Trinity XXII - The Magic Eyes
Bishop Ray Sutton

 
Our collect of a week ago asked for God’s forgiveness with the words, “Grant . . . merciful Lord to thy faithful people pardon and peace.”  Today’s Gospel turns from God’s forgiveness of us to our forgiveness of others.  The passage begins with St. Peter’s troubling question, “Lord, how oft shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him?” (St. Matthew 18:21).  I find the bold apostle’s question troubling because the answer he receives seems more than he or any of us care to hear.
 
Oh sure, St. Peter answers his question with what I’m sure seems to be an extremely charitable, “till seven times?”  But it’s what Christ does to that question.  He stretches Peter’s suggestion to proportions beyond his wildest expectation of mercy.  St. Peter offered seven.  Jesus responded with seven times seventy, equally 490 times?  He “takes the two perfect numbers – ten and seven – multiplies them together, and then once again multiplies the result by seven.  He does this to show that the spirit of genuine forgiveness recognizes no boundaries.  It is a state of heart, not a matter of calculation.  One might as well ask, ‘How often must I love my wife, my husband, my children?’  as to ask, ‘How often shall I forgive.’  Everyone immediately senses that when Jesus said, ‘up to seventy times seven times,’ he did not mean ‘exactly four hundred ninety times, but four hundred ninety-one.’  Clearly what he meant was, ‘Forgive without ever stopping.’”[i] 
 
Easier said than done isn’t it?  Certainly it’s hard to turn to God and ask His forgiveness; and it’s even more difficult to ask our peers to forgive us.  The greatest challenge, however, is extending forgiveness to others.  Maybe we can forgive someone once or twice, hardly ever thrice.  And to the extent Christ calls us, all I can say is “only by the Grace of God.”  But isn’t that the connection Jesus wants Peter to make: God’s grace to us and our mercy towards others?
 
Lewis B. Smedes (in Forgive & Forget) calls on one of my favorite writers, Soren Kierkegaard, to make the point with a parable from his journal.  Here is the story of “The Magic Eyes.”  In the village of Faken in innermost Friesland their lived a long thin baker named Fouke, a righteous man, with a long thin chin and a long nose.  Fouke was so upright that he seemed to spray righteousness from his lips over everyone who came near him; so the people of Faken preferred to stay away.
 
Fouke’s wife, Hilda, did not keep people away with her righteousness; her soft roundness seemed to invite them, instead, to come close to her in order to share the warm cheer of her open heart.  Hilda respected her righteous husband, and loved him too, as much as he allowed her; but her heart ached for something more from him than his worthy righteousness.  And there, in the bed of her need, lay the seed of sadness.  One morning, having worked since dawn to knead his dough for the ovens, Fouke came home and found a stranger with Hilda.
 
Hilda’s adultery soon became the talk of the tavern and the scandal of the congregation in Faken as well it should have.  Everyone assumed, however, that Fouke would cast Hilda out of his house, so righteous was he.  But he surprised all by keeping her as his wife, saying he forgave her as the good book said he should.
 
But in his heart of hearts, Fouke could not forgive Hilda for bringing shame to his name.  His feelings toward her were angry and hard.  When it came right down to it, he hated her for betraying him after he had been so good and so faithful a husband to her.  He only pretended to forgive Hilda so that he could punish her with his righteous mercy.
 
But Fouke’s fakery did not sit well in heaven.  So each time that Fouke would feel his secret hate toward Hilda, an angel came to him and dropped a small pebble, hardly the size of a button, into Fouke’s heart.  Each time a pebble dropped, Fouke felt the stabbing pain.  Thus his hate brought pain and his pain made him hate.
 
The pebbles multiplied.  And Fouke’s heart grew heavy with the weight of them, so heavy that the top half of his body bent forward so far that he had to strain his neck upward in order to see straight ahead.  Weary with hurt, Fouke began to wish he were dead.
 
One night, the angel who dropped the pebbles into his heart, came to him to tell how he could be healed of his hurt.  There was one remedy.  Fouke would need the miracle of the magic eyes.  He would need eyes that could look back to the beginning of his hurt and see his Hilda, not as a wife who betrayed him, but as a weak woman who needed him.  Only a new way of looking at things through magic eyes could heal the hurt flowing from the wounds of his yesterday.
 
Fouke protested to the angel, “Nothing can change the past.”  “Hilda is guilty, a fact that not even an angel can change.”  “yes, poor hurting man, you are right,” the angel replied.  “You cannot change the past, you can only heal the hurt that comes to you from the past.  And you can heal it only with the vision of the magic eyes.”  “And how can I get the magic eyes?” pouted Fouke.  “Only ask, desiring as you ask and they will be given you.  And each time you see Hilda through your new eyes, one pebble will be lifted from your aching heart.”
 
Fouke could not ask at first, for he had grown to love his hatred.  But the pain of his heart finally drove him to want to ask for the magic eyes.  So he asked and the angel gave.
 
Soon Hilda began to change in front of Fouke’s eyes, wonderfully and mysteriously.  He began to see her as a needy woman who loved him instead of a wicked woman who had betrayed him.  The angel kept his promise; he lifted the pebbles from Fouke’s heart, one by one, though it took a long time to take them all away.  Fouke gradually felt his heart grow lighter; he began to walk straight again, and somehow his nose and chin seemed less thin and sharp than before.  He invited Hilda to come into his heart again, and she came, and together they began a journey into their second season of humble joy.  And so ends the parable of the Magic eyes.
 
The point: The forgiveness of God is to pass onto those who hurt us through us.  In no way does this justify wrong or the natural and necessary consequences of our wrong.  Wrong is wrong.  But we’re not the final judge of heaven and earth.  We are called to forgive, lest those pebbles of angry, bitterness and acrimony seize our heart, turning it into a vindictive organ of stone.  So let us forgive as Jesus commanded Peter.  Let us allow the pebbles in our hearts to be dissolved by the love of God.  And through this forgiveness may God give us all the magic eyes to see with different perception those who’ve hurt us.  Amen.

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[i] William Hendriksen, New Testament Commentary: Exposition of the Gospel According to Matthew (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1973), p. 704.