‘Father, forgive us our sins, for we ourselves forgive
everyone indebted to us’.
First off, may I ask your forgiveness for taking some of
the ideas for this morning’s sermon from an excellent book
by Kenneth Bailey called ‘Jesus through Middle Eastern
eyes’. It somehow seems appropriate, at a time when events
in the Middle East are becoming increasingly important.
Forgiveness gives us all sorts of problems. How can anyone
like Mohamed Bouhlel, the French Tunisian who massacred so
many men women and children in Nice, be forgiven for what
he did? How can we ever come to terms with the callous
cruelty of the young gunman who murdered nine people in
Munich on Friday evening? Can we really be expected to
forgive such people, and if so – how? How can the peoples
of Israel and Palestine ever forgive one another and seek
common cause for the future? And how can those of us who
enter into the Israel-Palestine debate on one side or the
other, be reconciled amongst ourselves? In St. Luke’s
version of the Lord’s prayer Jesus gives us no final
answers, but he does tell us how to pray for forgiveness,
and how we can expect forgiveness to work.
When St. Peter asked how many times he was expected to
forgive his brother, Jesus told him: not seven times, but
seventy times seven. In other words mercy has no limits,
and does not wait for repentance or an apology. The onus
is on the wronged to forgive the wrong-doer. This
expectation may seem misguided, crazy, but only from the
perspective of our human weakness. This sort of
forgiveness can come only from God’s awesome power. Christ
forgave Peter for betraying him, and in his Passion he
prayed for his tormentors in the very midst of their
brutality. As St. Paul put it in his letter to the
Colossians, Jesus set aside the record of our sins by
nailing it, nailing it to the Cross.
But there is more: as well as stressing forgiveness for
the sinner, our scriptures are also full of the need for
justice. If we think again about the many conflicts in the
Middle East today, would mutual forgiveness alone, even if
it could ever be achieved, necessarily bring justice for
all those, past and present, who have been oppressed and
dispossessed? There has to be a will, or at least a hope,
that wrongs will be set right. The world sees forgiveness
as somehow weak, even cowardly. Yet it is possible for
human beings to forgive sacrificially, while at the same
time remaining angry, even very angry, at oppression and
injustice of all kinds. A raging thirst for justice gives
energy to forgiveness, while forgiveness tempers and
purifies the thirst for justice. And without justice there
can be no peace.
Of course we have the option of not bothering about
justice at all. In the Lord’s prayer, Jesus uses the
Aramaic word ‘khoba’ which means both debts and sins.
There is an old Scottish joke about the careful canny
Calvinists liking to use the word ‘debts’, while the
landed gentry, the Episcopalians, preferred ‘trespasses’.
In fact we need both words. I need reminding that my
‘debts’, my failure to do what God requires of me, are
just as important – maybe even more important – than my
‘trespasses’, when I act wrongly. Justice and peace are
bought at great cost, and I cannot hope for either
by doing nothing, saying nothing, and keeping my head
down.
But a thirst for justice is not the same as a thirst for
vengeance. When we use the Lord’s Prayer we have to pray
that we may see the difference between them and make the
right choice! When terrorist groups like Isis and Islamic
Jihad attack us they actually want us to seek revenge and
to hit out. They are trying to stir up a backlash against
ordinary Muslims, knowing that this will make their task
of radicalisation so much easier. Even here, and
impossible though it may be, Our Lord still asks us to
seek justice before hatred and revenge.
The trouble is that fear often makes us behave
irrationally. Lorens Van der Post who was interned by the
Japanese during the Second World War, and who knew about
real suffering, wrote this: ‘There is no power on earth
like imagination, and the worst, most obstinate grievances
are imagined ones’. In the Brexit referendum, communities
with the least number of immigrants were the ones who felt
most threatened by them, and who voted ‘leave’ as a
result. These communities were for the most part in the
poorer and more disadvantaged areas of our country, and
they would have been sensitive to even a small increase in
immigration. And so their fear was understandable: yet
fear it was. It is when we feel threatened that we all
find it hardest to accept, understand, and forgive.
Perhaps we should pray that we are not brought to the time
of trial.
The Lord taught us in his prayer that God’s forgiveness
for us, and our forgiveness for each other, are
inextricably entwined. Let us pray that we will always be
true to that relationship, as we struggle to bring
forgiveness and justice to the world for which Christ
died.