Forty Years and I Can Still Hear Him Say It

A man said a sentence to me in this barn in 1986 and I can still hear the exact way he said it.

I am not going to write the sentence down. It is not a spectacular sentence and if I wrote it here a reader would look at it and think, is that all, and that is precisely why I am not writing it. It was eleven words and it was about what he thought I would amount to, and he said it in front of two other men.

I was nineteen.

He died in 2004. I carried his coffin, which I want on the record because it makes this more complicated rather than less, and I meant it at the time and I would do it again.

And the sentence still arrives. Not often anymore, but it arrives, and it arrives at about four in the morning, and it always arrives in his voice rather than in mine, which after forty years is a piece of engineering I find genuinely remarkable and would rather not have.

I have done all the sensible things. I have talked about it once, to a man in a parking lot after a funeral, which is where farmers do their talking. I have prayed about it in the way a person prays about a thing they have decided is small.

What I had not done, until about three years ago, was forgive him, and the reason I had not is that I could not work out the mechanics. He is dead. There is nobody to say it to. Every version of forgiving I had ever been taught involved a conversation, and the conversation was not available, and so the whole thing had sat there since 2004 filed under impossible.

Toby asked me last year who the man in the photograph on the shelf was. And I said his name, and I said he had been a great help to my father, which is true, and I heard myself not say anything else.

I said it out loud in this barn on an ordinary Tuesday with nobody in here but Bucky, who was eating the corner of a feed sack. I said his name and I said it was all right, and I did not feel anything at all when I said it, and it has arrived at four in the morning perhaps twice since.

The number that ends counting

Peter comes with a question that is already generous, and he clearly thinks so.

Then came Peter to him, and said, Lord, how oft shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? till seven times? Jesus saith unto him, I say not unto thee, Until seven times: but, Until seventy times seven. (Matthew 18:21, 22)

Seven was a good offer. The rabbis of the day generally taught three, and Peter more than doubles it and names the number out loud, hoping, the way a man does.

And the answer is not a bigger number. It is a number that cannot be kept, and that is the entire point: four hundred and ninety is not a limit, it is an arithmetic joke about anybody who is still holding a tally.

You are being released from the counting rather than given a larger allowance, and Matthew 18:22 answers a number question by ending numbers. It is the Holy Spirit who makes that read as freedom instead of as an impossible standard.

There is a second thing hidden in Peter's question that nobody remarks on. He asks how often his brother will sin against him, which assumes a live relationship and a person who keeps coming back.

You have not been given an instruction that only works when the other person is standing there. The written word gives a posture rather than a procedure, and His Spirit is what makes that available about somebody who has been dead for twenty years.

Forgiving somebody who cannot receive it

The mechanics genuinely matter and almost nobody teaches them, so I want to put down what I found.

The parable Jesus tells straight after Peter's question is about a debt, and a debt is a thing held by the creditor rather than a thing agreed between two people.

Then the lord of that servant was moved with compassion, and loosed him, and forgave him the debt. (Matthew 18:27)

Loosed him. The releasing happens in the hands of the one holding the paper. Nothing in that verse requires the debtor to say anything, be present, understand, or agree.

Which means a man in a barn with a dead man's sentence in his head is not stuck. The paper is in his hand. It was always in his hand.

You are holding the paper, and Matthew 18:27 puts the loosing in the hands of the one who holds it. The Spirit of God is what makes that a discovery rather than a technicality.

And the debt in the parable is never described as fake. Ten thousand talents is a real sum that was really owed, and the release does not involve anybody deciding it had not happened.

You have not been asked to decide it did not happen. Matthew 18:27 forgives a real debt rather than erasing an imaginary one, and the Holy Spirit is the one who moves that from a parable into an eleven word sentence from 1986.