Forgiveness Sunday

Liturgy 25 February 1990

In the Name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.

Last week we heard in the Gospel a stern warning: that one day we will stand face to face with God when it will be too late to regret our past, when judgement will come upon us because our own conscience will stand as an accuser and because all our past will be before our eyes.

And today the Church gives us hope: the first words of the Gospel indeed, speak of two things at the same time, on the one hand repeating the warning of the last week and giving us a way of salvation: if we forgive those against whom we have (?) we shall also be forgiven.

So, salvation is in our hands; we repeat such words every time we pray the Lord's prayer! Forgive as I forgive!.. And so, the door is open for us for forgiveness. And if forgiveness is given, then the brokenness which is ours is restored to health and to wholeness; then, the relationships which exist between us and others are healed; and t h e n we become again capable of receiving God's o w n forgiveness.

But forgiveness must be both given and received...

We must today, in the few hours that are left to us ask ourselves, ‘Whom have I offended? To whom am I a temptation, a stumbling block? Whom do I prevent from having a light and open heart?’ And then we must do what we can about it. And what we can means first of all to pronounce a judgement about ourselves: W h o are you who judges someone else's servant, says Paul; it is to his Lord and Master that he stands and falls; and He, – the Lord – has power to restore him to health...

These words are addressed to each of us: w h a t right have I to judge, to condemn, to reject, to despise, simply to turn away from a n y o n e? Am I not myself deserving the same condemnation? If I cannot show mercy, then the Divine judgement will be as merciless to me as I am to others! So if we only could come to our senses, we might turn to those whom we have wounded, offended, humiliated, rejected, come up to them, bow l o w before them, and say, ‘Forgive!’... But this must be done from the heart, not as a pious exercise; . it must be truth, and we must in order to do this pass a severe ,judgement about our own selves; but we cannot always even do that much, we cannot always find enough courage to come humbly, sincerely to ask forgiveness from those people whom outwardly or inwardly we have rejected.

Then, let us go up to them and say, ‘I have offended you, I have hurt you in my inner self I have rejected you, I wished you were not there, I wished you didn't exist – you are a sore in my eyes, and yet, I cannot find either courage or greatness of heart, or humility, or a sense of my own sins in order to ask forgiveness! All I can do is to say ‘I can't ! And beg of you to forgive me for being unable to take this step, and I b e g of you, p r a y for me that I may one day be able to heal my own soul and yours, my own life and yours... And there will be cases also when even that will be too much; then let us stand before God, and say, ‘Shame, shame of me! O God, how low I have fallen – help me! You were able to raise Lazarus out of the tomb – s p e a k a word of life! Breath (e (?) your life-giving breath on me that I may change...

But this applies to the one who will c o m e to receive forgiveness – what about those who are to give it? Aren't we all tied in the same knot, aren't we all in the same position? If someone comes up to us – are we capable of forgiving (?) resentment, anger seething within our hearts.

If we can forgive, if in response of someone else's heartbrokenness we can say, ‘O, my poor! Of c o u r s e I forgive, o f c o u r s e I receives you in my heart, o f c o u r s e I am prepared to carry your burden as I am commanded by Paul the Apostle! – that would be s o beautiful; but so often we cannot do this! So often we should be honest enough to say, ‘No, I can't! I am too deeply wounded, my pain is too great, my anger is aflame! You, who are the cause of it, y o u pray for me that I may be healed and capable of forgiving because we are both locked into the same tragedy, we b o t h are standing now before God condemned: I, because I cannot forgive, you, because you cannot ask for forgiveness...

And if we were unable to forgive, let us stand before the judgement of our conscience, before the judgement of God and ask Him for help as long as we are alive...

And there are two other things which I want to mention.

The one is that we have another debtor Whom we do not forgive: it is God! We daren't speak in such terms but isn't it true that we accuse God all the time of all that has gone wrong in our lives? Isn't it true that at every moment we say within ourselves that had G o d have been looking after us, had the circumstances of our life been different, had He not made me as I am, had He not put such and such people in my way, had He not engendered all the things that have brought me to shipwreck, I would have been such a wonderful person: free, alive!... We condemn God every moment for who we are, for what we are, for what has happened to us, for the reasons that we are such: we must give thought to that, because this is as grave as rejecting our neighbour.

And there is another thing, a last one: we must ask ourselves, w h a t we do to the souls of other people when we slander our neighbour, when we gossip; gossip seems to be harmless exercise; at times it is a hypocritical exercise when we say to a person, ‘I know that you love so-and-so, so I will tell you the worst about him or her so that you can pray more deeply’: it is a LIE, a lie, and a lie is always of satan, of the devil; it is a way to death and destruction. We must learn that the moment we gossip, the moment we slander someone else we are murderers. And we must also realise that it comes not from our love of truth and of right, it comes simply because we are too cowardly to come up to a person and speak.

And one day will come, if gossip continues to be rife in this Parish as it has been for months now about one person or another, a moment will come when I will make a final challenge to it; I will force the people who slander and gossip others to meet them face to face, and if necessary, I will proclaim their names so that people should keep out of them, as one keeps out of people who can give a deathly infection , murder souls...

This is the threshold of Lent; Lent is a time of renewal, it is a spring of life; but we can n o t be renewed, we cannot become new if we carry with us all the distructiveness, all the evil of yesterday into it!

Let us therefore reflect on who we are, where we stand with regard to each of those people whom we cannot accept, or whom we reject, whom we hate, whose name we destroy!

And remember also that by destroying the name of one person, the personality of one person in the eyes of one unique person, we destroy t h a t person whom we call our friend and whom we claim to be a friend of (?) and yet, that is the door, the o p e n door if we forgive, we can be forgiven! This is the demarcation line between life and death!

Let us try! Let us try to restore if not paradise, at least a beginning of it, a beginning of the Kingdom: let it come with power to overcome us, to transform us, each of us, all of us... A Russian theologian of the 19th century said that the Church is an organism of love: a r e w e s u c h? Is there love, God’s love abroad in our midst? The love that covers up the sins of people, a love that heals, a love that gives hope, that restores the oneness which i s paradise?

Let us think of Paradise! Let us think of the joy, of freedom and of love! Remember the last words of today’s Gospel: Where your treasure is, your heart is – w h e r e is our heart?

Amen!