Sermon for the Fourth Sunday after Trinity
“Forgive and ye shall be forgiven”
Forgiveness. It is the hardest and yet one of the freest things, perhaps even one of the simplest things in our lives. It undoubtedly belongs to that most free of all things: the power of God’s praise which overcomes human pride and presumption. Forgiveness is the power of God’s love moving in human loves. There can be no love that is not constantly love-in-renewal and there can be no renewal-in-love without forgiveness. Divine forgiveness empowers human forgiveness. Yet how hard it is for us to let go of ourselves and of the illusions of our self-image and our assumptions about others.
What makes forgiveness so hard? Quite simply, it is our hypocrisy. This is the point of the Gospel. Hypocrisy is not just our saying one thing and our doing another, not just our doing one thing and thinking another; it is about a profound presumption, an illusion about who we think we are.
We are divided within ourselves against ourselves, against one another, and against God. We are in the ‘far country’ of our self-estrangement, in ‘the region of unlikeness,’ to use Augustine’s image, separated from the truth of ourselves in God. There is our blindness and there is our judgmentalism splendidly illustrated in the Gospel. “Can the blind lead the blind? Shall they not both fall into the ditch?” That powerful image leads to the next: “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.” This is the prescription for our presumption, our prejudice, meaning pre-judgment, our claim to know what 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 see and know. It is not just our knowing that is the problem. There is our capacity for willful destruction, the will to nothingness, as it were. We close our eyes to the truth before us, at once hypercritical of the minor faults of others (the mote or speck of dust) while utterly blind to the major faults and failings in ourselves (the beam or log). We do not know ourselves or others very well.
