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Yes, you read that right. So go ahead, roll your eyes, express your shock, outrage and liturgical disdain, and then tell me you don’t want one. Really. One of my lectionary group is getting ordained to the priesthood on Sunday. … Continue reading
The question came up during our Tuesday bible study week whether the sinner who anoints Jesus’ feet in the Gospel according to Luke is, in fact, Mary Magdalene, mentioned further down the page. There is a long tradition in the West of saying so, but I promised to explain this morning why I don’t think that this is the same woman. In fact, I think that we do these women something of an injustice when we try to mush them all together to fit one story. What’s more, it is my guess that Jesus had no difficulty telling them apart.
There is a story in each of the four gospels about a woman anointing Jesus with precious perfume. In the Gospel of Luke, which we just heard, Jesus is just getting into the swing of his Galilean ministry, travelling the country and cities around Capernaum, preaching, teaching and performing miracles. This story is about a woman who recognizes him as one who delivers those imprisoned by sin, and restores them to health and salvation, and she weeps with gratitude and wipes his feet with her hair. The response that Jesus gives is to defend her prophetic act of love, which he says is provoked by her own recognition of her sin and its forgiveness. He speaks directly to the woman in words he usually uses to the healed: your faith has saved you; your faith has made you well; and those around him are shocked.
There are obvious parallels with the other gospel stories, but there are also differences. The other three anointing stories are all told as Jesus is journeying towards Jerusalem and his death. All three set the scene not in Galilee but in Bethany, just a little way outside of the holy city. While the house belongs to Simon, he is now called “the leper”. In all three, the woman is criticized by the disciples not for being a sinner, but for wasting money. Again, Jesus defends her act as a prophetic gesture, this time one which prepares him for the trials to come. In two of the other three stories, the woman anoints Jesus’ head. Only in the Gospel of John is the woman identified by name, Mary of Bethany, the sister of Martha and Lazarus, and she anoints Jesus’ feet, like the sinner of Luke’s Gospel, and wipes them with her hair.
Fun fact from one of my teachers: of the sixteen women named in the New Testament, seven are called Mary(see https://rosalindhughes.com/2017/04/16/resurrection/ for a factcheck of this erroneous and deleted statement); so one Mary does not have to be the same woman as the next Mary, if you follow me.
There are very few other reasons why Mary Magdalene became associated with the sinner woman from Luke. The woman cries, and her tears fall on Jesus’ feet. Mary Magdalene is weeping when she goes to the tomb of Jesus, carrying oils and spices, and is among the first to witness the resurrection. Perfumed oils, tears, and the name Mary seem to have been sufficient to tie Mary Magdalene firmly to the notorious woman of the city unnamed by Luke.
By the sixth century, Pope Gregory, later to be known as the Great, seemed quite certain in his identification of the woman in today’s Gospel story:
“She whom Luke calls the sinful woman, whom John calls Mary, we believe to be the Mary from whom seven devils were ejected according to Mark. And what did these seven devils signify, if not all the vices? …It is clear, brothers, that the woman previously used the unguent to perfume her flesh in forbidden acts. What she therefore displayed more scandalously, she was now offering to God in a more praiseworthy manner.”[1]
And so the die was cast, at least in the West, and Mary Magdalene, from whom seven demons were cast out, was branded an albeit penitent prostitute.
Why does it matter? you might ask. If seven out of every 16 women one in every four or five women was called Mary anyway, why does it matter whether this one was called Mary, and whether she came from Magdala in Galilee or from Bethany in Judea, and since we are all sinners, and her sins were forgiven her, why should it matter what went before?
Well, here’s the thing. Mary of Magdala, whom we know as Mary Magdalene, is one of few women in scripture identified by her place of living rather than by her husband or father; she is a rare example of an established, independent, and apparently respected female figure. She was a constant companion, supporter, and follower of Jesus. She was, according to most accounts, the first to witness his resurrection. She was given the charge by Jesus to proclaim that holy and high event to the other apostles, including the men. She could have been used to represent the equality of women in the eyes of God, the dignity of women in the economy of the church, but instead, she was diluted and insulted by the church for centuries of its history.
