“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.
We are in a state of contradiction with ourselves, with one another, and with God. We are divided within ourselves. Yet to be aware of this state of inward contradiction means at the very least, the possibilities of an openness to what transcends the divisions within us, among ourselves, and with God. It means suffering through the conditions of our incompleteness in the acknowledgment, not simply of our own sinfulness, but of the redemption that is at work through suffering. To be aware of the contradictions within ourselves is to embrace suffering as redemptive and to be already looking beyond our condition of contradiction. Why and how? Because we are looking to God. It changes how we look upon ourselves and one another. Such is the mercy of this mercy gospel.
Our need for forgiveness throws us into the arms of Christ, something which our liturgy constantly and repeatedly emphasizes. To know our own need for forgiveness impels our willingness to forgive one another. It places us in the forgiveness of God.
This highlights a profound and important feature of the classical eucharistic lectionary as found in the Prayer Book. It is the relationship between justification, what Christ has done for us, and sanctification, what Christ is in us. Forgiveness belongs both to what Christ has done for us in his sacrifice and love, and to his life in us as a “living sacrifice unto thee.” Thus we are bidden to forgive even as we have been forgiven and in so doing find the real truth and beauty and goodness of our humanity and especially to find it in each other.
This 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 can only come from God. Forgiveness is of God. What we can know in ourselves is simply our contradictions and conflicts. But forgiveness is of God for man and for the whole created order which, in some sense, our sins have disturbed – “the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain,” as Paul notes, “until now,” meaning until in Christ. The power of forgiveness and the recognition of the need for forgiveness come together in Jesus Christ. He is “the forgiveness of sins.” Our own forgiveness and our forgiving one another arise out of our being with Christ, out of his life in us. It is simply his forgiveness alive in us.
These readings challenge us about the illusions of ourselves especially in our culture of illusion, “treating the shades (the shadows) as one treats solid things” (Dante, Purg. XXI, l. 136). They also challenge us about our actions, about our uncertainties and refusals to act upon what we are given to know. T.S. Eliot’s poem ‘The Love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock’ explores the hesitations, ambiguities and uncertainties of our actions that arise in part from our self-deception. “Do I dare disturb the universe?” the narrative voice asks, as if excusing oneself from any commitment to love since “in a minute there is time/ For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.” We are afraid to act, afraid to love, lest that itself seem presumptuous. “Then how should I begin/ To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?/ And how should I presume?” The poem offers no resolution to our unresolve and yet there is the awareness of presumption even in our irresolution. Our refusal to act is itself a judgment, a presumption. The greater awareness and the beginnings of love and the necessity of forgiveness are found in the awakening to a mercy that is greater than our presumption and hesitant irresolution.
Forgiveness underlies the concepts of toleration and liberty which are about patient and principled forbearance, as distinct from the acceptance and celebration of what one fundamentally opposes, and about rational accountability for one’s actions, as distinct from the narcissistic indulgence in self-expression. Forgiveness is a distinctive feature of the Christian Faith and one which belongs to our discourse with peoples of different faiths and non-faiths in the land. Forgiveness is an essential part of the Christian proclamation. “The forgiveness of sins,” as we say in the Apostle’s Creed, is Jesus Christ. It is part and parcel of his dominion, his lordship, at work in our lives. “O God, the protector of all that trust in thee,” as today’s Collect puts it, calling us to the awareness of the need for God’s “mercy” to be “our ruler and guide” “through things temporal” to “the things eternal.” Without that mercy, we fall into the ditch, taking others with us, it seems, a sorry scene. It could be a metaphor for our age.
Forgiveness is the reconciliation between God and man which enables the true and proper forms of reconciliation in the human community. It is not and cannot be about the mere compromises of social and political expediency. Christ is that radical reconciliation because he is “the forgiveness of sins”. His grace creates the same in us. What stands in the way is simply the hardness of our hearts, our hypocrisy. Our unwillingness to accept our need for forgiveness and to embrace suffering as redemptive in Christ leaves us bereft and empty, isolated in ourselves. But “forgive and ye shall be forgiven”as Luke’s Gospel of mercy proclaims and commands. More than a hope, it signals the reality of our life in Christ. For it is not simply about us, but about Christ in us. That makes all the difference.
“Forgive and ye shall be forgiven”
Fr. David Curry
Christ Church & St. Andrew’s
July 14 th, 2019