Forgiving and Car Crashes

His name is Simon Wilson. He was just 25 years old when it happened. He was living with his parents and doing temp work when early one morning on a walk, a car came from nowhere, cut across him and forced him into the ditch. The next thing that he knew he was in intensive care, waking up from major emergency surgery. He had a ruptured spleen, punctured lung and other severe internal injuries. The driver was never found but apparently someone had called the hospital asking if anyone had been brought in from a car crash… asking if they had survived or not. They likely didn’t want a fatality on their conscience.

Simon spent the next three months in the hospital and in the following years had 12 more operations. In one year alone he spent a hundred nights in hospital. Then, he was told that his condition was incurable and that the prognosis was not good. In a way, Simon said, it was almost liberating because up until then he’d always thought he could fix it.

You might imagine how he felt after the crash. He was full of anger at what had happened to him… but he also became paranoid with a fear that, because he didn’t know who had run over him, that perhaps someone was out to get him.

Beyond that, Simon wanted the person who’d done this to him to be suffer like he was. He wrote, “I’d never been someone to get easily angry and it was scary feeling this way. I became difficult to be around. But I knew I had to work though it – find some sort of forgiveness so that I could bring closure to the situation.”

As days turned to months and months into years, he had a lot of time to reflect on what had happened to him. Eventually, miraculously, he came to a point in his life that he was no longer angry with the person who had so significantly altered his life. Simon called it his moment of epiphany. And from that moment on, the crippling bitterness that he had within his spirit began to die down. That’s when he finally found a place of forgiveness.

Simon said, “In a spiritual sense I felt I’d been saved for something and as I became more vulnerable my faith became more important. I wish the accident hadn’t happened, but it made me much stronger than I was before.”

Simon went on and became an ordained minister and served as a chaplain to the police and firefighters in Norfolk, England. He also went on to work with a group known as RoadPeace that strives to help people injured or bereaved through road crashes like what Simon had experienced.

“Forgiveness,” Simon writes, “is something you have to do every day and it’s something that you have to keep doing because anything can trigger that anger again. I’m not angry that the driver wasn’t locked up, but sometimes I do feel angry that they just drove off without checking to see if I was alive or dead.”

When we have been wronged… forgiveness can be a challenge. Whether it’s a significant life altering event such as what Simon experienced or an expectation that someone failed to live up to or an outright betrayal by someone we trusted, forgiveness is hard. It’s perhaps the hardest thing in the world for us to do.

Perhaps we want the other person to be punished more. We want to see justice fulfilled against those who have hurt us. And yet… what might have justice looked like for someone like Simon? Simon himself, in an interview, talks about that challenge. He says when people tell him they want the other person to be punished enough before they can forgive he’ll ask them, “What’s enough? No one will ever be punished enough.”

But there are challenges to not finding forgiveness as well. Not only can holding someone’s sin against them make reconciliation in that relationship impossible… it can also spill over into other aspects of our lives. Bitterness pushed down, shaken up, and yet still flowing over causes marriages to fall apart, children to be ignored, friendships to be fractured, jobs to be lost, and health issues to arise.

The bitterness of an unforgiven sin can punish us as much or even more so than the person that we are unwilling to forgive. That bitterness can change who we are as it seeps from one area of our lives to the next. So also the guilt of a sin that we have committed against someone else can do much the same.

God created us to be in community with one another. When there are significant fractures in that community, it presents a challenge for us to move forward. If you have had the opportunity to watch Disney’s new Encanto Movie, you might have some sense of those cracks that can form in a household that would otherwise look perfect. The magic is diminished when the bitterness sets in.

I suspect all of this is why forgiveness is such a powerful emphasis in the Old Testament as well as the New. And, I suspect the challenge of being able to forgive is why when God became flesh in Jesus Christ that Jesus spent so much of his 3 years of ministry teaching people to forgive one another as well as to assure us of God’s forgiveness toward us.

Yet even with Jesus’ teaching on forgiveness, we still struggle with it… both on the receiving end and the giving end. We talk about forgiveness in church a great deal and I think we all agree that forgiveness is a good thing. And yet, when we experience someone sinning against us, it can be really hard to offer that word of forgiveness. If we were in Simon’s shoes and had experienced a life-altering event like that… it would be tempting to hold that bitterness to our dying day. And indeed, for some it is easier to go to the grave than it is to forgive. Forgiving is not easy.