Consider this: nowhere else, no one else who suffers from demons and is cured by Jesus is identified therefore as a notorious sinner. No one else’s demons are equated with their sins. But Gregory decides on a whim that the seven demons cast out of Mary are the seven vices, and suddenly she is a whore. There is no reason to accuse Luke’s sinful woman of specific crimes or lifestyle violations. Yet by mixing her up with the Magdalene, and adding in a little bit of imaginative interpretation of the demons Mary fought, we end up with a picture of Mary not as a faithful disciple and supporter of Jesus, the strong one who would carry forth his mission, but as a fallen woman, sidelined by her sin, by her sex and by her tears.
There is a problem that occurs when we conflate people, and groups of people, and we define them by the pigeonholes we can put them in, and we cease to see individuals as beloved children of God, each one uniquely made in the divine image, and we fall far short of loving them.
I am sorry to say that this has happened to women for many centuries, and the problems of inequality, not to mention of sex-trafficking, of exploitation and oppression are unfortunately real and alive in our communities. It happens also to anyone that we lump into a category instead of affording them the dignity of individuals: think about racial minorities, or those we choose to identify as such; people whose marriages or families fail to reflect our adopted ‘norms’; people with disabilities, people with criminal records, people with physical or mental illness; when we talk about the homeless guy, instead of seeing a man who doesn’t have a place to sleep tonight, or we talk about the druggie, instead of seeing someone’s child who is struggling to put the monsters back in the closet.
Any time we put a label ahead of the person wearing it, we are doing the same thing that Gregory did to Mary Magdalene and the women he made her absorb; making the oppressed responsible for their misfortune, we fail to do justice; making the victim responsible for her helplessness, we fail to administer mercy.
Rowan Williams calls it, “’Using other people to think with’; … When you get used to imposing meanings in this way, you silence the stranger’s account of who they are; and that can mean both metaphorical and literal death…living realities are turned into symbols, and the symbolic values are used to imprison the reality. At its extreme pitch, people simply relate to the symbols. It is too hard to look past them, to look into the complex humanity of a real other.”[2]
We would do so much better to listen to the stories of individuals than to lump them together as fallen, sinful or willful people. After all, one of them might just be a witness to the resurrection.
It is my guess that Jesus had no problem telling Mary of Magdala apart from Mary of Bethany, the woman at the house of Simon the Pharisee from the woman at the house of Simon the Leper. He seemed to have a knack for affording each person his or her own deserved and God-given dignity. He knows each of us by name, he justifies us and defends us, and he forgives us our sins.
And as his named disciples, we would do well to follow his example.
1] Pope Gregory’s Homily 33, delivered c. 591, quoted by Susan Haskins, Mary Magdalene: The Essential History (Pimlico, 2005) 96
[2] Rowan Williams, Writing in the Dust, after September 11 (William B. Eerdman, 2002) 64-65
Also read:
Ann Graham Brock, Mary Magdalene, The First Apostle: The Struggle for Authority (Harvard, 2003)
Mary R. Thompson, Mary of Magdala: What The Da Vinci Code Misses (Paulist Press, 1995)
Last week, I wrote about forgiving and forgetting offences done unto us. This week is all about those who forget what they have done. Does the fact that they do not remember that they have hurt us make it easier or harder to achieve a forgiving state with regard to them?
Several years ago, a friend introduced me to an episode of Babylon 5 by way of a theological reflection. The episode is entitled, “Passing Through Gethsemane,”* and it centres around a judicial practice called “the death of personality.” The person thus sentenced undergoes a “mind wipe,” which removes all of their memories and, in the design of the writers, thus destroys the personality that did foul deeds. The person is then “reprogrammed” with a fervent desire to serve society, and sent off to a life of fulfilling community service, with no memory of their crime or punishment. Some see it as a utopian solution; others as a cop-out. At the end, as the question of direct interaction with those hurt by the crime is revisited, despite a closing handshake, the quandary remains: is this forgiveness, or does the fact that it has become impossible to relate to the person as the one who committed the crimes make it impossible to forgive? Is resignation to the inaccessibility of the past closer or further from forgiveness than repeated and frequently faltering efforts to deal with it gracefully?
