Forgetful God

Text: Luke 15:1-10 Other texts: Exodus 32:7-14, Psalm 51

Humans are designed to forget. Unlike in some models of the mind, our brains are not mechanical or electronic machines. We notice some things but not others. We remember some things for years, others for just moments. Mostly, though, all our memories fade.

Until recently, that is. Now we have a huge repository of information, the global web, that remembers pretty much perfectly pretty much forever. If you did something not so pleasant a decade ago, the net will remember. You cannot outlive your mistakes, and their impact does not fade with time. This development worries people, because forgetting is important to us, individually and collectively. Forgetting makes forgiveness possible. It is not the same as forgiveness, and you can and usually do forgive someone without forgetting what that person did to you. But unless there is some trauma, you don’t remember everything exactly. And as we pull away from events over time, it makes room for reflection, reconciliation, and redemption. We are built to be forgetful.

In our relationship with God, it is easy to get confused about who does what. We get especially confused about repentance. In normal life, repentance is something we have to do to have someone say “It’s all right.” (I’m sorry, I won’t do it again, I messed up. Well, OK, it’s all right.) And if people don’t repent, that’s grounds for refusing to forgive them. Why should I forgive you, you’re not even sorry.

So when we hear Jesus talk about the joy in heaven over the one sinner who repents, it makes us wonder. Is repentance a requirement with God as it seems to be with us? Do I need to say I’m sorry before God says “It’s all right”? Will we lose our blessings unless we agree to change our ways for the better? Is it something we have to do to be favored by God, as it is to be favored by people?

The Israelites deserve God’s anger. God, through Moses, has just told them all the things they should do as God’s people, and in particular just told them that they are not to pay a lot of attention to other gods. So the very first thing they do is build this calf out of gold and start worshipping it as their lord. So God—our God and theirs—is ticked off. I have had it with these people, he says. And he threatens to zap them. But Moses intercedes. He argues with God. The Egyptians will laugh at you. Why did you lead all those people out of slavery, just to kill them in the desert. Change your mind, says Moses. It is hard to know whether God was nervous about being embarrassed. But whatever the reason, God does change God’s mind. That is, God repents. God turns back—which is what the word repent means—God turns back to the original plan: Israel onward to the promised land.

It is God who repents in this story, not the Israelites. There is no “I’m sorry, I won’t do it again” in this story. The repenting here is something God does, not something people do in order to have God do something in return. There is no “in return.”

The Israelites certainly deserve what God threatens to do. People like to see people get what they deserve. That’s one of the reasons some people don’t like the story of the Prodigal Son—in the next chapter in Luke—where neither son gets what he deserves. And why should the lost sheep of today’s passage get rescued, when by wandering away he puts the whole flock in jeopardy. But it seems like the words “God” and “what you deserve” don’t fit in the same sentence. God doesn’t seem to care much about who deserves what. The wandering sheep gets saved, the wandering brother gets a party, the adulterous woman gets freed, the workers who come late get paid the same as the ones who have worked all day, the beggar gets twice what he asks for, the Good Friday executioners get forgiven.

God gives too much away. In the parables that Jesus tells, no one asks for forgiveness. But they are forgiven anyway. No one repents. But they are welcomed by God anyway. The parables are not about how great the repent-ers are. They are about how great God is.

Sometimes I think the Gospels should be called “101 Jokes by Jesus.” He says these things with a straight face that you know are absurd. So today, he tells his listeners that the heavens welcome the one repentant sinner more than the 99 righteous people. But where are you going to find a crowd of 99 sinless people, one of whom repents? You’d be lucky to find one totally good person in a hundred, much less 99. We are all sinners, which we know by theology and by experience. If you’ve never done what you shouldn’t have or left undone something you should have, cool for you. The scribes and Pharisees grumble that Jesus eats with sinners. Good thing for us, I’d say. If Jesus only ate with the sinless, he’d eat at a table for one most of the time. If he wants to eat with me—and I want him to—I’m glad he eats with sinners.

We speak a lot about what God hopes we’ll do, what God says we should do, what we think God wants us to do. But our relationship with God is not so much about what God demands. It’s about what God gives. Even if we feel like we don’t deserve it, or don’t even feel bad about what we’ve done. Jesus eats with sinners not because they promise not to sin any more, but because Jesus wants to eat with them. This kind of hanging around with not-the-best sort of people is probably the most obvious part of Jesus’ ministry and for his contemporaries, and even for some folks nowadays, the most troubling. It is a scandal.

The psalm for today, a version of which we sang, is thought to have been a lament by King David after he slept with Bathsheba and then had her husband killed to cover it up. In the psalm, David says essentially: I would really appreciate it, God, if you’d just forget the whole thing.

I don’t know if God is more like the Internet or more like our brains—most likely not at all like either. We have a hard time forgiving, much less forgetting. But God evidently finds it easy. We worship a God who rejoices in the act of forgiving. Joy in heaven, the verses say, joy among the angels, when the ones who are lost are found.

Though made in the image of God, we forgive imperfectly, all messed up with thoughts of people getting what they deserve and accountability, or needing to receive an apology first, or just being unable to drop it. But we worship a God who forgives perfectly, and whether it is actually so or not, seems to perfectly forget. Which is good for wandering sheep and stiff-necked people. Good for us.