And again, even as we hear week after week as we confess our sins in church and we receive forgiveness… as we come to the front of the church to receive the body and blood of Christ… a tangible edible forgiveness given to us by Christ and commanded of us to do that we should remember. Even with all of those promises of forgiveness, we can still wonder at times if we have done enough to make God happy with us. We can still wonder if God is really going to forgive this sin or that sin because maybe we pushed it just a little too far or maybe we haven’t been repentant enough. I think that was actually one of the reasons the Catholic church found so much success with give tasks for penance of one’s sin… because there was a sense that we could make up for our sin. We knew what we had done and we could get back onto an even keel with Christ… somehow. But as Martin Luther reminded us, we are saved not by our works and our ability to get back on the even path… but we are saved by God’s grace alone.

Grace realized is the key that opens the doors to forgiveness.

In our reading from Genesis today, we heard a story of grace opening the doors to forgiveness. You may recall the story of Joseph and the multi-colored coat from our Sunday School days. How Joseph’s brothers were jealous of Joseph and so they threw him in a well and planned to let him die there. But as they were about to leave, some merchants came by and Joseph’s brothers saw the opportunity to not only be rid of their brother… but to make a profit on him too. So they sold him into slavery, with the expectation that he would be out of their lives forever.

All of that changes, however. Several years later as a great famine is sweeping the land, the brothers find themselves face-to-face with Joseph once more… but now he has the power over them. It is within his power to either give food to his brothers who betrayed him or to send them on their way… punishing them and allowing them to receive their just reward.

I can imagine that, just as with Simon’s story of the hit-and-run, Joseph would have had some significant anger and bitterness against his brothers. Just like that driver who didn’t even check to see if Simon was still alive, Joseph’s brothers sold him into slavery and never looked back. But unlike Simon, Joseph knew who it was who had hurt him. It wasn’t a stranger… it was his brothers… all of them.

And yet, when given the opportunity for Joseph’s brothers to get what they deserve, we hear this story of grace being offered to those who are undeserving. And we see Joseph weeping as he kisses on the brothers who had sold him away all those years ago. That is not the ending that those brothers deserve… and yet it is an ending that proves life-giving not only for Joseph’s brothers but for Joseph as well.

As the walls of bitterness come down and the wave of forgiveness courses through in this moment, we see a family reunion take place that should have been impossible. It should have been a sin taken too far… and yet here we see Joseph being able to not only forgive his brothers but we see him rejoicing that he has been reunited with them.

This is “turn the other cheek” level forgiveness here. Joseph, after getting burned before, is opening himself up to the opportunity to get burned again. Joseph, whose very self had been used to fill the pockets of his brothers with a few coins now is once more filling his brothers’ pockets with bread. Joseph, who had been cast away and left for dead is choosing to embrace his brothers rather than abandoning them in their time of need.

This forgiveness and care are not offered because the brothers say the right words. They don’t even really speak with Joseph until after he kisses them and weeps on them. This forgiveness and care is not because Joseph’s brothers take on enough punishment or find a way to pay Joseph back first so they can earn their way back into his good graces.

This forgiveness and care that Joseph’s brothers receive is the care offered by one who pushes back against the dark bitterness in his heart, offers himself up in vulnerability to get hurt again, and strives to make that connection whole again. It is the same kind of care and forgiveness that Christ offers the world on the cross… and that Christ calls us to in our walk as disciples.

In any and all relationships there are plenty of opportunities for us to find reason to dismiss someone. There are sins committed against us, large and small, that give us the reason to turn our backs against someone. And yet Christ calls us to instead turn the other cheek.

Christ calls us to seek an end to the bitterness that poisons our hearts and minds and pray for God’s courage and strength that we might kiss on and weep over those who have sinned against us.

Forgiveness is not easy. But it is what we are called to do. Father, forgive us our trespasses AS WE forgive those who trespass against us. Let us walk this discipleship walk of forgiveness… so that we too might come to find the life-giving waters beyond the pools of bitterness against our neighbor.

May God be with us as we try to follow in the footsteps of Joseph who forgave his brothers, Simon who forgave the unknown driver, and Christ… who forgave us all. God’s peace be with you. Amen.