This is not a hypothetical question, nor is it restricted to science fiction. Various dementias, brain traumas and diseases can lead not only to a forgetfulness of past misdeeds, but in fact the construction of a whole new set of memories that directly contradict everyone else’s. A tyrannical father remembers himself as the gentlest of men; an abusive lover remembers only acts of love; a sharp-tongued sister remembers only laughter at her cruel jokes, never the tears, and assumes that she was, in fact, sweet and funny. A confrontation with the reality that belongs to everyone else is impossible: the brain will not accommodate another set of memories alongside the new ones. The person who did the deed has undergone “the death of personality,” and is inaccessible to the one trying to forgive.
Replacing the hurt with pity for the person’s new state is not forgiveness. Neither is pretending to forget along with them. If forgiving is, as someone has described it, the gradual release of resentments, of those grains of unpleasantness wished upon another, those little atoms of hatred, letting them go one by one, or piece by piece, or drop by teardrop – that is work that can be done without the collusion of the one being forgiven, as in the case of the dead.
The presence of the person who does not remember in this case presents an obstacle, because the cause keeps being represented, without the means to address it head-on. I think that forgetfulness makes it harder work to get past the point of fist-clenching anger and pain, and ease towards the release of those grains of resentment; but it is not an insurmountable obstacle.
Jesus said, “Do not judge, so that you may not be judged. For with the judgment you make you will be judged, and the measure you give will be the measure you get. Why do you see the speck in your neighbour’s eye, but do not notice the log in your own eye?” (Matthew 7:1-3)
We know very well when we have been hurt, and we know when another’s recollection of reality does not match our own. Their efforts to paint themselves with a rosier hue are frustrating and hurtful in themselves – but they may reflect a very real impulse to be a better person than past actions would suggest, to live a better life, with kinder relationships, than our memories allow; they may even represent a kind of repentance. And there is always the question of what we ourselves have forgotten.
I met a woman once on vacation who remembered me. I didn’t remember her. We ran through everywhere we had lived and gone to school, where we might have overlapped, then she had it – a youth orchestra and choir combined event at a further education college in Cardiff. We had been for a weeklong residential course together.
I didn’t remember the woman. I still don’t remember anything about the course, except that she was right, I was there. I remember that college. I have carried a snapshot memory of its entrance, being dropped off in its circular driveway, since my teen years, and I had occasionally puzzled where it came from, and why I remembered it, because I did not know why I would have been there. As soon as she told me, I knew she was right. But I still don’t know why I don’t remember that week. I don’t know whether it has merged with other memories and lost its edges, blurred and blended in, or whether I have blocked it out, because something about it hurts me or threatens me or my self-image. It does appear lost to me. What sins did I commit that week that I have no memory of doing?
Of course, God knows all and forgives us everything, whether we remember or not, but I use that evidence of the fragility of my own memory as an aid to forgiving others who have forgotten, never knowing where I might need forgiveness all unknowing. “For with the judgment you make you will be judged, and the measure you give will be the measure you get.” It may turn out to be a good investment for me to be generous with my own efforts to forgive what I cannot forget.
* Babylon 5, Season 3, “Passing Through Gethsemane,” released 1995, by Babylonian Productions, Inc.
