24th Sunday

Larger than the vision we have of ourselves.

24^th Sunday

Sir. 27.33 - 28.9; Rom. 14.7-9; Mt. 18.21-35.

Like the readings for last week, the three readings today are amazingly integrated. They have a common theme which is both explicit and very clearly articulated. It is, of course, the matter of forgiveness. So, I'd like to talk a little bit about that today.

The first and most obvious point even if we don't bring it to consciousness, is that forgiveness makes absolutely no sense. Forgiveness is, on the face of it, irrational. Someone places an act, offensive to someone else...that act exists. The act perdures through time. I mean all we have to do is look at the Congo. Rwanda, Northern Ireland. Sarajevo. East Timor. What is being played out in all those horrible scenes but simply the result of one human action as it ripples forth into history. It makes perfectly good sense, because you can't cancel an historical fact. You cannot pretend that it does not exist. And therefore it has to be somehow... handled.

We see the way it's typically handled, in piles of dead bodies, burned houses and looted stores. That should not surprise anybody. Logically it makes eminent good sense. But then, of course, we sit back and say "This is chaos." (And it is chaos. I'd hate to be living in Dili, East Timor today. Or one of the cities in Kosovo.) People will sit back and say "Oh well, folks. We must do something about this. Life is unliveable."

And so we arrange some sort of response to the fact that people are offending each other, violating each other. Setup the U.N. to do that now.

But even personally we make such adjustments in a variety of ways. I think probably one of the leading ways runs like this... Well, if I let this go in some way, this person is going to come back and do me double dirt. So I'm going to be in even bigger trouble if somehow I cannot dissolve, in one way or another, the fact of this offense. I’ll just pretend it didn’t happen so cowardice is one major strategy for dealing with the fact that we offend each other. And I think that it's a pretty normal one.

Or this purely pragmatic solution. If we don't somehow walk away from a battle that took place in Serbia 700 years ago, life is going to be unliveable. So simply, strategic adjustment is another way of dealing with that. We "get on with it." Forget it. Life goes on. Time heals all wounds. And we can pray nightly that we have the power to forget.

But neither of those strategies, and there are many other ones that we can come up with, are forgiveness. Neither is forgiveness because forgiveness.... is what? Forgiveness is basically the serious admission of something wrong having been done to me and yet saying that that historical moment is to be somehow absorbed in a larger and richer future.

Okay. But then it gets a little more complicated than that because we know ourselves too well. "I did it once. The chances of my doing it again are very good." And so we can use the future as a dodge. "I’ll do better next time." Often enough we don't do better next time. So what on the face of this earth will enable us to really come to the point where somehow we are not stuck, like a butterfly with a pin on a board, on our own pasts?

There is no philosophical solution. There is no psychological solution despite how many are typically offered. There's only a theological solution to the problem of forgiveness. Namely, that God is the God of all of us and God wants to call us beyond where we are and who we are. And here we've introduced something drastically novel into the whole human scene. Forgiveness becomes really possible. It takes on it's own authentic colours. It is not an act of cowardice. It's not an act of strategic adjustment. Rather it becomes a claim on us, which is a whole different thing. It becomes a claim on me. That is, if I am to live, faithful to this God, the God of Jesus, then forgiveness means that I bring this other with me, together, into God's future. God, who can transmute me. God who can transform us so that we really can, in that glorious phrase that I repeat over and over....stand naked and unashamed before each other. And once God is introduced into this human equation, numerous things become clear.

One thing I talked about a couple of weeks ago: the essentially tragic character of the human condition becomes clear because without forgiveness, it is absolutely true, life becomes unliveable.

But it must be real forgiveness. It cannot be an act of cowardice or fake-psychological adjustment, or politically canny, strategic move. None of those are forgiveness. They're dodges. They're evasions. Falsifications. But once I come to believe in this God, hope in this God, then I can say to the other, I want to move toward God with you. For my hope in this God is real only when it is a hope for and with all other people. And the only way to come to this hope is to say that, what is more important is this God who calls us forward out of this past, however deeply flawed, however much violence has been done, however much we have damaged, wounded, injured and truncated each other. And this is, of course, what I would have done.

Jesus as we have it in the gospel, died with these extraordinary words: "Father, forgive them." Why? Because he didn't think his murder was real or serious? No, I don't think so. Rather he had a vision of these people even his own murderers, larger than the vision that they had of each other or themselves. And that alone is forgiveness. Only that is forgiveness. And we need to be very clear about that. That we don't confuse that with some kind of substitute, ersatz, phony form of forgiveness, which really leaves everything very much safely in place.

And so finally, I'd like to appeal again to the example of the pope in the hope that he will articulate this in a variety of ways. The church should be unique in the world in that it stands before the world publicly confessing itself as sinful, as needing to be forgiven, as penitent, as in need of reform. And by reform I don't mean some causal adjustment, some tidying of the edges. Cutting off of loose strings and sharpening of corners. No. It is us saying to the world.... we have failed you. We have betrayed you. And the only way, as I said, that the pope or any of us can make that statement is that we believe in a God who in the glorious phrase of the first letter of John... is larger than even our meagre, narrow, often enough unforgiving hearts.

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