FORGIVENESS – Series 7

The Trespass of Brethren (Chapter 6: pp 63-77)

An offended friend is harder to win back than a fortified city. – Proverbs 18:19, New Living Translation

Better a thousand enemies outside the house than one inside. – Arabic proverb

Exploited Kisses

Some trespasses are harder to forgive or forget, because they come from “brethren,” from people who sit with us, eat with us, live with us under the same roof; members of the same sworn team, or children of the same Father.  That was what Joseph faced: “the trespass of thy brethren.”   Those were not just “brethren,” they were “THY brethren,” his own blood brothers.  That is what sometimes makes it worse: “thy brethren” – in their plural number against your singular self; in their malicious majority against your defenceless minority; in their conspiratorial unity against your voiceless innocence: “thy brethren.”  Jesus was betrayed by one whom He called a “friend” (Matthew 26:50), one who exploited the lovely language of a kiss to betray his Master (Luke 22:48).

More than being brethren, or being his own brethren, those trespassers were also “the servants of the God of thy father.” Is that not how we address preachers and pastors: servants of God?  The trespassers against Joseph were co-patriarchs, co-ministers, brethren to whom Joseph had been taking their father’s goodwill and refreshments (Genesis 37:14); brethren who were also ministers – feeders of the flock; elder shepherds for that matter (Genesis 37:14, 16).  Could anyone have expected betrayal of that magnitude from such pillars? No.  That is what makes these betrayals very painful to forgive and harder to forget.  Some ‘servants of God’ (real and fake) have done worse things to other servants of God than the brothers of Joseph did, except that circumstances have not yet uncovered their wickedness.

It may be easy to preach forgiveness, especially if one has never known the pains of betrayals, but they preach it better who have given it themselves to others, especially to ‘undeserving’ traitorous ‘brethren.’

Brethren are those we trust more than others, those we draw close to ourselves, those we run to for cover when pursued by outsiders.  Ministers are those of whom we have no fear even if they should stand behind us; those to whom we go for an interpretation of the voice of God; those we take as God among mortals.  When such patriarchs align with outsiders to hunt and hurt us, like Judas to Jesus or Brutus to Caesar, and kisses of love are exploited to sudden malicious advantage, the pain can be deeper than words can ever express.  In this sad category could be betrayal by a father, a mother, a husband, a wife, an associate pastor, a senior pastor, a foster child, a tenant or landlord, a colleague at work, a fellow worshipper, some trusted and close person, a ‘best friend,’ etc.; betrayal not by mere “brethren” but “THY brethren.”  The pain is heightened when those “brethren” are also “servants of the God of thy father.”  Then, like Caesar, we cry, “Et tu, Brute?”

A brother offended is harder to be won than a strong city: and their contentions are like the [never-meeting parallel] bars of a castle (Proverbs 18:19).

Does Time Erase a Trespass?

Does time erase a trespass and cancel the need for repentance?  No.  Does confession become unnecessary because time has passed since the action or non-action of a trespass?  No.  In the story of Joseph, for example, years had passed – about twenty-one years; still, the case was no stale trespass.  It had to be recalled to be erased.

Time might heal the wounds of a trespass, but it does not erase the scars of it.  Time might diminish the pains of a trespass, but it does not delete the file.  Only confession recalls the file to destroy it.  Even where the person trespassed against might have magnanimously deleted the file from their end, they have only freed themselves; the spirit of the trespass lives to haunt the trespasser, until they exorcize it by confession.  We find further analogy in computer application.  Sometimes, even when a file might have been deleted from a device, there may still be a backup ‘copy’ in some ‘cloud,’ until that also is addressed as a next step.

Does Distance Erase a Trespass?

Does distance erase a trespass?  Does it become unnecessary to repair a trespass because the person trespassed against has since moved far away, or because the trespasser is in some distant land?  The story of the Prodigal Son has an answer.  In that story, the son had not just moved to a different city but to a different country, a “FAR country” at that (Luke 15:13).  Still, he closed the distance – the wide gap in time and space – by travelling home to the transgressed father to make peace.  The brothers of Joseph did the same.  They bridged the decades and the distance; they closed the gap in time and space; they went to Joseph to make their confessions.  They didn’t say that because he was inferior to them in age, or because he was in more comfortable material circumstances, he was the one who should come to them.  They went, closing the gap, to heal an ancestral injury.  Sometimes, the peace of a thousand miles distance could be just a phone call away.