The fact that the stories we hear today, which echo one another so clearly that these two women might have been related, one the great-great grandmother of the other, a sister several times removed; the fact that these stories revolve around widowed women is not coincidental. Indeed, we read the Bible and we hear so often about the plight of widows and orphans, the motherless and the fatherless and those who live alone, and we think about the situations of poverty, of precarious social standing, of vulnerability that these labels imply, but I was reminded this week in my reading that in fact, whenever we read about widows in the Bible, we should prick up our ears and pay attention, because so often, these women are indicators not of helplessness and poverty but signs that God is about to do something a little special, a little out of the ordinary.[1] God seems to have a particular relationship with these widowed women, a nudging, secret language with them that lets them know that God is with them, that they are the signs of God’s love for us all. We should be a little bit careful about writing them off as helpless and powerless, because they tend to be the vehicles for amazing grace.
Think of Judith, the widow of Manasseh, a profound prophetess who used both her feminine wiles and weapons of war to rescue God’s people from oppression. (The book of Judith is found in the Apocrypha, or the Intertestamental readings, those chapters which are sandwiched in between the Old and the New Testaments; it makes for some kind of racy reading). Think of Naomi and Ruth, widows both, who became matriarchs in the Davidic line, the royal family whose heritage Jesus shared. Jesus told the story of a dishonourable judge who had no fear of God or man, but a widow woman was the only one who could wrangle justice out of him. Or think of Anna, a bride for seven, then a widow the rest of her eighty-four years, who broke into song and prophetic speech in the Temple of Jerusalem when she first saw the infant Jesus, when she was among the first to greet him, the first to recognize him (Luke 2:36-38).
These are not weak characters. They are no shrinking violets; and while biblical widows may indeed be particularly vulnerable to the economic tides of society, and to the dangers of isolation and exclusion, they are by that very token the conscience of the people, the barometer of the fairness and faithfulness of the community – both in the Old and the New Testaments the people of God are instructed especially to care for the widowed and the orphaned, and for the alien in the land: those at risk of poverty, of loneliness, of exclusion and isolation, of poor health outcomes and lower educational opportunities. We would do well to take note, especially when we consider the impact on the economically vulnerable or the alien in this land of our own society’s policies. Such people are firmly fixed and secure in their standing within God’s loving and abundant care, and their standing in our society is a barometer of our own faithfulness.
Of course, none of that special grace and favour makes it any easier, day by day, to live with the grief and hardship that go with widowhood, either then or now. If God could save the widow from starvation, save her son from death itself, at least for the time being, because there will come a time when he will die, there will come a time when she will pass on from this life to the next – but if God could save them once, she might argue, then why is she a widow at all? What was the need to leave her lonely? Why not another miracle, and another, and one more, so that life becomes easy and a never ending joy, in this life, now?
Anger, fear, doubt and distrust: all are pretty reasonable responses to the realities of life and death.
Funnily enough, Jesus had already talked about this story of Elijah, the one in which he lived with the widow when God saved her and her son from death by drought, and brought her son back from the brink of death, or perhaps even beyond.
Jesus, when they were surprised at him in his hometown, referred to the prophets and said that of all the widows in Israel when that drought fell upon them, the only one Elijah was sent to was the widow at Zarephath, the one whose son was saved (Luke 4). It is almost as though he had her on his mind, that story haunting him, long before he saw the widow in Nain weeping for her own dear, dead son.
The widow in Zarephath, has her life restored twice, first when she is facing death from starvation, and then when she is near to being destroyed by the loss of her son. She responds first with doubt, even after days of the feeding miracle, the grain and the oil that refuse to run out, she accuses Elijah – “What have you against me, man of God, to bring my sin to remembrance and cause the death of my son?” But when God’s abundance overflows even into the breath of her son, she responds with faith, “Now I know that the word of the Lord in your mouth is truth.”
It made them angry, when Jesus talked about it in Nazareth. They formed a mob to throw him off the cliff, but he slipped away, lived to talk and heal another day.
The people who witness the miracle during the funeral procession outside the city of Nain are also gripped first by fear, but instead of becoming angry, they celebrate God’s mercy in their midst.
Anger, fear, doubt, gratitude and celebration: they are fairly basic and reasonable responses to the basic realities of life and death, scarcity and drought, relief, illness, bereavement and restoration.
