Day: October 23, 2022

“Thy sins be forgiven thee”

“Do you think we will ever be forgiven for what we’ve done?” Someone asks about the devastation and carnage of the First World War in Timothy Findley’s The Wars, to which the reply is given: “I doubt we’ll ever be forgiven. All I hope is – they’ll remember we were human beings”. A poignant remark, it suggests that somehow forgiveness is critical to our humanity, something at the very least for which we sense a profound need, especially perhaps when we recognise how we are invariably implicated in the confusions of our world. Our readings today help us to think more deeply about the nature and power of forgiveness.

The forsaking of sins and the forgiveness of sins are two intimately related concepts that speak to the truth of our humanity. Both involve a re-ordering, a re-establishing of the interior life of the soul: the first as directed to the soul’s activity, to what we do; the second, to the soul itself, to who and what we are.

Forgiveness means the actual putting away of all that hinders the soul’s true motion towards the good, towards God; it means the removal of sin. Forsaking means the act of turning away from sin and turning to loving the good, God; it means the pursuit of righteousness. The forgiveness of sins enables the forsaking of sins, the seeking after righteousness through the restoration of righteousness in us. This involves a motion away from sin and a motion towards righteousness. Such motions of the soul constitute repentance. As Jeremy Taylor writes:

“Repentance, of all things in the world, makes the greatest change: it changes things in heaven and earth; for it changes the whole man from sin to grace, from vicious habits to holy customs, from unchaste bodies to angelical souls, from swine to philosophers, from drunkenness to sober counsels”.

“Be ye kind to one another, tender-hearted, forgiving one another, even as God for Christ’s sake hath forgiven you,” Paul bids us. God’s forgiveness must be active in our forgiveness. The forsaking of sins depends radically upon the forgiveness of sins. The forgiveness of sins is a divine act – a divine activity accomplished in the flesh of our humanity in Jesus Christ. And Jesus wants us to know this: “that ye may know”. “Repentance makes the greatest change”. It means just that – a change, a change in outlook, a metanoia, a conversion of the mind, a turning around because of having been turned around.

Repentance means a change of heart and a conversion of mind. “Be ye renewed in the spirit of your mind”, writes St. Paul, exhorting the Ephesians to repentance, to the forsaking of sins. “Put off the old manhood … put on the new manhood”. Put away “all bitterness, and wrath, and anger, and clamour, and evil speaking … with all malice”. Why? For “ye have not so learned Christ.” Repentance means a radical re-ordering of the soul’s activity. But how is this possible? How are our vicious habits to be transformed into holy customs?

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