13 June 2010

Homily for the Eleventh Sunday in Ordinary Time 13 June 2010

This Sunday’s readings all share the theme of forgiveness: in our first reading the prophet Nathan assures David that, in spite of his wicked behaviour, the Lord forgives him; and in this famous Gospel passage we have just read the woman with the bad reputation hears the words of forgiveness from Jesus “Your faith has saved you, go in peace”. Forgiveness, vital to our well being, knowing we are forgiven, vital for our peace of mind. Doing the forgiving ourselves, very hard! Very hard, and yet something we have to attempt! I want to share with you this morning some thoughts, some texts, on forgiving.
Forgiving those who do us wrong is a central point of the teachings of Our Lord, we find it again and again in the Gospels don’t we, and of course it is part of the Our Father- “forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us”. Now forgiving your enemies was never really much talked about in the Jewish religion in Old Testament times, and when it was it tended to be in terms of trying to get the offence into some kind of proportion- “an eye for an eye” and so on. This is one reason why the disciples often ask Jesus about forgiveness – “How many times shall I forgive my brother?” and so on. Now ironically David, who figures in our first reading conscious of his need for forgiveness, is one of the few figures in the Old Testament who is shown forgiving his enemies, forbearing to kill those in his power. There is that crazy story in 1 Samuel where David and his men are hiding in a cave, the very cave that his enemy Saul decided to go into to relieve himself, and although this seems to David’s men like the ideal moment to kill Saul, David won’t let them take unfair advantage of Saul in this way, and Saul leaves the cave unscathed. (1 Sam 24) And then a couple of chapters later (1 Sam 26) one of David’s men creeps into Saul’s tent when no one is about and asks David if he should kill him there and then, with his own spear, and again David won’t allow Saul to be murdered and he sleeps on. In this case David is prepared to leave judgement to God, to put his enemy into God’s hands - he says “As the Lord lives, the Lord will smite him or his day shall come to die….” (1 Sam 26 x)
Of course the great example of forgiveness comes from Jesus himself- you remember as he is being nailed to the Cross he says “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do” (Lk 23 xxxiv). The first Christians knew they had to follow this supreme example of Our Lord when their own sufferings came upon them- remember St Stephen, stoned to death? How his dying words were “Lord, do not hold this sin against them?” (Acts 7 lx) And listen to St Paul, writing to the Corinthians describing what should be the Christian response to those who offend us: “When reviled, we bless; when persecuted, we endure; when slandered ,we conciliate…” (1 Cor 4 xii-xiii). And again, in his letter to the Ephesians, he has this advice for his converts: “Let all bitterness and wrath and anger be put away from you….be kind to one another….forgiving one another as God in Christ forgave you”. (Eph 4 xxxi-xxxii).
And there we have the connexion between the way we behave to those who offend us and the way we want God to behave to us when we offend him- it is all in that small word “as” – St Paul says we must forgive one another as God in Christ forgave us, as or just as, exactly as. And this is the little word at the very heart of the Lord’s Prayer, that we say so many times we hardly notice what it actually means – forgive us, we say to God, forgive us our trespasses, as- exactly as, in exactly the same way as, we forgive those who trespass against us. Now that is quite an alarming thing for us to be saying in our prayers- God, you know how I have messed you about, I want you to treat me how I treat the people who mess me about. That is what we are saying in the Our Father with that little “as”. So if we think that God is going to take us at our word, we’d better make sure that we are getting good at forgiving- we certainly are expecting him to do a lot of forgiving when it’s our turn to come before him, so we need to be practising our forgiving as much as we can while we have the chance- because we’re saying in that prayer, “See what I’m like when it comes to forgiving? That’s what I want you to be like”. Matthew spells it out for us: at the end of the text he gives us of the Lord’s Prayer, he adds “For if you forgive men their trespasses your heavenly Father also will forgive you; but if you do not forgive men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses”. (Matth 6 xiv-xv)
I know- believe me, I know- how hard it is to forgive those who do us wrong, who cause us harm, those whose evil actions leave consequences that have to be lived with as best we may, but we have to make a start, we have to try- it is our Lord’s wish and he has shown us the way. We must try to let go of the grudges and start to wish these enemies of ours well, to ask God to look after them, to leave them and their destiny, their desserts, in God’s hands. Because – St Paul again, writing to the Colossians: “as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive” (Col 4 xiii). Forgive us all our offences, dear Jesus, and as we rejoice in our forgiveness help us to become bearers of forgiveness in our world, so that when we pass from this life to the next it will be said of us, as Nathan said to David “The Lord for his part forgives your sin, you are not to die”. Amen.