by CCW | 23 October 2022 10:00
“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?
God alone can forgive sins, but we are the ones who need forgiveness. The two sides meet in Jesus Christ. Forgiveness belongs to God because the forgiveness of sins means the restoration of man to righteousness. This cannot be accomplished by a mere forgetting of sin, the pretense that nothing happened when, in fact, something did, but by making right of what was wrong, the transformation of sin into righteousness, of evil into good.
The gospel story anticipates the forgiveness of sins for the whole world. It anticipates the passion of Christ. Jesus Christ is the forgiveness of sins. In Him, there is perfect accord between the truth of our humanity and true divinity.
Christ forgives the sins of the man sick with palsy; Christ perceives the hidden thoughts of the Scribes; Christ heals the paralytic in order that “ye may know that the Son of Man hath power on earth to forgive sins”. Forgiveness, omniscience, resuscitation anticipating resurrection. These are all divine activities wrought by Christ in the flesh of our humanity; “that ye may know” the nature and power of forgiveness. Christ wants us to know this and Paul tells us that we are to have learned this.
The forgiveness of sins is a divine act. It means a restoration, a re-creation. The God who creates out of nothing restores man out of the nothingness of sins. He re-establishes man in righteousness. The vehicle of this restoration is the humanity of Christ. The restoration is accomplished in the Passion and Death of Christ. As Austin Farrer notes:
“Jesus is by his own death the forgiveness of sins; he is the resurrection and the life through his own resurrection. We are thrown into the life-giving sepulchre of Christ, we touch the slain and living Christ, his body and his blood; our sins are forgiven us, and we live by him; we arise to walk in all those good works that he has prepared for us to walk in”.
It cost the heart-blood of the Son of God to obtain heaven for us. Forgiveness ultimately means to will the true good, the good that is God himself and the goal of our humanity. Forgiveness is no superficial gesture. It comes from the heart, from God’s heart to our hearts. It concerns not simply the penalties or the consequences of sin but sin itself.
But what is the act of forgiving in us? What does it look like? If you say, “I forgive you, but I can’t forget”, then you haven’t forgiven the sin. You have merely put away the penalty that you might have exacted, your ‘pound of flesh’, as it were. But the original wrong isn’t made right between you. It isn’t forgiven. Forgiveness cannot be mere words, sounds signifying nothing. Or if you despise the one who has offended you so that it is a matter of repugnance or a matter of indifference to have anything further to do with him, then you haven’t forgiven him so much as tried to forget him, to erase him from your universe. If you say, “I will forgive, because if I don’t, God won’t forgive me”, then you come a little closer to true forgiveness, though standing still a long way off. At least the common basis of our sinful humanity is recognised, a ground of sympathy is acknowledged.
True forgiveness is something greater. It mirrors in us the Divine Love that has created and restores us. Divine forgiveness creates our forgiveness. Christ is our forgiveness who at the moment of his dying, prays “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.” “Forgiveness,” writes George MacDonald, “is not love merely, but love conveyed as love to the erring”, love to the unlovely, “so establishing peace with God, and forgiveness towards our neighbour.” Forgiveness is one of the great distinctives of the Christian faith. We cannot not speak of it.
In the face of conflict and war, of enmity and hatred, it means everything. It means an openness to the transcendent love of God without which our lives are prisoners to our passions. At the very least, we have to want the peace and reconciliation that comes from God to “direct and rule our hearts” as the Collect puts it. We are recalled to the ultimate dignity of our humanity as found in the love of God for us in Jesus Christ. We come to him who has given himself for us. We arise like the healed man in the Gospel only to find ourselves in that homeland of the spirit which is our true home, our home with God.
Fr. David Curry
Trinity 19, 2022 (re: 2011)
Christ Church
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