A trespass is a debt owed.  It is not settled until it is paid or pardoned.  That is the point of the parable of the unforgiving servant in Matthew 18:15-35.

Does Age Erase a Trespass?

Sometimes we suppose that an adult could trespass against a child and merely bribe them off with a candy or a coke.  They have souls, too.  The same God who admonishes servants to not exploit their masters, also admonishes masters and mistresses to not exploit their servants.  The same God who admonishes children to obey their parents also advises parents to not provoke those children (Ephesians 6:2-9; Colossians 3:20-23).  They have feelings, too.  Joseph was a ‘mere’ teenager, a far ‘junior’ brother, when he was betrayed by his elders, yet those elders did not consider themselves too tall to bow to a junior when the time came to do so.

A young girl told me her story. She insisted that I note it as a lesson that adults should learn from.   Her father is a pastor that I know very well.  There was an issue one day between Mom and Dad, and Mom had taken all the children as usual in her car and driven off into town.  They went that day first to see a younger and junior pastor to her father, to whom the mother began to tell terrible tales about the father.  From where she sat with her siblings, she said, they could hear the mother lying as always against their father.  What pained her was not the telling but the lying.  They had all witnessed what had happened, which was far from what Mom was reporting again to one more stranger.  She said her mother was claiming to the pastor that her husband had often beaten her, whereas she was the troublemaker, very malicious and violent with her tongue.  The young girl didn’t think that that was a Christian tongue, much less the tongue of a pastor’s wife.  She boiled the more when she heard the pastor threatening and wishing that he could print posters of her father and go all over town to publish and ‘expose’ the abominations of a man who claimed to be a pastor yet could do those terrible things to his wife.  Helplessly, she wondered to herself where she sat with her younger siblings, “This pastor should at least have taken the pains to confirm if what he has heard is true. That is what a pastor should do, not take sides with lies.”

From where they sat, she felt so angry at the lies and the threatened blackmail that she wished she were older, and she would have fought that man, but she was only seven years old.  She vowed in her little heart that when she grew up she would ‘do something’ to that man that he would not forget, for taking sides and threatening to sponsor placards and posters all over town against an innocent man, without even bothering to confirm if what he had heard was the truth.

Eleven years later, that pastor was a guest in their house.  She had long forgotten the matter, but when she saw him and heard his peculiar gruff voice, the picture and pain of so many years ago rushed back at her.  She was angry.   While she was wondering how to handle him, her father asked her to prepare dinner for the man.  (The mother had long abandoned them.)  They were going to host him at their house overnight.  The young girl said she realised at once that she had to deal with forgiveness, with a pain she did not know she still carried, until the face of that visiting pastor had recalled the past.  Telling me her story was part of her vicarious therapy, to relieve her soul.  But she reinforced a message: that children have feelings also, even though they might not have the courage or privilege, like an elder, to express their pains promptly.

Some elders might never know how many young hearts they have wounded.  Some thoughtless elders might never know how many tender hearts are carrying offences against them.  Worse still, some elders are too proud to care, and would never bend to say “I am sorry” to a mere child.  Children deserve apology no less than an adult does.  They have souls, too.  A candy cannot erase the memory of their pains, nor heal the wound that a simple penitent apology would have done.  “Provoke not your children to anger” (Colossians 3:21).  Children also can be sinned against, as the Bible here reveals.

Lessons from the Prophets

In Daniel 10:2, we read that DANIEL “was mourning three full weeks.”  Later, we hear him giving voice to his penitence; he had been mourning from the previous chapter:

18 O my God, incline thine ear, and hear; open thine eyes, and behold our desolations, and the city which is called by thy name: for we do not present our supplications before thee for our righteousnesses, but for thy great mercies.

19 O Lord, hear; O Lord, forgive; O Lord, hearken and do; defer not, for thine own sake, O my God: for thy city and thy people are called by thy name (Daniel 9:18-19).

