by CCW | 12 November 2017 15:00
Powerful words about the power of forgiveness. It is, I fear, often in short supply in our contemporary culture where the power over words trumps the truth of words and where forgiveness is largely a forgotten concept. Yet it remains one of the most distinctive features of the Christian religion. “Forgive and ye shall be forgiven.” “Forgive even as ye have been forgiven.” Can there be any more powerful words than these in our broken and disordered world?
The great good news of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, as Paul intuited and knew, is that it is the truest liberation from the prison of ourselves. It is entirely about how we are “partakers of God’s grace,” not by any merit on our own but by virtue of the supreme goodness of God himself. In a paradoxical way, that is the message of the Gospel for this Sunday in the late days of the Trinity season. Forgiveness is shown; then forgiveness is rejected. How great is the forgiveness shown; how much greater is the forgiveness denied, but, paradoxically, that illustrates the absolute necessity of divine forgiveness, its infinite power and truth and its movement in us. Forget that or worse, deny it and Hell is the only conclusion, for whatever one might mean by that, it can only mean something negative in and of itself.
The consequences are huge. It is the fullest possible illustration of the denial of God’s goodness. But the Gospel is told to awaken us to the fullest possible understanding of the loving-kindness of God towards us. Such is the point of the parable of the unforgiving servant; the one who is forgiven does not himself forgive others and so negates what he himself receives. The fault lies in contradicting by your actions what God’s actions have bestowed upon you. And yet, God’s forgiveness is inexhaustible; hence, the deliberate exaggeration of seventy-times seven. You have to want it, however, and not deny it. In denying its power and truth, you deny yourself and others.
It is a sad testament to our confused and confusing time that this is an all too frequent occurrence and one which belongs to the narcissism and nihilism rampant in our world and day. Those factors rule out the very possibilities of forgiveness because they deny the truth of the self in relation to others. This is all part of the problem of the radical instability of the self. It thinks it is something when it is nothing and turns the other into an enemy, unable to see oneself in the other.
The parables of Jesus are really quite amazing. They are hardly simplistic. They challenge us at every level. Perhaps, none more so than this parable.
There is, perhaps, nothing harder than forgiveness nor anything more necessary. We meet in the aftermath of Remembrance Day, itself a kind of secular All Souls’ Day when we try to remember those who gave their lives in the great conflicts of the last one hundred years or so; their names engraved upon the plaques of our churches and upon the obelisks at a thousand cenotaphs. No century is bloodier or more destructive than the twentieth and which extends sadly into the twenty-first century. No period of time confronts us more with the hideous truth of our inhumanity towards one another and no century confronts us more with the destructive nature of our humanity. Yet at the root of it lies a profound philosophical concept. It is our betrayal of ourselves through our betrayal of what makes us selves; in short, God.
The whole bloody pageant of the twentieth century is the pageant of a world which denies God in favour of its own overweening self whether in the form of nation or race. In a way, it reveals the deadly triumph of the tyranny of the self. It is altogether about the triumph of power over truth. And yet, it reveals the exact opposite. It reveals what the parable itself reveals. Such pretensions only show that power without truth is not only folly but death and destruction. We confront ourselves in contradiction with ourselves.
That, paradoxically, is the good news of the Gospel. In confronting ourselves in this way, we confront our evil only to realize the truth of God and his goodness. That is the real point of the parable and of our liturgy in its repeated patterns of contrition, confession and satisfaction; itself a constant pageant of forgiveness. Sunday after Sunday we are reminded of our own shortcomings, failings, and, to be perfectly blunt, our sins, but only so as to be awakened to the superlative power of the goodness of God bestowed upon us. Nowhere is the power of the goodness of God shown more completely than in forgiveness.
Forgiveness denied shows us the radical nature of human evil. It negates the goodness of God which is greater than any and all evil. Therein lies the nature and the power of forgiveness. It is about nothing less than the radical nature of God’s goodness which is always and by definition the truth against which all else is untruth, a lie and nothingness, the destructive nothingness of evil in its vain attempt to unseat the truth and the beauty of God’s goodness.
Remembrance Day weekend recalls us to the sad horrors and realities of our destructiveness, the destructiveness that belongs to the very cleverness of our humanity, on the one hand, and the presumption of the self, on the other hand. To ignore this and to pretend that we can all make it better is our naiveté, our folly and, more importantly, our presumption. We forget that we are the problem. With the words of forgiveness ringing in our ears we fail to forgive. Can there be any greater illustration of our own folly and contradiction?
No Gospel convicts more and yet offers more hope and promise than this which convicts us all and convinces us all of the real and only triumph of God’s goodness and love. The Gospel compels us to act out of the love which has been shown to us; at the same time, it reminds us of the very real nature of human evil in our capacity to contradict and deny God’s goodness. At no time has that been more fully on parade than in the bloodiest of the bloody century of all times and which serves as a stark warning to our own world and day. We cannot not remember, if ever we shall. We are called to forgiveness. It is our only hope.
Fr. David Curry
Trinity XXII, November 12th, 2017
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