Quiet Day Talk 3: True Forgiveness

This is the third talk I gave on Saturday 26th March at a Sisters of Bethany Quiet Day.  I suggest you read the other two talks first!


So...you've spent a quiet morning, you've had a Midday Mass, and a Midday Meal...so by about now, I guess, you're all ready for a nice afternoon nap!

So...let's start our afternoon session with some high energy worship!  Here's a very simple little song I learned in Uganda:  "When Jesus say yes, nobody can say no!"

(After song)

It's just about the simplest song I know...and yet the meaning is very profound.  I wonder how seriously we take the idea that when Jesus says something, he means it?!  

One of the questions I get asked most frequently as a priest is a very simple one...'Why does God allow suffering?'  After the last couple of weeks, with conflict in the Middle East, and earthquakes and tsunamis in Japan and New Zealand, its a question that rises up very often in conversations in our community cafe at St Mark's.  The answer of course, is much less simple than the question.  I don't pretend to know why God has created a planet which can cause such destruction, and wipe out so many lives.  Perhaps it is important for us, as a human race, to be reminded from time to time that we are not the masters of our own destinies. Perhaps it is because we need to be reminded that we have failed, time and time again, to live wisely.  To pick up the thrust of this morning's talk - we have failed to be lovers of wisdom.  

My family and I visited Naples a few years ago - to see Pompeii.  While we were there, I was struck at how the whole city of Naples lies in the lea of Vesuvius, an active volcano!  Naples is the most densely populated city in Italy.  In the whole of the metropolitan area, there are between 3 and 4 million people.  And one day...the whole city will be wiped out by an eruption from Vesuvius.  That doesn't strike me as very wise.  No wiser, in fact, than a Japanese culture which builds cities and villages all along a coast-line which history and geology tell us will one day be hit by a Tsunami.  Japan has plenty of hills and mountains...but its people choose to live by the sea.  

This is not to blame the people individually.   I'm not saying that it is their fault that their country just got destroyed.  But collectively, people do some very silly things.  We human beings are not very wise.  And perhaps we need to be reminded of that, from time to time...reminded that human wisdom is like God's foolishness.

But the other question that is asked is about medical suffering.  Why does God permit babies to suffer?  Why was my son or my daughter taken from me by cancer?  That is a harder question to answer.  But let me point you back to the simple profundity of that song from Uganda.  When Jesus says yes, nobody can say no.  In other words...Jesus knew what he was talking about.  He spoke with authority that no-one could deny.  And one of the most important things that Jesus said was, when translated in English, just three simple words:  "Love one another".

If only the human race had followed that simple teaching for the last two thousand years.  If only we would learn that loving one another would produce miracles.  If, as a human race, we had spent the last 2000 years loving one another, instead of blowing each other up through endless vendetas and cycles of violence and revenge, then, I suggest to you that we would by now have cured all the common diseases of humanity!  Children would no longer be dying, because we would have lovingly co-operated with each other, to discover how to prevent it!  Perhaps God allows a certain amount of chaos in the created order precisely for this reason.  Perhaps God allows what is, to us, the terrible death of a child from time to time, to wake us up...to make us question whether or not we are living the way he calls us to live.  Each cruise missile that has been used in the last week in Libya cost us half a million pounds.  Half a million pounds per bang.  I wonder how much research into child-hood cancer that could have funded.

You see, the trouble is, we are far too good as assuming we know better than God.  

God says "love one another".  And we say "No...we'll just go on battering each other"

God says "love me, with all your heart, soul, body, mind and strength".  And we say "No...I'd rather love my car, or my house, or my holidays or my hobby, or my garden or my grandchildren first."

God says "you are members of a body - the church".  And we say "Oh, I don't need to belong to a church...I can worship God anywhere.  I can worship him on a hilltop or by the sea. The question is, do we?"

God says "How long, O simple ones, will you love being simple?" (Proverbs 1.22)  And we say "I haven't got time to study at the moment"

God says "whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—ponder such things" (Phillipians 4:8).  And we say, "Let me just catch one more episode of 'X-Factor' or 'Strictly come Maria on ice' and then I'll get down to thinking about God"

When Jesus says yes, nobody can say no.  When Jesus speaks with authority, only a fool would ignore him.  

So why do we find it so hard to follow what Jesus teaches?  I want to suggest to you that it is because we have not yet found answers to those two philosophical questions I posed this morning.  'Who am I?'  And 'Why am I here?'

Last Sunday, those of us whose churches used the lectionary - or those of us who were in church, instead of on a mountaintop - would have heard these words of Jesus:  "God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that everyone who believes in him would not perish, but will have everlasting life."

