by CCW | 27 June 2010 18:20
Forgiveness. It is the hardest thing and yet it is one of the most free things that we can ever do, perhaps even one of the simplest things, in our lives. It is connected to that most free of all things: the power of God’s praise which brings the walls of presumption tumbling to the ground, like the walls of Jericho, for example. It belongs as well to the power of God’s love which moves in human loves; for instance, the love of friendship seen in David and Jonathan which remains a strong and precious bond even in the face of the enmity of a father and a king, namely, Saul. It is the abundance of divine charity that alone can open our eyes and soften our hearts.
What makes forgiveness so hard? It is our hypocrisy. It is not just our saying one thing and our doing another, but also our doing one thing and thinking another. We are divided within ourselves against ourselves, against one another and against God. There is our blindness and there is our judgmentalism – both of which are eloquently illustrated in the Gospel for today. “Can the blind lead the blind? Shall they not both fall into the ditch?…Cast out first the beam that is in thine own eye, then shall thou see clearly the mote that is in thy brother’s eye.” We presume to know what in fact we do not know. It is not just our ignorance but our arrogance that is the problem. It is a willful blindness, a kind of refusal to see what in fact we have been given to see and know, for instance, in the witness of the Scriptures. But then, again, we frequently refuse to act upon what we do know. It is not our knowing but our indifference or our stubbornness that is the problem.
We are constantly in a state of contradiction with ourselves and so with one another and with God. We are divided within ourselves. But to be aware of this state of inward contradiction is actually good news. It means the possibility of an openness to what transcends the divisions within ourselves and among ourselves and with God. It means suffering through the conditions of our incompleteness in the acknowledgment, not only of our own sinfulness, but of the redemption that is at work even through suffering. To be aware of the contradictions within ourselves is to embrace the suffering as redemptive. In a way, it is the simplest thing. We look beyond ourselves out of our condition of contradiction. We look to God. It changes how we look upon ourselves and one another.
Our need for forgiveness throws us into the arms of Christ. To know our own need for forgiveness impells our willingness to forgive one another. It places us in the forgiveness of God. Yet the acknowledgment of our own need for forgiveness and our willingness to forgive one another does not create the forgiveness we seek for ourselves and for one another. That, after all, can only come from God. Forgiveness is of God. But it is of God for man and for the whole created order which our sins have disturbed – “the whole creation groaneth and travaileth together until now.” The power of forgiveness and the need for forgiveness meet together in Jesus Christ. He is simply the forgiveness of sins. Our own forgiveness and our forgiveness towards one another arise out of our being with Christ. In him we see a whole new world, a world that is embraced in the love of God.
It doesn’t mean that it is easy. Khaled Hosseini’s novel The Kite Runner describes the heart-rending and brutal world of Afghanistan as the backdrop for depicting the power and the desire for forgiveness that arise out of the awareness of things done that should not have been done and things not done that should have been done. The story is set within the forms of the Islamic religion amid the ethnic and political conflicts in Afghanistan. It offers a poignant illustration of the realistic dynamic of forgiveness as something which is lived out through the pains and sorrows of the human heart that has had to come to terms with its own failings and betrayals and the pains and sorrows that it has created.
In the story, forgiveness is a somewhat elusive quality but, at the very least, remains as something hoped for once the sting of self-accusation begins to pass. Forgiveness buds forth, perhaps, “not with the fanfare of epiphany,” a sudden eureka moment, “but with pain gathering its things, packing up and slipping away unannounced in the middle of the night.” That is a nice image, I think, of the way in which the idea of forgiveness sometimes takes effect in us. But it requires that we be confronted not only with the idea but its reality. For Christians, the idea and the reality are one in Christ. In the pain and agony of the Cross he prays for our forgiveness. “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.” The task is to let his mercy begin to take shape in us.
Forgiveness is the reconciliation between God and man which he is and which he effects in us. What stands in the way is often just the hardness of our hearts – our unwillingness to accept our need for forgiveness and to embrace the sufferings in our lives as redemptive in Christ through his sufferings. Yet that challenge is constantly before us in the Lord’s Prayer and here in this Gospel and always in the Cross. It means to want what God wants and provides for us. We do not come to him presuming upon our righteousness but trusting only in his infinite mercy. But it is a mercy which has been shown to us and one which we struggle to live.
Fr. David Curry
Christ Church, Windsor
Trinity IV, 2010
8:00am
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2010/06/27/sermon-for-the-fourth-sunday-after-trinity-800am-service/
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