- Carefully backing into a parking lot space, the driver of a big, heavy old Rolls Royce was angered when a teenager in a cool sports car zipped in and stole his place. Getting out of the car, the youth grinned and said, "You got to be young and quick to be able to do that, Pops." The older gent grinned too, and continued to back up his Roils, crunching the tiny sports car into a total wreck. "And you have to be old and rich to be able to do that, Son," he said.
Forgiveness of those who have harmed us--who are harming us--then, is the hallmark of Christianity. The very message of Calvary itself and the first message of the Risen Christ is: "Receive the Holy Spirit. Whose sins you shall forgive, they are forgiven them." Such open forgiveness was, when you think of it, a profoundly shocking idea then, and is a profoundly shocking idea now. And yet, on those occasions when it has been put into practice, we recognize its authenticity.
- Elsa Joseph was a Jewish woman who was cut off from both her children, both girls, during the Second World War. It was years later that she discovered that her daughters had been gassed at Auschwitz. A former concert violinist, Elsa responded to this tragic news by picking up her violin and going to play it in Germany. And there in the halls of the homeland of her children's murderers she played her violin and told her story that cried out to heaven for vengeance. But she did not seek vengeance. She spoke of the world's deep need for reconciliation and forgiveness, without which it was tearing itself apart. "If I, a Jewish mother, can forgive what happened," she told her audiences not only in Germany, but in Northern Ireland, and in Lebanon and in Israel, "then why can you not sink your differences and be reconciled to one another?"
It is this radical concept of forgiving love, grounded in Jesus' witness, that sharply distinguishes such people as Elsa Joseph, Bishop Taft, Archbishop Oscar Romero, and Father James Carney from those other martyrs, the Kamikaze terrorists. Yes, both share one thing in common: they are prepared to die for a cause. But whereas the terrorist, in dying, adds to the violence of the world, hating and cursing what he has killed and encouraging others to do the same, the man or woman who responds to violence by begging God to have mercy on its perpetrators comes close to redeeming the world.
We may feel in our bones that such heroic forgiveness as we just mentioned is beyond us, and yet we recognize that when forgiveness is actually given and practiced, it speaks to the world's deepest needs. If the world is to be saved, the chain of evil and the vicious cycle of revenge have to be broken. It was Mohandas Gandhi, I think, who said that if you practice an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, you're going to wind up with a universe of toothless and blind people.
An unknown woman in the Ravensbruck concentration camp wrote this little prayer and pinned it to the dead body of a little girl there. I'd like to share her prayer. "Oh, Lord," she wrote, "remember not only the men and women of good will, but also those of ill will. But do not remember all the sufferings they have inflicted on us. Remember rather the fruits we have bought, thanks to this suffering: our comradeship, our loyalty, our humility, our courage, our generosity; the greatness of heart that has grown out of all of this. And when they come to judgment, let all the fruits we have borne be their forgiveness."
Betsie Ten Boom, who died in the same concentration camp, steadfastly refused to hate the guards who beat her and eventually beat her to death. Her dying words are both simple and profound. Listen to what she said: "We must tell the people what we have learned here. We must tell them that there is no pit so deep that he is not deeper still." That is incredible: There is no pit so deep that Jesus is not deeper still. Calvary in the twentieth century!
For all of that, the injunction to forgive, the inner demand of being a Christian to forgive, there are people who cannot bring themselves to offer forgiveness. And there are people who cannot bring themselves to accept it. I think of a man that every once in a while I visit in jail. He should be there because he has committed a terrible murder. But he's so caught up in his own guilt that he cannot accept forgiveness, even from God. He feels there is no hope for himself either in this world or the next. He spends his time hugging his guilt to himself, thereby blocking out the forgiveness of the Christ who is on record for forgiving other murderers.
This man is light years away from another murderer in Dostoyevsky's great classic, Crime and Punishment. Here the murderer recognizes his guilt, his unworthiness, but offers them as the very reason for being open to mercy. He cries out in a famous passage from the book: "You're right. I don't deserve any pity. I ought to be crucified. Crucified and not pitied. But he who takes pity on all men will also take pity on me. And he who understands all men and all things, he alone is judge. And he will judge all and will forgive them: the good and the bad, the wise and the meek. And when he has done with all of them, he will say unto us, 'Come forth, you also. Come forth, ye who are drunk.