Daniel in faraway Babylon was asking forgiveness for a people and a place some 500 miles away; he was interceding for his now-desolate nation of Judah and its capital city of Jerusalem.  For that prophet, time and space had not erased the need for repentance; time and distance had not diminished the need to repair relational damages with the Divine.  Is that applicable to human relations?  Yes.

In a way that makes further sense to intercessors, we find NEHEMIAH in a similar role.  In Nehemiah 1:5-9, for example, we read,

5 …I beseech thee, O LORD God of heaven, the great and terrible God, that keepeth covenant and mercy for them that love him and observe his commandments:

6 Let thine ear now be attentive, and thine eyes open, that thou mayest hear the prayer of thy servant, which I pray before thee now, day and night, for the children of Israel thy servants, and CONFESS the sins of the children of Israel, which we have sinned against thee: both I and my father’s house have sinned.

7 We have dealt very corruptly against thee, and have not kept the commandments, nor the statutes, nor the judgments, which thou commandedst thy servant Moses.

8 Remember, I beseech thee, the word that thou commandedst thy servant Moses, saying, If ye transgress, I will scatter you abroad among the nations:

9 But if ye turn unto me, and keep my commandments, and do them; though there were of you cast out unto THE UTTERMOST PART of the heaven, yet will I gather them from thence, and will bring them unto the place that I have chosen to set my name there (Nehemiah 1:5-9).

Like Daniel, Nehemiah was in exile several hundreds of miles away from the land and people for whom that confession directly stood, several decades after the trespasses being confessed were committed.  For Nehemiah also, time and distance had not erased the need to repair past damages.  Someone might argue that those prayers were confessions to God.  Even then, they are applicable in human relations.  Besides, we have repeatedly seen the cases of Joseph’s brothers and the Prodigal Son, which were more horizontal in their nature.

In similar circumstances, God instructed the prophet EZEKIEL to address “the iniquity of the house of Israel” (Ezekiel 4:5), a case that God let him know was 390 years old, nearly four centuries into the past (Ezekiel 4:1-5).  In terms of time, that was far back in the past; in terms of distance, it was a long way off, as Prophet Ezekiel at that time was in exile in Babylon, some 500 miles away.  The wide gap in time and space had not erased the need to repair the past.

Proxy Confessions

The examples of interceding prophets in the foregoing sections reveal another side to repairing past relational damages.  None of those confessors was the one that committed the ‘iniquity’ for which they were seeking forgiveness.  They were only the descendants of the guilty ancestors.  In other words, where the culprit of a relational damage is not available, a near kin can institute the repair process, especially where the original offence has had communal or concentric repercussions, where there have been implications beyond the original trespasser and the original victim.  For instance, in the Dr Omo Oba-Jesu story told in chapter 5, the ones to whom God was compelling His servant to make confession were not the direct victims, except in the sense of being the parents of that dead victim.

If a drunk boy drove into a house and maimed a child, then fled town and has been unseen for years, how would you feel if you were the parent of that crippled child, and the parents of the Prodigal Son have never since showed up to check on you or the child, because it is ‘not their business’ after all?  How differently would you feel if they had been coming to seek amends and had been making contributions towards the child’s recovery, in spite of their runaway son?

Sometimes there are families feuding as a result of ancestral hostility.  One ancestor trespassed against the other in the distant past, and each ancestor passed the legacy of bitterness down their line.  Today, the children of the ancestor trespassed against carry the grudge against the children of the trespasser, or vice versa.  What should be done?  The children of the guilty should commence reparation processes.  They should confess on behalf of their guilty ancestor to the children of the ancestor trespassed against.  Is there a scripture for that prescription?  Yes.  The proxy confessions of the prophets cited above are examples.

In Leviticus 26:32-42 also, God puts upon a present generation of ‘children’ the onus of redressing the sins of their distant ancestors; He recognizes their power to confess not only “their iniquity” in the present but also “the iniquity of their fathers” (v.40) in the distant past.  He says that such proxy intervention by relations has the power to ‘open’ the ancient files and make Him to “remember” and to “heal” a forgotten land and its forgotten people.

