The date was September 11, 2001, I was in my first year of seminary. I had been in class that morning, and as I walked across campus after class, there was a strange stillness. This was before smartphones put the whole world in our pockets, so information traveled differently. I remember getting into my car and turning on the radio, and for a few moments I wondered whether I was listening to some modern version of War of the Worlds. A plane had struck the World Trade Center. Then another. Something terrible was happening, although none of us understood just how terrible it would become.
I returned to the seminary, where students and faculty had gathered around a television. I remember knowing, even then, that something had changed. We did not yet know what the next weeks or months or years would bring, but we knew that the world we had awakened to that morning was not the world in which we would go to sleep that night.
Twenty-five years is a long time. A few years ago, I was traveling with a group of Boy Scouts on the way to Gettysburg, and we stopped at the September 11 Memorial and Museum in New York. I looked for the name of Father Mychal Judge, the FDNY chaplain who was killed while ministering at the World Trade Center. His example has profoundly influenced my own understanding of fire chaplaincy and what it means simply to be present and “serving those who serve.”
But something else struck me that day. Many of the young people traveling with us had not even been born on September 11, 2001. For me, September 11 was memory. For them, it was history. The world that had changed so dramatically for those of us who lived through that day was simply the world they had inherited. Eventually all living memory crosses that threshold. Those who remember become those who tell the story, and another generation must decide what it will do with the story it receives.
That may be one of the most important questions we can ask twenty-five years later. Not simply, “Do we remember?” Of course we remember. But perhaps the deeper question is this: What do we do with what we remember?
Memory can teach us, protect us, and help us honor those who have gone before us. But memory can also become a prison if the wound we remember is permitted to determine forever how we see ourselves, how we see others, and how we imagine the future. We cannot always choose what wounds us. But, with time and grace, we can begin to choose whether the wound gets to choose our future.
That is where we encounter Joseph. His brothers had betrayed him, thrown him into a pit, sold him into slavery, and allowed their father to believe he was dead. Years later, Joseph has risen to power in Egypt, and the brothers who once held power over him now find themselves entirely at his mercy. Their father has died, and they are terrified that Joseph has simply been waiting for his opportunity to make them pay.
Joseph now possesses everything he needs for revenge, but he refuses it. And notice that he does not accomplish this by pretending the past never happened. He looks directly at his brothers and says, “Even though you intended to do harm to me, God intended it for good.” Joseph calls the harm what it was. He does not excuse it or erase it. Forgiveness begins not with denial but with truth.
We should also be careful with that verse. I do not believe Joseph is saying that God caused his brothers to abuse him so that some larger divine plan could unfold. Human beings caused evil in Joseph’s story. What Joseph has discovered is that human evil does not get the last word. God can bring life from places where human beings intended destruction. Joseph remembers what happened, but he refuses to let what happened determine what happens next.
Then Peter comes to Jesus in Matthew’s Gospel and asks, “Lord, if another member of the church sins against me, how often should I forgive? As many as seven times?” Peter wants a number. He wants to know the limit. At what point have I fulfilled my obligation? At what point may I finally say, “That’s it. I have forgiven enough”?
Jesus answers with a number our translations render either seventy-seven times or seventy times seven. But the arithmetic is not the point. He is not suggesting that Peter keep a notebook and make a checkmark each time he forgives someone. Jesus is dismantling the accounting system altogether.
There may also be an echo here of one of the oldest stories in Genesis. A man named Lamech boasts that if Cain is avenged sevenfold, Lamech will be avenged seventy-sevenfold. It is a picture of the way violence multiplies you hurt me, so I hurt you more; you retaliate, so I retaliate again. Injury becomes vengeance, vengeance creates another injury, and eventually the cycle seems almost impossible to break.
Jesus takes that language of multiplied vengeance and turns it around. What if, instead of multiplying vengeance, we multiplied forgiveness? What if the cycle stopped somewhere? The injury can still be named. Justice can still be sought. Boundaries may still be necessary. But vengeance does not have to have the final word.
Jesus follows with the story of a servant who owes a king an impossibly large debt. The servant begs for mercy, and the king releases the debt completely. Yet almost immediately, that same servant encounters someone who owes him far less, grabs him, and demands payment.
The tragedy is that the servant has been released from his debt, but he has not been released from the world of debt. He has received mercy but continues to live by scorekeeping, punishment, and repayment. He has been set free, but he does not know how to live like a free person.