That one line, from John 3.16, sums up the whole purpose of God in sending Jesus.  First, God sent Jesus because God loves the world.  God loves the world in the way the Father loved the prodigal son.  God knows that the world will fail him. God knows that time and time again we will get things wrong and muddled...but God still loves us. He loves us enough to send his Son.  Why?  "So that everyone who believes in Him will not perish, but will have life that goes on for ever" (which is another way of translating the phrase 'everlasting life'.

The point is that the everlasting life God offers us can begin right now.  Being a follower of Jesus is not a sort of insurance premium.  I don't follow Jesus because I hope that one day I'll be given a place in heaven.  I follow Jesus because Jesus makes sense now.  I follow Jesus because the way he calls me to live matters now.  I follow Jesus because when I succeed in living as he calls me now, I already find myself in heaven.

Who am I?  A loved, child of God.  Failing, often wrong, often messed up. But a child of God...who God loves so much that he is prepared to die for me.

Why am I here?  I'm here to live as God calls me to live.  Nothing more, nothing less.  I'm here to participate in God's activity in the world - shaping it, transforming it, wherever I can with the powerful tool he has given me...the tool of love.  I am here to stand with God against the forces of evil - the forces of violence, ignorance, laziness, selfishness and consumerism.

How can I do this?  How can I have the gall to believe that I am participating in God's life in the world?  Because I know that whatever I have done, whatever mistakes I have made (and will still make), whatever evil I have perpetrated, whatever evil has been done to me...it is all taken care of.  I am forgiven.  I am free.  I live in the light of the love and forgiveness of God.  

But..here's something else that I experience every week in my ministry as a priest.  Time and time again I come across people who struggle with the idea of being forgiven.  Some people carry such guilt around with them, that it is like a permanent wound.  They hear Jesus say "Come to me, all who labour and are heavy laden", but they are unable to lay their burden down at his feet.  For too long, a world which lacks God's wisdom, a world which delights in punishment and retributive violence, has told them that their kind of sin cannot be forgiven.  When Jesus says yes, nobody can say no.  Ok. But why is it that when Jesus says "you are forgiven", some people just can't accept it.

So in these last few minutes I have been given, I want to focus on that most Lenten of themes:  the forgiveness of God.  Of course, the place we focus on for all our theology of forgiveness is the cross.  Over the centuries, theologians have wrestled with the question of exactly what was happening on that day.  How can the death of a man - even a man who is God - two thousand years ago, possibly speak into our situation today?  How can I know that my sins and yours were dealt with then? 

Most theology about the cross rests on the idea of atonement:  that is 'at one-ment' - the idea that somehow, by his death, Jesus managed to bring fallen, sinful humanity to one-ness with God.  Many different images are used in pursuit of this idea.  Drawing from Isaiah's visions of the Suffering Servant, theologians have proclaimed that 'it is by his wounds that we are healed'.  Suffering then, and specifically God's suffering for our sake, is what it is all about.  Some theologies go further, and suggest that God nailed all our sin onto Jesus - and that when he died, our sin died with him.  Jesus, then, was punished for our sins - taking the punishment which should have been ours; like a Judge in a court of law who volunteers to go to prison instead of the convicted murderer in the dock.  Another popular image is taken from Jewish tradition, when, on the day of atonement, a goat would symbolically have the sins of the people laid on it - and it would then be led out into the desert to die.

Another at-one-ment image is the idea of ransom.   According to that theory,  our sins make us the property of the devil.  Because we sin, we belong to Satan.  Jesus, as the only sinless human being who has ever lived, was the only price which could be paid to 'redeem' us back - to pay the ransom demanded by the devil.

But we would do well to remember that all these images are just that...images deployed by theologians like St Paul, and many after him, to attempt to get a handle on precisely what Jesus was doing that day.  Because, conspicuously, Jesus himself, never explained precisely what was going on.  The nearest we get to an explanation from Jesus himself is the words we use at every Mass:  'this is my body, given for you; do this in remembrance of me'.  'This is my blood of the new covenant, which is shed for you and for many for the forgiveness of sins.  Do this as often as you drink it in remembrance of me'.  Clearly, from Jesus lips, his sacrifice has something to do with forgiveness of sins...but what, precisely?  How did it work?  What was the mechanism?  That's what thinking Christians for two thousand years have asked.

For me...it comes down to this.  Whatever all those different atonement images point to...the one, unquestionable fact is this:  Jesus took it.  Jesus took all the hate, all the malice, all the worldly power, all the fear, all the sin that the world could throw at him.  He took it, and absorbed it.  He took it, to the point of utter powerlessness.  He took it to the point where he could no longer raise his hands in blessing, because they were nailed to a beam.  He took it to the point when blood ran down his face.  He took it to the point where he was so overpowered by the hatred and sin of human beings that his own connection with God was lost.  "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"

But the story of the cross doesn't end at Golgotha.  The story of the cross ends three days later, when, having taken all the hate and sin, Jesus rises from the dead.  Death and sin are defeated - but not in some mechanistic kind of way.   Sin is not defeated because somehow our sins were individually nailed onto Jesus.  It's not as if the sin I committed yesterday is somehow floating around the spiritual ether...to be picked up and nailed onto Jesus.  Sin doesn't exist in the sense of being a real, spiritual thing.  Rather, sin is a description of a way of living that is contrary to the ways of God.   

Jesus rises from the tomb because Jesus could take it.  Jesus is bigger - universally, galactically bigger, than our petty human sins.  And therefore Jesus could overcome them. They simply don't matter to him anymore.   One image, often used in the Bible, is that God covers our sins.  Another is that he forgets them.  The Jews celebrate 'Yom Kippur' - the Day of Atonement.  'Kippur' comes from a root word which means 'to cover, or to hide'.  Another word is 'obliterate'.  Our sins are not an actual thing.  They are actions and thoughts which God, mercifully, is big enough to be able to simple cover over.  

By his death, and crucially by his resurrection, Jesus pronounces that our sins are as nothing to him.  He can shrug them off as easily as he shrugs off death itself.  Like an earthly parent who shrugs off the mis-doings of their beloved child, Jesus pronounces, by his actions, the forgiveness of sins.  The new Covenant written on the Cross is a Covenant of unconditional forgiveness.  

By his death, Jesus declares that our sins are washed away, in his eyes.  Anyone who turns to him can find forgiveness.  Not a grudging forgiveness.  Not the sort of forgiveness which the world offers.  We human beings will only offer a sort of grudging forgiveness won't we?  Anyone who has ever had to fill in a criminal records bureau check is only too well aware of how conditional is the forgiveness that human beings can offer one another.  "I can forgive....but I can never forget"...is one of the most oft repeated phrases we use.  "I will forgive you for what you have done, as long as you never do it again".  We hold each other in a sort of provisional forgiveness.

But this is nothing like the forgiveness of God. Jesus takes every bit of hurt and sin and anger and power-crazy nonsense that the world can throw at him...and what does he say?  Does he rail at his accusers?  Does he say, "Stop doing this to me, and perhaps I'll let you off"?  No, he says "Father, forgive them, they don't know what they are doing".

Compared to the goodness and mercy and holiness of God, human sin is as nothing.  God wipes away sin, like it was a fly on his nose.  The Father of the prodigal son doesn't demand that his son should even repent of his actions and beg forgiveness...he just runs to greet him, and welcomes him home. The son's sin is not even mentioned.  Its dealt with.  Its done.  It just doesn't matter anymore.

Let me put this another way:  there is nothing you and I could do, no penance, no act of contrition, no wailing and knashing of teeth, no amount of sack-cloth and ashes which could make God forgive us any easier than he already does.  

Not only does Jesus death and resurrection declare that he can take everything we throw at him.  It shouts out that these sins are as nothing, compared to the mercy of God.  "Forgive them, Father...they are like children in the playground.  They don't know what they are doing."

There's one more thing we need to remember.  God isn't especially interested in our past.  The past is gone.  There is nothing we can do to change it.  God's only interest is in our future. The past is dead...but God offers us life which goes on for ever.  Our choice is simple...we either live in the past, which God has flicked away from his memory like a fly from his heavenly nose...or we embrace the future he offers us.  

"Come unto me, all that travail and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.  Take my yoke upon you, for I am meek and lowly in heart...and you will find rest for your souls."

Who am I?  A loved, child of God.  Failing, often wrong, often messed up. But a child of God...who God loves so much that he is prepared to die and then rise for me...to show me how little my sins matter to him, now that I've turned to walk on his Way.

Why am I here?  I'm here to live as God calls me to live.  Nothing more, nothing less.  I'm here to participate in God's activity in the world - shaping it, transforming it, wherever I can with the powerful tool he has given me...the tool of love.  I am here to stand with God against the forces of evil - the forces of violence, ignorance, laziness, selfishness and consumerism.

How can I do this?  How can I have the gall to believe that I am participating in God's life in the world?  Because I know that whatever I have done, whatever mistakes I have made (and will still make), whatever evil I have perpetrated, whatever evil has been done to me...it is all taken care of.  I am forgiven.  I am free.  

I live in the light of the love and forgiveness of God.  

I live in the light of the love and forgiveness of God.

Let me invite you to take that thought away with you now, for a last hour of reflection.  Let those words roll around inside your mind.  Let them shape your being.  What does it mean for you, and me, to be people who live in the light and forgiveness of God.

I live in the light of the love and forgiveness of God.

I live in the light of the love and forgiveness of God.