Come forth, ye who know no shame.' And we shall all come forth without being ashamed, and we will stand before him. And the wise will say, and the learned will say, 'Lord, why dost thou receive them?' And he will say unto them, 'I receive them, oh wise men, I receive them, oh learned men, because not one of them ever thought himself worthy of it.' And he will stretch out his arms to us, and we shall fall down before him, and we shall weep, and we shall understand all."
Forgiveness. There are probably very few of us here who have not been hurt or know people who have been hurt deeply. A spouse has walked out of our lives. Children have disappointed us. Parents have abused us. Friends have betrayed us. The company to which we gave so much devotion has fired us without notice, leaving us unemployed and bitter. We have been refused promotion. We have been treated unfairly. There's a host of deep and abiding hurts in the personal histories of most of us.
But forgiveness is hard, isn't it? To consciously break the vicious cycle of revenge is hard. Forgiveness, after all, is the deliberate decision to put up with an uneven score, and that rubs our American psyches the wrong way. To surrender a right to get even in a nation of Rambos with Uzi machine guns blasting enemy bodies all over the media is almost un-American. But the point is that we are not just anybody. We are a community that was born out of Calvary's forgiveness, called to be a reconciling community.
A wise man who knows what it means to forgive his youngest son had been brutalized by a police officer--offers three somewhat earthy bits of practical advice that are worth sharing. He said, "I'm not very good at spiritual discipline, but after being called by a friend to practice what I preach, I sat alone in my study and made believe I was a priest in the confessional. I said out loud, 'Officer, in the name of God, I forgive you.' I felt kind of foolish at this creative hypocrisy, but it did get the juices of forgiveness going. I felt the caricature I had made of the officer change. Oh, a year later when that same cop drove past my house I had to go through the whole forgiveness process again. Forgiveness by fallible creatures is repetitious.'' That's real wisdom. For us weak creatures forgiveness indeed turns out to be a repetitious affair.
The second bit of wisdom he offers is this: "Don't forgive too fast." By that he doesn't mean to harbor lingering revenge. He means that we have to allow time for the hurt to surface, for the hatred to be visible and recognized and acknowledged to the point when perhaps we can say out loud, "I hate you." It is only when the hurt, the enemy, is out there and regurgitated that we can feel its full impact and come to terms with forgiveness. That's what our friend means by saying "Don't forgive too fast." Otherwise our forgiveness is too shallow. It hasn't grabbed sufficiently hold of the evil.
And finally he gives this delightful advice: "It's good to remember that when you pray for your enemies it doesn't automatically make them your friends. They are still your enemy. They're still out to get you. They still hate your guts." And he adds for emphasis: "They are still your enemies and you'd better guard against them because they might wallop you when you're down on your knees.'
But that's their problem. Yours and mine is to enter into today's Scriptures, especially the gospel. And to remember that it's not a gospel of Jesus talking to priests; it is a gospel of Jesus talking to the entire community. His Easter gift is to breathe into that community the spirit of Calvary: "Receive its spirit. Whose sins you shall forgive they are forgiven." This is not only our mandate to continue the mission of Jesus. It turns out to be the condition of our own forgiveness, for we must remember that we were also commanded to pray thus to the Father, "Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us."
[Reprinted with permission from More Telling Stories, Compelling Stories, pp. 26-31, copyright 1993 by William J. Bausch, Twenty-third Publications, Mystic, CT. This is one of two homilies available for this text in Fr. Bausch's books. This resource, as well as many others, is available at a discount through the Homiletic Resource Center. If you enjoyed this homily, you might consider purchasing the BAUSCH TREASURY, a complete set of his homiletic books, including his new ones The Yellow Brick Road, The Word In And Out Of Season and A World of Stories for Preachers and Teachers, as well as all of his previous publications: