‘To err,’ Alexander Pope famously said, ‘is human; to forgive divine.’ Or, as another version of the same quote by an American called Franklin P Adams, which I found on Google, put it, ‘To err is human, to forgive infrequent.’ But whichever version you use, the message is the same. Forgiveness, as the whole of human history demonstrates, does not come easily to us. Even when we want to forgive, or would like to be able to do so, we can’t. It’s beyond us. Something inside us stops us doing it as we cling to the hurt, the resentment, the sense of injustice, the betrayal, the festering grievance, the desire for revenge which eat away at us. Many of us here will know these feelings well and in some cases, like Tam O’Shanter’s wife, will be nursing them and keeping them warm. And it’s not just as individuals that we experience them. Whole nations suffer from them as do the tribes and groupings which make up nations. Why else would it be that most of the major conflicts around the world, far from being recent in their origin, are rooted in things that happened hundreds of years ago. Some are not only as old the Bible but have their roots in it. So what can we do? Well, there’s no simple answer to that question, but we could start by looking again at today’s readings, a masterclass in the art of forgiveness.
The first one told us about David’s sin with Bathsheba and her husband Uriah which we commented on earlier. It was a truly horrific episode in David’s life which initially in the story incurred the wrath of God through the prophet Nathan. And yet, at the first sign of repentance – ‘I have sinned against the Lord’ David tells Nathan – God, not for the first or last time in David’s life, forgives him. And in this we have the first secret of forgiveness. We must be open to the possibility of people changing and moving on. If we are not; if we, as it were, freeze the moment when another person has offended us and, like a video stuck on one frame of a film, refuse to let the story continue, then, like the people of Pompeii caught in the dust and lava from Vesuvius, we will be forever trapped in that moment of unforgiveness.
Now I know that many of you will not agree with what I am about to say, but the place where I feel the sadness of this most deeply is in the prison. Our justice system can be very unforgiving and there is one particular group where I would love to see more flexibility. These are men doing life for murders they committed as teenagers. Often these crimes, horrific as they are, were the result of a moment of youthful madness. And yet the consequences, despite the rubbish you read in the papers, are life-long. Many of these men pose no threat at all to society now and instead of wasting their lives in jail could live normal lives if given the chance. Both we and they, however, are trapped in a moment now long past and as I meet them every week I am reminded of all the other moments we are trapped in and how, whether it is disputes between individuals, disputes between tribes or nations or the tragedy of lives whose whole direction is defined in a fraction of a second, only genuine conversion and forgiveness can set us free. I love the story of the man who went to see God to talk about a particular sin he was struggling with. And how, on his way out after talking to God he did it again. And so back he went. ‘I’m sorry God’ he said, ‘I’ve done it again.’ ‘Done what again,’ said God.
In the Gospel reading we find yet another crucial aspect of forgiveness. For the Pharisees in the story, the woman who washed Jesus feet with her tears, dried them with her hair, covered them with kisses and anointed them with oil was a prostitute with a bad name in the town. What Jesus saw, however, was a person, a human being with a name who, although she may have earned a living through prostitution, had much more to her than that. She was someone’s daughter and possibly mother to children. She may have been a gifted artist or a wonderful singer For all we know, she might even have been working as a prostitute to earn money to care for a disabled child or her elderly parents. We just don’t know any of this stuff and even if she wasn’t Mother Teresa, there would still be many many things about her that we don’t know and so are in no position to judge her. And that is what I experience in the prison every week. I have never in my life met a murderer. I have met many men who have committed murder, but there is no way that that one action could possibly encompass everything they are as individuals. Every person I meet in the prison – itself no more than a microcosm of the wider world outside – is a unique individual with a unique life and a unique story, and if we are to be more like God, the one who understands all and so forgives all, then the first thing we must do is stop labelling people and reducing the richness and complexity of their lives to one single aspect of who they are. And if we can do this with those whom we find hard to forgive; if we can see the whole of them rather than the part that has offended us, then we have one foot at least on the road to forgivenesss.
And it’s the same with large groups of people. Just as there is no such things as ‘a prostitute,’ so there is no such thing as a young people, foreigners, economic migrants or, for that matter, Frenchmen. There are only unique individuals who happen to be young, persons with real names who come from other countries, mums and dads, sons and daughters from far away places who come here in search of work or men called Claude and Pierre who happen to have born in France. Phrases like I don’t like Frenchmen or Young people are all whatever, are ultimately absurd. When it comes to human beings, generalizations have no meaning except to demonstrate the ignorance and prejudice of those who use them.
Forgiveness is difficult. But if, having moved the video on and looked at the wider picture, we add a dose of God’s grace, it becomes possible. And then the most wonderful thing happens. People don’t seem so bad after all and the world looks a better and brighter place.
BIDDING PRAYERS
We begin this week by asking God to touch those parts of our lives which are caught up in resentment and the inability to forgive and move on. We pray for the grace to let go of the past and see everything that happened there in the context of a much wider picture. We pray in particular for the grace to see that the faults of those whom we find it difficult to forgive are only part of who they are and that there is so much more to them than that………………………………..Lord hear us
Sometimes we not only find it difficult to forgive but do not even want to do so. We nurse our resentments and take a dark kind of pleasure in them. We feel self-righteous and use our sense of grievance to justify our own sinful attitudes and actions, blaming others rather than facing up to the ungodliness in ourselves. And so we pray for all who are caught up in this evil, recognizing that, until we are free from it, we can never enter the presence of God………………………………..Lord hear us
There are few things in life more sad than a family that is torn apart by arguments and disagreements over things that happened in the past. Some of us will know this in our own families and may even be the cause of it. And even if we are fortunate enough not to have experienced it close to home, we will know of cases in other families. And so we pray for all who are caught up in this kind of tragedy that God will pour into them the desire to forgive and the grace they need to do it……….…Lord hear us
We live in a society which can be extremely severe in its judgements and very unforgiving in its attitudes to human weakness. Day after day, the Tabloid Press dig up stories of human frailty and proceed to crucify people in the pages of our so-called newspapers. And they do it because it sells papers. In other words, we are all collaborators in this evil. And so we pray this week for all the victims of this kind of journalism, especially this who are suffering from it this weekend………Lord hear us
To see the ultimate effects of our inability and unwillingness to forgive those whom we believe have offended us, all we have to do is look around the world. Everywhere people are continuing ancient feuds, killing and slaughtering each other as our ancestors have done for centuries. The Middle East in particular, where the great events of the Bible took place, have hardly seen peace in two thousand years. And so, despite the huge problems that exist there, we pray for that peace……….Lord hear us
The tendency to label people rather than see them as the unique individuals that they are is deep within us. And so we pray for the grace we need to see this for the evil that it is. We ask God to help us see every human being as he sees them so that we can finally stop making huge generalizations about people which, by definition, cannot possibly be true and which only show us up for the narrow-minded and deeply prejudiced people we are sometimes.……………..Lord hear us
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