The Forgiven
Today’s texts leave no doubt about what God wants us to do: love one another. In Jesus God reveals his love for us and in light of that the only thing that makes sense is for us to reflect that love here and now. I have to admit though that to me it can sound pretty vapid. I read these passages a few times and in my head it’s 1967 and I’m hearing the Beatles: All you need is love, love is all you need... Lennon and McCartney wrote a lot of great songs; that wasn’t one of them. Sweet but silly sentiment; embarrassingly ineffectual against the world’s real evils. The napalm still fell in Vietnam, the Soviet tanks rolled into Prague, the hopeful sixties unwound into the disillusioned seventies, hate, greed and indifference went on – and go on – unabated.
Of course I’m giving the Johannine writers a raw deal if I dismiss this command to love as an insipid invitation to good feeling that will effortlessly and painlessly make things right. But what is it we’re being told to do here in the real world? What does it mean to love one another as God first loved us? We need something specific, something concrete. A place to start is forgiveness.
There are different ways to answer the question: where does this new community of love we’re a part of start: The empty tomb? The Last Supper? The day of Pentecost? One answer is that it’s in that locked room where Jesus suddenly appears among those fearful people, those disciples who consistently misunderstood him, frustrated him, and in the end betrayed and deserted him. There he is, as William Countryman describes it: “sharing bread with a group of bewildered disciples…calling them by name, welcoming them back to his love even after they have abandoned him, holding a family reunion where all are welcome” (Forgiven and Forgiving, p. 65). Jesus forgives, not just the sins of the world, but the very specific harms and hurts inflicted by those closest to him. Doing so, he creates the fellowship of the forgiven, the company of those who are receiving the good news that God forgives them. That’s how God first loves us, so if we are to love as he loves us, our task is to be forgivers, the forgiven forgivers. As we’ll pray later this morning: forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. In a world where the essence of what’s right and good is justice for all, rewards for the deserving, fair punishment for the wicked, we throw our lot with the promise of forgiveness for all.
Here too there’s the worry that we’re being directed toward something vacuous. Is forgiveness just another word for letting people get away with things? Is it, as Countryman asks, nothing more than denial, “making nice,” “putting up with the unsupportable while making light of its real impact?” (p. 7). Often we “forgive” by acting as though there was never anything to forgive. Forgiveness isn’t telling lies about the past; its orientation is not toward the past but the future. As the word suggests, it is to give something up front, to give on speculation, to act not in response to someone giving me something – apologies, remorse, restitution – but out of hope that somehow there is a shared future with him. To forgive is to act on the hope of a future with that person, despite the wrong he has done, despite the chance that he wants to keep doing it, despite what might well be my current heartfelt desire to destroy him, at least symbolically by way of imposing pain and humiliation on him. Jesus told us to love our enemies. It would have been easier if he had told us not to have any enemies, and just to get along nicely with everyone. But to love your enemies is to live in the present with them while acting on the basis of a hoped for – even if to all appearances impossible – future in which they will be your friends. My natural inclination is to want to see my enemies vaporized, and to anticipate a world made better by their absence. Yet the love that abides in God never gives up on anyone, no matter what, as a part of the human family, as someone like you and me already completely -- and not yet fully -- redeemed. To forgive is, finally, to trust in God’s forgiveness, and with it God’s healing and refashioning of each of us.
We won’t first think of it in there terms, but I think this is what we see in today’s reading from the Acts of the Apostles. Those Jewish Christians were forced to face the fact that God was determined to save not only them, but those hordes of lawless and unwashed gentiles. It would be hard to overestimate how hard it must have been for those Jewish believers to welcome gentiles into the kingdom of the God. So much of what deeply mattered to them, so much of their identity as God’s people, as faithful keepers of the Law, so much even of what Jesus as the messiah of beleaguered Israel must have meant to them, and so much of themselves…they gave it up to practice the love of Christ. There’s the forgiving we do of others for not being like us, for not caring much about what we care about, for not getting right what really should be gotten right. Unlike many Christians today, we Episcopalians do a good job of forgiving those who believe differently than us. I figure we have a way to go when it comes to forgiving those guilty of other things, maybe incivility, intolerance, ignorance and crimes against good taste.
The love we are commanded to have is the love of God in Christ, a forgiving love that saves a world by giving itself. The Church of Jesus has one identifying mark: it shares in this love. One way we do that is by seeing ourselves as forgiven by God and offering that same forgiveness to the rest of the world.
