Month: November 2017

“So likewise shall my heavenly Father do also unto you,
if ye from your hearts forgive not every one his brother their trespasses”

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.

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“The man believed the word which Jesus had spoken”

“Faith cometh by hearing”, St. Paul remarks, setting up an interesting contrast between the two most intellectual of the senses, hearing and seeing. It is interesting to see how that contrast plays out in the Scriptures and, then, in the various forms of cultural expression. The ancient Greek world, as Alberto Manguel observes, largely expresses itself in monuments, statues and buildings, think of the Parthenon, the Venus de Milo, and Greek amphitheaters. Jewish or Hebrew culture, on the other hand, expresses itself more through words spoken and then written down, the Scriptures. Later one might contrast Catholic and Protestant Europe and its successors in terms of the prominence given to the visual – things seen – in Roman Catholic Churches as distinct from the emphasis given to things audible – words and music – in Protestant churches. These are, I hasten to add, primarily differences of emphasis and not categories of exclusion one way or the other. At issue are the respective forms of balance between the Word visible and the Word audible such as in our own liturgy in terms of Word and Sacrament.

Such things speak to the forms of our understanding about matters spiritual. In today’s gospel a certain priority is given to hearing in the story of the healing of the nobleman’s son. The nobleman having heard, believed, and having heard again, believed yet again and all without seeing. This happens in the context of Jesus’ general remark and critical observation that challenges the empirical aspects of our own culture. What is heard and believed actually stands in complete contrast to what apparently is wanted to be seen. As Jesus notes, “Except ye see signs and wonders, ye will not believe.” It is a critical comment that hints at a problem, namely the idea of demanding that things be literally visible and sensible as distinct from intelligible. God, of course, by definition cannot be seen and his grace made manifest in human lives is not really something that can be empirically grasped and measured, put into a test-tube or particle accelerator or somehow quantitatively known. The deeper question is more about how God’s grace lives and moves in us, how God’s word has its resonance in us, literally, how it is echoed in us. The catechism, for instance, means an instruction but the actual word is about what is being echoed in us.

We meet in the Octave of All Saints, that marvellous festival of spiritual life that reminds us of our homeland of the spirit, the homeland of heaven in the Communion of Saints, reminding us, too, of the common reality of human mortality in the Solemnity of All Souls. The thread of Christ’s glory runs through the grave of our deaths. Such reflections speak profoundly to the worries and anxieties of our world and day, of our church and culture.

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