Fair

I present to you a Calvin and Hobbes comic strip that I remember fondly from my own childhood.  It spoke to me a great deal when I was younger, and hopefully you'll appreciate it now.

As you get older, as you have kids of your own, the strip of Calvin and Hobbes has a way of switching over.  It worked when you were a child, enjoying the many exploits, real and imaginary, of Calvin and his tiger, but when you grow up, when you have kids of your own, you tend to find a new layer in the mix.  You tend to enjoy the interactions and the personalities of Calvin's parents.

Now, that's a treat.  It's fun to watch that happen, to see something from your childhood become new and interesting, to find a new appeal in it, and the strip above is something that ages really well.  That is, as a kid you identify heavily with Calvin, with his desire to have things be fair, and to come to the conclusion that things are unfair, and yet stacked against you.  However, as a parent, the answer of the world not being fair isn't dismissive, or trite, it's actually massively important.  I'll explain.

Calvin, as the strip will show you, lives the life of an average child.  He has a treehouse, plays outside, gets into mischief, has friends, goes to school, has a tiger whose company he enjoys greatly, that kind of thing.   Here are some things he doesn't have.

-A Job.
-Responsibilities
-Bills to pay
-A family to feed
-Anything to do beyond just what he feels like.


I understand that from his perspective, Calvin feels as though things are phenomenally unfair, but things actually aren't fair, but it's in the other direction.  Growing up, when we were told to help out with one chore in a while, that kind of thing, and it always seems horribly unfair, that sort of thing. . What we didn't realize was that it was amazingly, spectacularly unfair, but unfair in our favor.  Doing the dishes is a pretty small price to pay in return for every single need being met in our entire lives.  We were living an existence of super abundance every day that there was, but we still found time to insist that things were unfair because we were expected to help out every once in a while. And had we been thinking about it, had Calvin been thinking about it, we would have realized that the very last thing in the world that we would want is for things to actually be fair.

This brings us to the Gospel reading from Sunday.  The reading in which Peter asks Jesus a sensible question, 'Lord, if my brother sins against me, how many times should I forgive him.  Up to seven times?'  That question on its surface is actually, even for us humans, possibly overstating the case.  That is, if someone sins against you, and you forgive them, are you supposed to forgive them more than once?  From a worldly perspective, we would say no.  We would say that forgiving them more than once is a sucker's game, it's for mugs only.  Why would you want to forgive someone who keeps on going back to you and keeps on messing up.  Surely, after once, you can sort of cut that person off, and deal with them as a sinner and a tax collector.  Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me.  Fool me seven times, we're off the rails now.

 

We all remember that bit from George W Bush, and though he's largely considered to be a figure of fun now, his line about not being fooled again sort of has some perspective when it comes to this Gospel reading.  Surely, Jesus doesn't expect us to be suckers, does he? He doesn't expect us to do things that would be bad or difficult for us, does he?  Because the people we don't forgive, those people don't deserve forgiveness, right?  

Well, I have some bad news for you, fellow Christian.  I have some bad news for you as fellow Christians who are going to have to hear something from the scriptures that you don't want to hear.  You're going to have to hear the following words.

Forgive us our trespasses 

As we forgive those who trespass against us.

That's from the Lord's prayer you know.  Straight from the horses' mouth.   And in the Lord's prayer, Christ makes it clear to us that we need to forgive one another if we expect to be forgiven.  Of course, our usual understand of prayer is that it is a list of things that we expect God to do for us, but there is a separate aspect from prayer, and that is that you will find in it things that you expect God to change about you.  To soften your heart.  To conform you to his will, and to make you more likely, and more eager to forgive.  And lest we skip over that vital couplet in the Lord's prayer, think on this.  The next two verses in the Gospel of Matthew after the Lord's prayer are as follows

If you forgive others who sin against you, your Heavenly Father

will forgive you.  But if you refuse to forgive others, your Father

will not forgive your sins.

Gee, how nice.  We look at that passage, and we realize that in the Christian faith, forgiveness is not optional.  Peter thought it would be simple enough to say seven times of forgiveness, but Jesus ratchets it up to seventy times seven.  And are you counting?  Likely you're not.  That number is so large it might as well be ten thousand talents, a number so big as to be impossibly, laughably huge.  And you, as a Christian, are expected to go to all the effort of forgiving the same person who wrongs you seventy times seven times?  Really?  That's not fair.

Trust me, the last thing in the universe you want is fair.  Oh sure, you may kick and scream and beg that the situation was fair, but you don't want that.  You have no desire for fair.  What you want is the situation you have, in which things are unfair, but they are unfair in your favor.  Think of the debts in the Gospel reading, the debts the way they are listed have the servant owing ten thousand talents. Ten thousand talents is around seven billion dollars in today's money, which is a chunk of change.  I know the servant said that he would pay it all back, but how on earth was he going to do that if he was staring down seven billion dollars.  None of us will ever see that much money in our entire lives, it is impossible to even contemplate.  The pit that this servant had dug for himself was so big that he was never going to get out of it.  There was no way he was ever going to work hard enough, try hard enough, get another job to pay it all back.  It would be impossible, laughable in the highest order. That was what the first servant owed.  He owed an astronomical amount, so high as to be impossible.  And what was he owed?  A hundred days wages.  Now, the amount that he was owed, rather than the one he was owing, it's still big, don't get me wrong.  It's still an amount that should be paid back.  It's still an amount that someone would be right in demanding, of course, if he hadn't just been forgiven a debt that would have crippled his own family for generations.  Given that that's the case, the first servant, who had been forgiven an amount so big nobody can really imagine it, should have forgiven the small amount he was owed from his fellow servant.  But he did not.  He wanted things to be fair.  It would unfair for his fellow servant not to pay him back.  If things were fair, however, and he could throw his fellow servant in jail until the debt be repaid, then it stands to reason that that would be what would happen to him as well except for much longer, since the debt is much larger.

You see, that's how it goes.  We want things to be fair, but that's not what we really mean.  We want things to be unfair in our favor.  We want to collect what is owed to us, but to have our own debts canceled.  We want our sins to be forgiven by God, but we want to hold against others what they have done to us.  We say that it's not about what we want, it's about what's fair, but it really, really isn't.  For if things were fair, if everyone got paid what they owed, if the system worked the way we say we wanted it to work, we'd be in a hole so deep we would never get out of it.  If you take seriously not just way the Bible tells you to behave, but also how you think other people should behave, then you'll realize that you're seriously behind where you should be, and getting further behind all the time.  Essentially, every day that goes by you're doing more wrong than right, you're withdrawing from an account that gets closer and closer to overdrawn every day that there is, because you're making more withdrawls than deposits.  It's getting out of control, which is why fair isn't what you want.  

What you want is Jesus.

In the cross of Christ, you see the most unfair thing in all of creation, the godly dying for the ungodly, the righteous for the unrighteous.  You see Jesus Christ, true God and true man, dying for the sins of the whole world, yours included.  You see the lamb of God who comes to take away the sins of the world, the lamb of God who took on flesh, dwelt among us, and died for our salvation.  This is what it means to be a Christian person, which is to have a massive debt wiped clean, paid for in blood by the only person who could possibly afford to pay it. It's unfair for sure, completely, ludicrously unfair that that debt should be absorbed by another person.

But it's not about fair, you know.  It's about grace.  And Grace is what God provides, because the last thing in all of creation that you want is fair.