N. T. Wright, Canon of Westminster, writes that “on the cross, the true God has defeated the false gods,” (“Coming Home to St. Paul?” Scottish Journal of Theology 55 (2002): 400), “….standing on its head this symbol of imperial arrogance and making it instead the symbol of all-powerful divine love” (404). “This victory must now be worked out in Christian lives and Christian communities” (400). Amen to that. But we need to confess the other side too: that cross is also a sign of failure and defeat. It represents the utter failure of humanity to recognize God when he comes to us in the flesh. And it represents God’s failure to evoke from humankind the response he wanted (Countryman, 107). From that cross of failure and uncertainty the condemned man pleads on behalf of his tormentors: “Father, forgive them…” Then he dies. No law of this world determines that a love that gives itself, that forgives its enemies, has the slightest power to turn back evil or to defeat death. Nothing in this world guarantees that self-sacrificing, forgiving, suffering love makes the slightest difference. We know that the refusal to forgive sickens us and perpetuates hatred – think of that Clint Eastwood masterpiece, The Unforgiven. But that doesn’t mean that forgiveness and the love that gives itself reliably makes things better. Maybe nothing does that. Sometimes it looks that way.
Dominique Lapierre’s The City of Joy takes its name from one of Calcutta’s thousands of slum neighborhoods. Anand Nagar is a shantytown of 70,000 residents crammed into a space about the size of three football fields. That comes out to the densest population density on the planet: 200,000 human beings per square mile. Lapierre’s wonderful, appalling book records the stories of some of those who endured its unimaginable poverty, filth, disease, misery and exploitation. Selima is a young Muslim woman. Her husband is out of work and she spends her days desperately seeking scraps of food to feed her three children. They do not eat every day. Her one joy and hope is the as yet unborn fourth child she carries within her; she is seven months pregnant. One day she is approached on the street and propositioned: 2000 rupees – about two hundred US dollars, a fortune – for the fetus. Calcutta sustains a clandestine trade in late-term fetuses destined for sale in the US or Europe in either scientific research or the manufacture of “rejuvenation” products. Selima is first horrified at the offer, but after a night of internal struggle she decides to make the sacrifice to save her family. She appears at the small, barely equipped, clinic where the procedure is scheduled to take place; unfortunately, the regular surgeons are not there; they’ve gone off to play cards or dice in celebration of a religious festival. But the traffickers recruit a surgeon of sorts; he hurriedly extracts the fetus but something goes badly wrong after he cuts the umbilical cord. Blood copiously flows out of Selima; the surgeon tries to staunch it but fails; within minutes it covers the floor. The traffickers hastily put the fetus in a jar and leave for the airport. Selima dies. The surgeon quickly takes his leave, leaving her alone with the owner of the so-called clinic. He is glad he did not leave for the card game. There is unexpected profit tonight. He knows the address of those who will come to buy her lifeless body so they can recover the skeleton for export. Selima’s family never knows why she disappeared. They never know the great – but futile – sacrifice she made. Thus the impotence of love in a world of greed and death.
As those who live by faith in the crucified and resurrected Jesus we do not claim some magical power, some secret principle that when properly applied makes everything turn out right. There’s no cosmic bookkeeping that ensures the defeat of evil by self-sacrificial love, no double your money back guarantee that the forgiveness we give now builds a grace filled future rather than exacerbating evil and encouraging wrongdoers. We have only faith and hope that out of death and defeat God will bring new life.
Anne Lamott in her novel Blue Shoe relates that “…after World War II ended in Europe, lost children wandered around until they were gathered in camps run by the Allies. There they were fed and cared for while relatives were located or new families found who could take them in. In one camp it was discovered that none of the children was sleeping well. Their nerves were shot, the memories fresh and haunting. Then a social worker determined that if the children were each given a piece of bread to hold at night, they could fall asleep. This was not bread to eat – there was plenty of that when the children were hungry. No, this piece of bread was just to hold on to, to reassure the children through the night that they were safe now, that there would be bread to eat in the morning.” (p. 38)
That’s a way to think of the bits of eucharistic bread Karen will soon be putting in our hands: we hold them in hope, trusting in, and trying to share in, the fantastic forgiveness and abiding love of God and the future he’s creating.
Amen.