Goodbye to all that – 22 July 2016

And forgive us our sins, for we ourselves forgive everyone indebted to us.  [Luke 11:4]

The Gospel lesson for next Sunday has the disciples asking Jesus to teach them to pray.  So Jesus teaches them a prayer.  It is a prayer of considerable economy of words, and it sets out our most basic needs – daily bread, forgiveness, protection from evil.  Much of our secular culture still recites this prayer, on fraught public occasions, as a kind of mantra, without really knowing why, except that it seems right, for some it has memories, and it’s vaguely comforting. 

Well, it is the petition in the middle of the prayer that interests me this morning… forgive us our sins, for we ourselves forgive…  The simplicity of this masks its difficulty.  Jesus clearly believed that unforgiving people are not forgiven – indeed, they are unforgiveable, so long as they cannot, or will not, forgive others.  That in itself ought to rattle the bones of many sitting a lifetime in church pews, or any thoughtful person reciting it at a funeral or a wedding. 

Jesus’s followers, as Jesus saw it, are people who have learned forgiveness and who live that way.  In some cases it is a simple consequence of understanding that they themselves have been forgiven.    

But very often it is difficult to forgive.  Forgiving frequently seems offensive to justice.  People who have offended may be rigorously unrepentant.  In the minds of many, offences require punishment, the punishment must fit the crime, and even then, memory will make sure that the crime or injury is carried on into the future, and remembered even down the generations.  Forgiveness can seem like a far too easy way out of stern issues and consequences.

So it is never easy.  Nevertheless, the Lord’s Prayer is uncompromising.  There must be a heart willing to forgive.  Understanding helps, of course – if we even partly understood why someone did what they did, or said what they said, we might have a trail opening to forgiveness.  

Forgiveness is a decision that whatever it was, it is not now or ever going to poison life or love.  I decide that I can and will bear injury… yes, it may hurt, but I will bear that too, quietly and peaceably, without recrimination.  Forgiveness sets free both the offender and the victim to move onwards with life.  It restores relationships.  It sets judgement aside, and opens the door to the future again. 

It would be very difficult, I would think, if not impossible, for a contemplative person to remain unforgiving.  In our prayer, a prayer of silence and presence, there may be pain to bear, and the knowledge of unresolved issues, but there can be no respect in which we are consenting to cause pain, to keep wounds open, or to shut the door to peace and forgiveness.  More than that… we are consenting to the gentle processes of grace and love, to change us in the ways we need to be changed, and to heal the damage we have done.  And so that prayer, forgive us our sins, for we ourselves forgive, becomes a simple description of the way we are living.