hand the practice of
forgiveness is the open door that leads us out of Spite House.
I use that phrase “the practice of forgiveness” very intentionally because we don’t always succeed
in forgiving on the first try. Sometimes I’ll say to someone, “Have you forgiven So-and-so?” And they’ll
reply, “Oh, I tried that but it didn’t work.” No, it doesn’t always work the first time—or the second or
third time. If the wound is deep, if you’ve carried the grudge for a while, if the person who wronged you
is unrepentant, then you may have to forgive them several times before it takes. When resentment rears
its head, you may have to tell yourself, “No, I’ve forgiven that. I’m not going to keep carrying it with
me.” When the bad feelings return and the hurtful memories, you may have to tell your heart over and
over to let it go, to forgive, to heal.
Jesus enjoyed using humor in this teaching and I suspect his tongue may have been in his cheek
when he told Peter, “You must forgive seventy times seven times.” Sometimes it feels like that, it feels
like we’ve forgiven the same person for the same offense twenty or thirty times, but somehow it hasn’t
sunk in to our heart yet. When that happens, we forgive again and get that much closer to wholeness.
And if takes seventy times seven times, then we’ll hang in there as long as it takes.
Why? Why keep trying to forgive? Two good reasons come to mind.
The second reason is that it’s hard to be happy while dragging around a trunk full of grudges,
grievances, and bleeding resentments.
And the first reason is because we have been forgiven and therefore we are obliged to forgive in
turn. In Christ, the mountainous debt of our shortcomings has been wiped clean. In the grace of our
Savior we are forgiven all those harsh words, all those angry responses, all those times we took
advantage or belittled or exploited, all the occasions when we were thoughtless or indifferent or walked
over other people to get our own way. If we have been forgiven such a great debt, how can we refuse
to forgive the little debts others owe to us? In the parable Jesus told, The Master says to the
hardhearted servant, “I forgave you all that debt. Should you not have mercy on others as I have had
mercy on you?”
Spite House is a lonely and bitter place, a cramped life built on fossilized pain. The refusal to forgive
isolates us both from God and from our brothers and sisters. Christ beckons us to a better place, a
more spacious home in the world. Forgiveness can be hard, but not as hard as spending a life-sentence
in Spite House.
The good news is that Christ stands on the doorstep of that shadowed house, he knocks at the
door, and he says, “Come with me to a better life. Come with me. It’s moving day and I’ll carry the
baggage.”
Soli Deo Gloria!