Psalm 146, the one that we prayed together this morning, reminds us to praise God at all times, praise God no matter what befalls and no matter how we are feeling, because God loves us whether we are strangers or orphans or widows, because God looks for opportunities to release those who are imprisoned and oppressed, who are hungry and thirsty, who need a little extra help. When the widowed women and men who are widowers, when any of us is mourning the loss of a partner or a parent or a child, we are assured of God’s grace, of God’s compassion for us; and when we see those vulnerable to loss and hardship, we are called by God’s commandments to compassion for them.
Another psalm, Psalm 139, speaks directly to those sons of widows whose lives hung in the balance between life and death, who fell down on the side of the grave and were pulled back by the grace of God.
“Where shall I go from your Spirit?” asks the Psalm, “Or where shall I flee from your presence? If I ascend to heaven, you are there! If I make my bed in the Underworld, you are there also.” (Ps 139:7-8)
Sometimes the stories that we hear, that we read in the name of the Word of God, leave us with more questions than answers. What really was going on with these two women, and their sons? Why does one woman have her son restored to her, when you just know that there were other funerals taking place that day, which Jesus did not encounter and derange? What tales did the two boys tell their mothers about their time apart?
At the heart of these two stories, the stories of these two women and their sons, is assurance; is the assurance that nowhere are we beyond the reach of the living and loving God made manifest in Jesus Christ; not in the land of the living nor even beyond the grave. At the heart of these stories is the assurance that no one is beyond the reach of God, no one; and there is no such time as too late in the eternity of God’s saving grace and love.
These two women had suffered more than one loss in their lives, and they were weary with grief and sorrow, but God looked upon them and had more than enough compassion for them both. Not only the grain and the oil, but God’s love and compassion never gave out, never ran dry.
God’s mercy, as yet another psalm says, God’s mercy endures forever.
[1] “It seems that Jesus has a special fondness for widows, perhaps because his mother was one for most of her life. When he does something remarkable or finds something remarkable in the community, it is often connected to a widow.” Megan McKenna, Not Counting Women and Children: Neglected Stories from the Bible (Orbis Books, 1994), 147
Granny Lyle was widowed in 1957. For as long as I knew her, she lived alone in a house not her own; she had never lived in her own home, going from her parents into service with the local doctor at the age of fourteen. After she married, she and he moved into the council house, government-owned, where she lived and died, where I knew her.
When she died, she left nothing but a few sticks of furniture, which her son and daughter burned in a bonfire in the back yard, and just enough in her savings book to cover her cremation and to give her grandchildren a parting present of fifty pounds each. Her little dog went to live at a neighbour’s house.
She didn’t have a telephone. If we needed to get hold of her in a hurry, we called her friend across the street, and she would put on her housecoat and go and fetch Granny Lyle and bring her back so that we could call again in ten minutes.
I thought of Granny Lyle this week, walking along the beach in hot sand and cold water so nice that I walked halfway back barefoot in sisterhood with her, who, much to my mother’s shame, never wore a shoe where a foot would do. We walked that way in heather on the moors, and on the pier, where she ducked in to play bingo while we ate our ice creams.
She was not what you might call a domesticated widow. She was tiny and strong as a coiled spring, and her breath came in gasps towards the end, and she drank a bottle of Guinness every day and her bird seed fell into the gaps in the window sill and grew accidental hemp.
The dishonourable judge, who feared neither God nor man but got heartily sick of the nagging widow woman, would have crossed the street and poked his head into the public bar to avoid Granny Lyle, and hidden his face in a foamy pint of northern bitter and never come back out till closing time.
I thought that she was a saint. My mother thought she was a holy terror.
They say that Elijah raised a fatherless child,
stretched out corpselike over his body,
breathing for him, with him, breathing
until his new life began.
His mother, from then on, developed
a habit of peering over his shoulder
into the shadows,
fearful of what might be demanded in return.
I could not breathe for you,
or lay out your barely-formed body.
