7th Sunday in Ordinary Time – 20 February 2022
Let me share with you words of a woman from the former Yugoslavia:
I am thirty-five years old. To my second son just born I gave the name, Jihad. So, he would not forget the testament of his mother – revenge. The first time I put my baby at my breast and told him, “May this milk choke you if you forget.” So be it. They have taught me to hate. For the last two months there was nothing in me. No pain, no bitterness. Only hatred. I taught these children to love. I did. I am a teacher of literature. But my students have become my persecutors. They have abused me and kept hitting me. Wherever they could. I have become insensitive to pain. But my soul? It hurts. I taught them to love and all the while they were making preparations to destroy everything that is different from them. Jihad- war. This is the only way.
We can taste the bitterness in the woman’s words. And she has suffered much. It is understandable. But we also recognized in her word how hate begets hate. he downward spiral is known only too well to us as is shows itself in the world at large.
Jesus himself knew the potential of revenge. He knew how it could consume the human heart and make it dull and insensitive. He knew how hate and vengeance imprisoned a person so that they could never be freed even when their revenge had seemed to destroy the object of its hate. He knew how revenge enslaves and how it initiates a never-ending cycle which creates further and further alienation.
It seems Jesus not only realised this as an astute insight but that he recognised that the impulse to revenge, to strike back, was the most dangerous threat to the experience of genuine community between people. He saw this impulse as the element that worked most against his vision of a world in which all might live as members of one family in communion with each other and in communion with his Father. But even more than this, Jesus identified how hate and how revenge, in the way in which they enslaved people, robbed them of life and of freedom. It made them victims and prisoners.
And so, Jesus preaches the power of forgiveness constantly in his ministry. At the very outset of his ministry he preaches to the people, ‘Repent!’ When we remember that he was at first preaching here to those who were the victims of oppression and brutality, his challenge becomes rather curious. Surely it should have been to those who were oppressing that he would preach repentance. But it is to the victims! What would they have to repent? What would they have to repent? They are to repent of their impulse to revenge. By letting go of the impulse to revenge, the cycle of hate is broken, and a new space is created in which the possibility at least of a new cycle might begin. But as long as hate begets hate everyone is denied life.
Repent, for the Kingdom of God is close at hand! Repent of the desire to strike back, to be avenged, to have vengeance! There is no future in that cycle which spawns itself time and time again. It is a call Jesus makes to each of us today. We too are called to a life of forgiveness. We are to reverse the old order in which a wrong was to be avenged seven times its worth and rather we are to forgive each other seven times and not only seven times but seventy-seven times. And we are to replace vengeance with a continued openness to the other, with a readiness to maintain the other in relation.
If this was a central and consistently repeated theme in Jesus’ ministry, it was because he realised just how hard it is for us to live in this way.
But we also must remember what forgiveness is and what it is not.
First of all, we must acknowledge that forgiveness is not naive. It is not blind or sentimental. Nor does forgiveness mean forgetting. We cannot blot out painful memory. We may carry painful memory to the grave. The question is what we do with our memory of hurt. Do we use it to generate even yet further vengeful feeling and thought? Or do we use it to recall that fundamental option we have in its regard: to exclude the other in vengeance or to maintain an openness toward the other, an openness which I wish to stress needs to be realistic, informed and mature.
Most of all, we must be clear that forgiveness is not a feeling. So often we can get ourselves into thinking that we have to feel a certain way before we forgive or that we have to feel forgiving before we can forgive another. If this were the case, then either we might be waiting a long time, or we might be denying the full reality of the wrong that has occurred to us. Forgiveness in the mind of Jesus is first and foremost a decision. We can feel quite unforgiving, but still forgive. That is, even in the midst of difficult feelings, we can make the decision to retain an openness to the other who has hurt us and to hold them in relationship albeit in a relationship that respects the reality of what we have experienced.
And therefore, at heart, forgiveness is the decision to maintain a person in the circle of relationship and not to exclude them. In fact, forgiveness is a decision to act out a fourfold drama. It means we make the decision to open our arms, a sign of invitation. It means we wait, a sign of our respect for the difference and timing of others. It means we close our arms in a gentle and mutual embrace and it means we open our arms again allowing the other – and ourselves – to be free.
Jesus calls us into this fourfold drama throughout our lives in order that we might be free. For each of us the drama will become one of the hardest things we perform in our lives and it will be our own deepest affirmation of resistance to the forces of negativity which would make us less than who we could be. It is no accident then that the very last act of Jesus before his own death on the cross is an action of forgiveness. It is his deepest affirmation of life, and his act of final resistance to the forces of death and imprisonment of the self. In his capacity to forgive Jesus is free.
In our own struggle to forgive may we too act for life and thus be free.
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