If you have never been hurt by someone close to you, so hurt that you believe the relationship will always be defined by that pain, then you are welcome to daydream during this sermon. But think twice before you check out, because if you haven’t been hurt like that yet, you haven’t lived long enough. Your day will come.

We have a vivid picture of just that kind of pain in the biblical saga of King David and his son Absalom. David is the best loved of Bible characters from the Old Testament. He is the hero shepherd boy who first killed lions and tigers and bears (oh, my!) to protect the sheep, and then he killed the giant Goliath. He rose to be king of Israel, and he ruled with as much mercy toward his people as ruthlessness toward his enemies. What’s more, he was a man after God’s own heart, which, considering some of his flaws, makes us wonder about God’s own heart. Remember, this is the same David who first did a peeping Tom on Bathsheba, then brought her into his palace bed, and then sent her husband to the front lines, where he took a literal arrow in the heart to match the one his wife had put there.

People say, If we could just be more like the people in the Bible, as if all the people in the Bible always did the right thing where we are apt to do the wrong thing. Right! No, sometimes the Bible offers us unflattering mirrors to look into. Bible characters are a lot like us. And yet we never get the idea that we must fail or fall. All may sin and fall short of the glory of God, but nothing is inevitable; we do not have to betray those we love, for instance. Reading tragedies that issue from unfaithfulness forewarns us. But we find hope for a cure there, too — a cure we do not have it in us naturally to muster. As Alexander Pope well put it, To err is human, to forgive divine.

The slice of the story of David and Absalom we read today typifies the basic betrayals in the relationship. David has many wives, and many concubines as well. (That, as any woman will tell you, was his first fault, don’t you know?!) His son Amnon is next in line for the throne, but the young prince is smitten with lust for his stepsister, Tamar. Amnon longs for her until his heart hurts. When he can stand it no longer, he tricks Tamar into his bedchamber and ravishes her. After he has taken her for his pleasure, his heart turns as cold toward her as it had been hot.

Well, Tamar is shamed in the eyes of all Israel, which incredibly and sadly is what still happens to women today who have been raped. Tamar’s full brother, Absalom, waits for his father the king to discipline his half-brother, Amnon, for this family atrocity. But David betrays his daughter and his whole family by failing to defend her by punishing Amnon. Absalom was several steps down the ladder of succession, and maybe his view of the future throne skews his reaction, but he will not let the matter of his sister’s honor go. Within two years he sees to the murder of Amnon. This time the king acts: he banishes Absalom, rubbing salt in the wound, because he did nothing toward Amnon; and then when Absalom avenges his sister, the way her father should have, Absalom is sent away. The bile of bitterness builds in Absalom’s belly. He both loves and loathes his father, David. He wants his love and blessing, and yet he wants justice done at the same time. David finally concedes to bring Absalom back to Jerusalem after a three-year exile, but he refuses to see him for another two years. In other words, David further turns the knife into Absalom’s heart by drawing him close and still shutting him out. The sweet reunion of father and son turns bitter again for the same neglect.

David fails in his fatherly duties, and he fails his kingly duties to judge the people’s disputes. With no role in the royal family, Absalom steps up to win the hearts of the people by hearing their cases and judging justly among them. Before long, he decides to steal the hearts of the people and the crown of his father the king, since he cannot win the heart of his father or wait for his own crown. The battle that follows ends badly. Absalom’s famously beautiful long hair, which was all the crown on his head he could claim, gets caught in an oak thicket, and he is left hanging between heaven and earth.David’s general, Joab, finds him and puts an end to Absalom’s pain by putting three spears through him. The scene ends King Lear-like: all the victorious king can do is mourn his son and his own failure: Absalom, Absalom, my son, my son. Would that I could have died in your place. Too late.

It’s one of those stories you wish you could just crawl into the pages, right between the lines, and shake some sense into all of them. Amnon, whose name means faithfulness, wasn’t. Absalom, whose name means my father is peace, didn’t have a father of peace, and he surely wasn’t a son of peace, either. It didn’t have to be that way. It all could have been stopped at any moment with the proper tonic.

Already, in hearing this story, many a mind has wandered in this sanctuary — not because you haven’t known disloyalty or betrayal in your own family, but precisely because you have. You have made the connection to a father who abandoned you or a mother who was unduly critical or withheld her affections or a spouse who cheated on you, or a child who turned on you, or a sibling who got away with murder while you were blamed for everything. These are hurts for which there is no human cure. They linger for a lifetime and shape your soul in ways you cannot imagine. What’s more, they affect your own relationships with people who are close to you. If you are overly outraged by the behavior of others or find yourself outraged as to why others are not equally outraged at bad behavior, it might be more than moral rectitude; it might be because you have not fully addressed the old hurt in your heart from someone else who is close to you. And if you find yourself guarding your heart, unable to give it away or open it someone in love, it may also be that you have unfinished business with someone who has betrayed your trust.

The gospel of Jesus Christ provides the only antidote for this poison: forgiveness. I don’t mean any easy wave of the hand that excuses the hurt or erases it overnight; I mean a painful process that rewrites the past in your memory and re-imagines the future differently. This forgiveness is possible because God has done just that with us and wants to teach us to do it with each other.

When Jesus looked down from the cross and said, Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do, he was seeing not only Roman soldiers and Jewish leaders and deserting disciples; he was seeing you and me. He suffered our betrayal and did not hold it against us. Jesus forgave Peter and restored him after Peter’s disloyalty in denying Jesus and treating his friend as a stranger. No relationship is beyond the redemption of Jesus. I even think Judas would have learned that if he had stuck around long enough to see the risen Lord. And so Paul tells us that if any of us is hurt by another, we MUST forgive, as God has forgiven us. We must forgive, as much for ourselves as for those who need our forgiveness. The only way to find peace with our betrayers is through this painful forgiveness.

In this series of sermons on a peace that passes understanding, we have learned that this God is peace and we know God’s peace by practicing the presence of Christ in our own lives. And yet all of that is in jeopardy if we do not let Christ’s presence lead us to peace with those who have hurt us. One key is to remember that we are all of us betrayers also. None of us will make it through life without needing someone’s forgiveness, in addition to God’s.

My wife, Kim, has just opened her heart to her father in a new way. He is not in good health these days, and all the days of their relationship have not been good, either. So she wrote a letter to him that is a model to me of how to forgive and restore. She did not detail the facts that cannot be changed, but she acknowledged the hold her hurts had had on her. She did not dwell on that with him, though. Instead, she performed “spiritual surgery” on herself. She put herself under the knife instead of putting it to him. She cut out the tumor of resentment and replaced it with gratitude. She thanked him for all the ways he had loved her and her children, for all the qualities in her she had inherited from him. She changed her memory of him. She determined to think of him in love rather than focus on the bad.

This is sometimes a missing ingredient in making peace through a painful forgiveness. The most obvious element we neglect is forgiveness that doesn’t wait for the person to repent or to deserve our pardon. Sometimes forgiveness is the very thing that makes that possible. But even though we can own the hurt and even claim to forgive, we sometimes don’t want to go on to seeing a new and joyful future for the relationship. The peace that passes understanding is more than personal therapy or a numbing truce.

Lewis Smedes tells a moving fable of a married couple, Hilda and Fouke, who learned forgiveness in a powerful way. They were an unlikely match, these two: the man long and angular and stern, the woman short and round and flush with emotion. They were upstanding members of their church in a town small enough for everyone to know everyone’s business. One day Fouke returned home early from his work routine and found Hilda in bed with another man. The whole church felt Fouke’s pain and expected him to put her out of his house. But he surprised them by taking her back, claiming that it was his Christian duty to forgive his wife. And yet, although they lived in the same house, they were never at home with one another again, because Fouke made Hilda live under his righteous mercy. Hilda felt his scorn, but it affected him as much as her. Fouke’s fakery did not go over well in heaven. Every time he looked at her, all he could see was her in bed with another man, and his anger flared again. And each time he did, an angel dropped another pebble into his heart. Over time he became so weighted down that he was bent over and could not even lift his head to see her.

One night the angel who dropped the pebbles in his heart appeared to him and told him that there was only one remedy: he had to put on the magic eyes. Only if he began to look at his wife as a woman who needed his love instead of a woman who had betrayed him could he be free. Fouke protested that no one can change the past; what is must remain. The angel insisted. Fouke began to change. Each time he looked upon his wife with love and drew toward her rather than pushing her away, the angel took another pebble away. Over time Fouke straightened up and found his eyes looking naturally at a woman he longed for again. They enjoyed an intimacy for the rest of their days that they had even lacked at the beginning. [Forgive & Forget: Healing the Hurts We Don’t Deserve (Pocket Books: 1984), pp. 13-15.]

You can’t change the past, but you can heal the hurts the past has caused. And you can begin today. To forgive is to make peace with those who have betrayed you. It is to set a prisoner free, only to discover that the prisoner was you. Do you want that kind of freedom? Do you want that kind of peace? You know what to do.