You fell away from me, and no prophet,
nor medicine man could pull you back.
I could only sing bitter-sweet praises to
the God of the living and the dead,
Who raised you as Her own
and loved you where I never saw you go.
I do not think that forgetfulness is necessarily helpful to forgiveness. Of course, neither is holding a grudge; but forgiveness, as part of a loving and generous outlook on relationship, depends upon an honest assessment of where we are together; and a deliberate, willed or otherwise fake forgetfulness is not conducive to honest and difficult, real reconciliation; nor, where reconciliation is neither safe not desirable, to the harder work of forgiving a serial or abusive offender.
Indeed, the worst abuses of this phrase often come in the midst of ongoing, abusive relationships, where “one more chance” is played off against “forgive and forget” in the quest for a better future in a present spiralling out of control.
Countryman makes a useful distinction between “single incidents of wrongdoing between people who have had a strong relationship, [between whom] there can sometimes be a fairly easy reconciliation and restoration,” and “habitual patterns [which] will not normally yield to such immediate solutions… Forgiveness, here, needs to respond to the whole pattern… it will say, ‘If there’s going to be a future tethered the two of us, it has to be a nonabusive one.’ … The only forgiving and loving thing here is to demand change.”*
I think that a corollary of Countryman’s argument is that the forgiving is done only when the abusive relationship is in the rear view mirror. It is almost impossible to forgive someone while they are in the act of harming us, however quickly afterwards a saint might find the grace. It is equally hard to forgive from the middle of an abusive relationship. Clear-sightedness, the kind that aids true forgiveness, takes just a little bit of perspective.
Forgiving does not demand forgetfulness; in fact, quite the opposite. If we have forgotten the hurt, what need is there to forgive?
Through Jeremiah, and the author of the letter to the Hebrews, God speaks of forgiving sins and remembering them no more (Jeremiah 31:34; Hebrews 8:12). Does this mean that God forgives and forgets? Or does refusing to remember our sins mean that God refuses to let our future relationship be defined by them; that this will not be at the forefront of any future conversation, nor the first thing that is thought of when we come to the mind of God? That, perhaps, is a different and more positive prospect than pretending to forget, attempting to rewrite a past that is indelible, but whose colours need not bleed through, which does not have to define the future.
Refusing to remember first the worst aspects of a relationship, of a person’s behaviour, even as we struggle for an honest and true way to love and forgive them, may be something we can get behind without the need for pretence or selective memory.
Forgiveness is not a parlour trick, nor sleight of hand; it is not done with smoke and mirrors, and it is not pretending to forget. It is the hard work looking reality in the face, and forgiving it anyway; forgiving it enough, perhaps, to care enough for the future of the relationship to demand real, unflinching, change; the kind we might call repentance.
I had intended exploring this phrase in light of the difficulty of forgiving one who has forgotten hurting us; I will return to that theme, but it seemed important, first, to address to issue of recognizing, realizing, and remembering abuse. Forgiving those who have forgotten will be up next.
*L. William Countryman, Forgiven and Forgiving (Morehouse Publishing, 1998), 84
Two days after my mother died, at half past five in the morning, I heard a strange noise outside my bedroom window, the window of the spare bedroom in my parent’s house. It was a rasping, grinding, rolling, grunting, sighing sound, and it kept repeating over and over. I got up and looked out. My father was in the yard, rolling paving slabs to the wheelbarrow, hefting them in, and transporting them around to the back of the house to build the patio he was in the middle of making when my mother died.
This was half past five in the morning, and I had flown in the night before; it was still midnight-thirty east coast time, but what was I to do? I got up, got dressed, and joined the crazy man with the paving slabs and the wheelbarrow while the sun slowly rose.
A week later – these things take a little longer in Wales than they often do here – a week later, I was sitting in the back yard on the bench with my cup of tea. It was eight o’clock, a real eight o’clock, because the jet lag was over, and it was the day after my mother’s funeral. My father emerged with his own cuppa, still in his pyjamas.