While we agree that it is “the soul that sinneth” that shall die (Ezekiel 18:4, 20); while we also agree that every worker of sin would have the “wages” paid directly into their personal account (Romans 6:23), we cannot deny, as the story of David in 2 Samuel 12:9-12 well illustrates, that there are often sad ‘fringe benefits’ or consequences that also flow out horizontally to other relations and neighbours, or flow down vertically to the descendants of the guilty.  That is why proxy interventions are important.  The extent to which one is connected enough to suffer the consequences of an offender’s actions is indicative of the power they possess to make proxy appearances or confessions.  If they are not connected to the circumstances, their locus standi to address the trespass might accordingly be little.

What if Nobody Knows?

Should I still seek forgiveness if nobody knows that I was the culprit?  Nobody might know, but the conscience does, and the policeman of conscience is more to be feared than the one in uniform who patrols the streets.  Besides, the Justice of Nature, which some call nemesis, still hangs a curse over guilty heads whom the searching eyes of mortals might never find.

The curse of the LORD is [already] in the house of the wicked [whether or not anyone has found out their wickedness]: but he blesseth the habitation of the just (Proverbs 3:33).

A woman lost 110 shekels of silver.  She did not know who the thief was.  She cursed when she discovered her loss.  It turned out her son was the thief.  Nobody knew, apart from himself, that he was the thief, yet he restored the stolen items and confessed to having been the guilty one.  We might say that he had only been frightened by the curse; all the same, he owned up to the wrong, repairing the past.  Unfortunately, the money went into an idolatrous project (Judges 17:1-2).  David did not wait for King Saul to discover who had cut his royal skirt before, smitten by his conscience, he called out to confess the act (1 Samuel 24:4-21).  Even where nobody knows, God knows.

What if They are Unreachable?

What if one is unable to trace the person to whom one was owing the debt of confession?  Does that erase the need to pay back?  No.  God gives directives on how to pay back debts where the original party can no longer be reached as a result of death or other life events.  That includes the debt of confession.

8 “And give the following instructions to the people of Israel: If a man dies and has no son, then give his inheritance to his daughters. 9 And if he has no daughter either, transfer his inheritance to his brothers. 10 If he has no brothers, give his inheritance to his father’s brothers. 11 But if his father has no brothers, give his inheritance to the nearest relative in his clan. This is a legal requirement for the people of Israel, just as the Lord commanded Moses” (Numbers 27:8-11, New Living Translation).

“But if the person who was wronged is dead, and there are no near relatives to whom restitution can be made, the payment belongs to the Lord and must be given to the priest. Those who are guilty must also bring a ram as a sacrifice, and they will be purified and made right with the Lord (Numbers 5:8, New Living Translation).

The implication is clear: where it is not possible to trace the one being owed the debt of confession or apology, it should be passed to the nearest kin or relation.  Where that is also impossible, let it be between that penitent seeker and the Lord their God.

False Witnessing

If I did not commit a trespass, should I confess to the ‘wrong,’ merely for the sake of peace?  No.  It is as wrong to lie against oneself as it is to lie against someone else.  Sometimes, people have been forced to admit to what they never did, just to gain an advantage or escape apparent danger.  The ninth Commandment says, “Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour” (Exodus 20:16).  In the same vein, one should not bear false witness against oneself.  The core of the commandment is “FALSE witness.” It is painful when others lie against us, but is it almost abominable when we are forced to lie against ourselves, even in the name of confession or a supposed righteousness.

In 2 Samuel 1:2-16, the story is told of an ambitious Amalekite who lied against himself, claiming that he had been the ‘hero’ who hastened the death of the dying King Saul, David’s sworn antagonist.  He had hoped by the lie to procure favour from David.  What did he get in return?  Instant death.  He implicated himself by his words, even though he had been innocent of the act.  Do not lie against yourself, despite the pressure to so offend your conscience.  You could bring ineradicable blood upon yourself.

And David said unto him, Thy blood be upon thy head; for THY MOUTH hath TESTIFIED against thee, saying, I have slain the LORD’S anointed (1 Samuel 1:16).

May your own mouth never be the ‘witness’ against yourself in the courts of God and of mortals.  May your mouth never give ‘testimony’ against your innocent self, no matter the situation.  May it never be said by the jury of mortals and of spirits, “thy mouth hath testified against thee.”  When that happens, no other witness is needed by the ‘courts’ to condemn you, and you may hardly thereafter be acquitted.