FIFTH SUNDAY OF LENT

At the end of last week’s story of the prodigal son, we left the elder brother outside, refusing to go in and be part of the celebration to mark the return of his younger brother. And it’s not hard to know why. What the father was doing was completely beyond, not only the elder son’s comprehension, but the comprehension of the entire village. According to Jewish law, what the younger son had done was literally unforgiveable. Legally he had ceased to exist and technically the father now had only one son. So much so, that if the younger son ever returned, the local people would have seen it as their duty to kill him as soon as he set foot in the village on the grounds that he was already dead, which was why the father rushed out to meet him before anyone else could get to him. This was the world of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, the world of religion rather than faith, a world which Jesus challenges to the very depth of its being by his call to forgive, not seven times but seventy seven times..

And now this week we have the story of Jesus and the woman caught committing adultery, with those words of Jesus ringing down through the centuries, ‘Let he or she who has not sinned throw the first stone.’ What Jesus is saying, both last week and again this week, could not be clearer. If we want to enter the kingdom of God there must be no judgement and no condemnation of anyone. Our willingness to forgive must know no limits. For anyone who seeks to follow Jesus and live by his teaching, no-one, no matter what they have done, can be beyond forgiveness. There are no exceptions. And he means none.

So how is this possible? How can we be expected to forgive everyone? Surely, to use the examples people always bring up, Jesus is not talking about people like Hitler or Stalin. Surely he cannot expect us to forgive terrorists and those who blow up innocent people in places all over the world. Well, the simple answer to that is that he does. What he doesn’t expect, however, is that we do it on our own. The forgiveness we are speaking of here is only possible through the power of the Spirit working deep within us. But without a willingness to forgive in this way: without a desire to forgive as God forgives, or, as my friend St Ignatius would say, a desire to desire - or if that isn’t there - a desire to desire to desire – then the truth today’s liturgy is inviting us to see is that we cannot enter the kingdom of God. But having said that, it is important that we reflect a little more on what this all-embracing forgiveness is like, and to illustrate this I would like to consider a case that has been in the News so much recently and about which there has been considerable disagreement, the case of Jon Venables.

And the first thing to say about both Jon Venables – and we can all agree on this - is that what he did was truly horrific. And the gospel command to forgive does not diminish this or water it down in any way. There has, however, been a good deal of debate about the extent to which a ten year-old can be held either morally or criminally responsible for his actions. As has been pointed out over and over again these boys were themselves children when they killed James Bulger and only in the last few days the children’s commissioner for England and Wales has stirred even more controversy by saying that they should never have been tried in an adult criminal court. I even heard someone say on Television the other night that had they committed this crime in Finland, they would have been sent back to school within weeks and given the chance to get on with their lives. But there is nothing in the gospel for or against that particular approach just as there is nothing in the gospel to suggest that children should not receive appropriate punishment when they do something wrong. I have never experienced the presence of a forgiving God more powerfully than I did every week in Kilmarnock prison during the years I was chaplain there, but I have also met a handful of men there who, in my judgement, should never be let out given the danger they would be to others. But on the subject of children, I was impressed by these words from this week’s New Statesman magazine. ‘The age of criminal responsibility’ it said, ‘should be at least twelve. Most parents do not treat ten year olds as responsible adults. They do not allow them to walk around the town unaccompanied, stay at home alone, hold unsupervised parties, play with matches or take sole charge of younger children. The statute book – on subjects from alcohol to paid employment – is full of laws that regard young people as impressionable, irresponsible and vulnerable until they are much older than twelve.’ Or as another writer put it, ‘If they can commit an adult crime at ten, let them vote at ten.’

All of these points, of course, can be and have been debated and it is perfectly possible for Christians to disagree on them. But there are other forces at work in the Jon Venables story which can have no place in the heart of any Christian. They are the vindictiveness, the hatred, the desire to do him harm, the instinct to hound this young man and pursue him all his life because of what he did when he was ten, the lynch mob mentality encouraged by papers like the Sun and others, the refusal to even consider the possibility that he and others are capable of redemption. These things are totally incompatible with the following of Jesus. We may feel them. We have, after all, no control over our feelings at the moment when they surface spontaneously within us. But what we feel and what we choose to do are two different things. Who knows what Jesus felt at the human level as he hung on the cross? What he said, however, was, ‘Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.’ And so the big question for us today is not how we feel about Jon Venables, but can we pray for him. Because until we can do this for him and for others like him we cannot enter the kingdom of God.

But I would like, today, to add a personal note to today’s homily. We all have people in our lives whom we struggle to forgive. Mine, however, is the Catholic Church itself. For forty years as a priest I have argued at meetings against the clerical structures which underpin the current tragedy of child abuse in Ireland and elsewhere. Often I have felt like a voice crying in the wilderness and have been accused of being a stirrer or trouble-maker. And so now, as the full scale of what has been going on becomes clear, years of anger are surfacing in me. When I see the Pope on TV I want to punch his face. I take a twisted kind of pleasure in watching bishops in Ireland suffer and would be happy if they were all forced to resign. Sometimes I hate the Church to which I belong. And so, on this day when Pope Benedict’s letter of apology is being read in every church in Ireland, I invite you to pray for him, for the Church, for me and above all for the victims of paedophile priests everywhere. And if we have really understood Jesus then we will pray for the abusers too.

BIDDING PRAYERS

We pray this weekend for all those who have been the victims of child sexual abuse by priests, religious and other people within the Church. But we pray, too, for the courage and openness we need to look at the causes of this abuse and address them so that this evil does not happen again in the future. And what has become abundantly clear is that the root of this scandal is power and the abuse of power. And so we ask God for the wisdom we need to recognize the profound changes required to deal with this....Lord hear us

The demands of the gospel in relation to forgiveness could not be more radical. No-one is excluded from God’s forgiveness and to the extent that we refuse to forgive others we cannot look upon the face of God. But there are times when forgiveness is almost impossible for us. The anger and resentment are too deep and the hurt too great. And so we ask God to stir in us a desire to be able to forgive, or even a desire to desire it, which one day will grow into forgiveness itself ......Lord hear us

Not to be able to forgive becomes a cancer which eats away inside us. Those who are gripped by such a condition often live deeply unhappy lives where the constant bitterness they feel becomes a cloud hanging over everything they do. Those, on the other hand, who can forgive even great evils, become an inspiration to those around them, as we have seen over the years in Northern Ireland, South Africa and elsewhere. And so we ask God to raise up in the world many more examples of such forgiveness.......Lord hear us

In the first reading today the prophet speaks of how there is no need to recall the past. God, he says, is doing a new deed. And so we pray for people in the world’s most troubled places where, as a result of constantly recalling the past and reliving old battles, peace seems completely unattainable. There can be no more tragic example of this than the Holy Land itself, the very place where God lived among us and died on a cross for every human being. And so we pray for peace and forgiveness there............Lord hear us

In today’s Gospel, the woman caught committing adultery is humiliated in front of everyone. And this weekend, as happens every weekend, someone somewhere will have his or her sexual indiscretions exposed to full view by the gutter press. And so we pray for them. We pray for the moral maturity we need not to even read such things and the courage, where possible, to speak out against them, remembering those words of Jesus: ‘Let him who has not sinned throw the first stone.’...........Lord hear us

The woman in the gospel, like millions of other women down through the ages, was exploited and abused by men. This abuse, too, is rooted in the traditional power men have claimed over women and which remains as big an evil today as it has ever been. And so we pray for women who live with male violence; women who are trapped in prostitution; women who are the victims of human trafficking; women who are caught up in psychologically harmful abusive relationships; and many others.......Lord hear us