The ending of the parable is harsh, and I do not think we should turn every detail of the king into a literal description of God. Jesus is telling a story meant to disturb us. The servant ends up imprisoned, and perhaps that is the image we need to notice. There are prisons built of stone and steel, but resentment can become a prison too. The desire for revenge can keep someone who hurt us years ago occupying our thoughts and directing our lives long after the original injury.
This is why I have come to believe that forgiveness is a form of freedom. Sometimes the person who hurt us will never apologize or acknowledge what they did. Sometimes they are no longer alive. Forgiveness is the work, often long and difficult work, of refusing to give another person permanent possession of part of our life.
But Christians have sometimes spoken about forgiveness in ways that cause tremendous harm, so we need to be clear about what it is not. Forgiveness does not mean forgetting. It does not mean pretending something did not hurt or calling evil good. It does not mean abandoning justice or accountability. And Jesus’ command to forgive is never permission for someone to keep hurting you.
Forgiveness is also not the same thing as reconciliation. Reconciliation is relational. If a relationship is going to be restored, there must be truth, accountability, repentance, changed behavior, and enough safety for trust to be rebuilt. You can forgive someone and never have a relationship with them again. You can forgive someone and maintain a boundary. You can forgive someone and still insist that harmful actions have consequences.
Joseph shows us this. He calls what his brothers did harm, but he refuses to become what they were. He will not allow their violence to dictate his character or his future. Forgiveness does not require Joseph to call evil good. He calls it evil and then refuses to let evil determine what happens next.
And perhaps that brings us back to September 11. I would never stand here and tell someone who lost a spouse, a parent, a child, a sibling, or a friend that day what they are required to feel. Their grief belongs to them, and it is sacred. There are circles of grief around every tragedy, and those closest to the loss carry something those of us farther away cannot fully understand.
But communities carry wounds too. Nations carry wounds. Churches carry wounds. Families carry wounds. Sooner or later, every community must decide what it will do with what it remembers. Will memory teach us compassion, or will it teach us suspicion? Will grief deepen our humanity, or will it harden our hearts? Will the wound become part of our story, or will we allow the wound to write every chapter that follows?
This weekend our Jewish neighbors are observing Rosh Hashanah and entering the High Holy Days, a sacred season marked by reflection, repentance, and the work of repair. These are not our holy days to claim as Christians, but we can honor our Jewish neighbors and recognize a deeply human truth in the practice: there are moments when we need to look honestly at where we have been so that we can choose more faithfully where we are going.
Perhaps that is part of the road to freedom. We remember, because forgetting is not healing. We tell the truth, because denial is not forgiveness. We seek justice, because mercy does not require indifference to harm. But somewhere along the road, by the grace of God, we begin loosening our grip on the need to make someone else suffer because we have suffered.
For anyone carrying a wound that is still raw, forgiveness may be a process rather than a moment. There are injuries that cannot simply be released because a preacher says on Sunday morning that forgiveness is a good idea. Sometimes the first faithful step is admitting, “I am not ready.” Sometimes it is asking God to help us want to want to forgive. Sometimes it means seeking the help of someone we trust because what we are carrying is too heavy to carry alone.
Grace is not another burden placed upon wounded people. Grace is God’s patient work within us, loosening what binds us and opening possibilities we could not see before. We do not forgive to persuade God to love us. We forgive because we have already encountered a God whose mercy is larger than our debts, larger than our failures, and larger even than the wounds we carry.
Twenty-five years after September 11, we remember. Joseph remembered. Jesus never asks us to erase the past. The Christian hope is something far more daring: that the past, however painful, does not have to possess the future.
We cannot change what has happened to us. We cannot return to September 10, 2001. We cannot unsay the words that wounded someone, restore every trust that has been broken, or undo every choice we regret. But by the grace of God, what has happened to us does not have to determine what happens next.
That is the road Jesus invites us to walk. It is not the road of forgetting or cheap reconciliation. It does not avoid truth or justice. It is the road on which we remember without becoming captive to memory, seek justice without surrendering ourselves to vengeance, and discover that mercy can interrupt the cycle of injury before another generation inherits it.
Forgiveness does not change the past. Forgiveness changes the past’s claim upon the future. Perhaps that is what freedom looks like: the wound remains part of our story, but it no longer gets to decide how the story ends.
May God give us the courage to tell the truth about what has wounded us, the wisdom to establish the boundaries that protect life and dignity, the patience to forgive in the time that forgiveness requires, and the grace to take the next step on the road to freedom.
Amen.