“I slept well last night,” he announced.
I thought about the funeral that we had prayed and cried our way through the day before, and I was profoundly grateful for the rituals that had helped us to articulate our grief, our sorrow, our hope, our anger, our dependence on the good grace and mercy of God and of our neighbours. Rituals make a difference. This one allowed a crazy man to sleep for once, which in turn let me sleep, too.
In the story of Elijah, ritual has run amok. The priests of Baal are running riot at the extremes of ritual, trying by their own actions and efforts of will to make something miraculous happen.
But that is not what religious ritual is about. It is not about saying the right incantation, or spilling the right blood, or believing the right things, having the right spirit, in order to bend God’s will to our own. Rather, it is about opening ourselves up to the power of God which is all around us, listening to God who loves us, acting on behalf of God who wills only good for us.
God was not dependent upon Elijah and his altar to do the deed of power that astonished the people; but perhaps the people were. They needed an interpreter, and they needed to understand what they saw on their own terms, so that they could own it and live it. In order to show them the one true God, the one true God met them where they could see and meet God, in their ritual lives, on a pile of sodden, soaking wood and stone.
Jesus was not dependent upon the faith of the centurion, or the ritual of the laying on of hands in order to heal his servant; but he knew what people needed, and he was prepared to come. There are other stories in which he goes even further, making mud from the dirty ground to cleanse a man’s sight, sighing up to heaven and sending his healed lepers to the priests for certification. Jesus knew that he could heal the centurion’s servant with a word, but he was surprised that the centurion knew it, too.
He was astonished at the centurion’s response: “I am not worthy to have you come into my house; I did not presume to come to you; but only say the word, and let my servant be healed.”
The centurion was used to ordering things with a word, and he figured, how much more so the living Word of God who spoke creation into being. But the centurion was the odd one out. This is not how people usually received Jesus, almost all of them needing to see, to hear, to touch, to feel in order to know the presence of God, the healing power of the Spirit upon themselves or their household; even after the Resurrection, Jesus offered Thomas his hands to touch, his side to feel, to know by his senses that he was for real.
Rituals are important. There is a reason that we come together, instead of remaining apart and simply sending word via facebook or email that we are praying, thinking of one another, thinking of God. There is a reason that we come together in material ways, sharing real bread, real wine, real matter that really matters. There is a reason why in church we sometimes weep real tears, sometimes tears of laughter if we’re lucky, why we hug each other at the Peace, why we use olive oil to anoint the sick and the heartsick, and lay our hands upon them. It is a rare centurion, a rare person who has no need of such rituals, of tangible and touchable symbols of God’s grace and presence with them.
Most of us will admit, if push comes to shove, that we need our signs, our symbols, our cultic and familiar assurances of God’s grace with and among us. And if we need them, then so do our neighbours; and it is a kindness that we do to gather with them to share God’s good gifts and graces with them.
And God has graciously agreed to meet us where we are, has given us the gifts of the church in order to help us out. God recognizes and affirms our need for contact and companionship, for food and fellowship, for care and community, for signs and symbols elevated by God into sacramental mysteries.
So I invite you this summer, in the words of the letter to the Hebrews, not to neglect to meet together, but to stand together in the presence of the living God, celebrating with joy and gratitude the gifts that we have been given, the gifts of ritual and of remembrance, of our baptism and of the Eucharist.
There will be times when you are travelling, or otherwise detained, and there will be one or two Sundays when I am, too; but when you do not see me, I will be gathered still into that great congregation, the cloud of witnesses, and at least one of those Sundays I will praying for you in that old stone church where I was married and where we lay my mother to rest, singing her to sleep with the sweet and gentle rituals that soften our own spiritual journeys, those gifts of a God who knows just what we need, and is ready always to come under our rooftops to offer it to us.
May you encounter God’s blessings in the most unexpected places, people and practices this summer, and may you come quickly home to share your good graces with us all.
Amen.
I understand from various casual sources that this commonplace was most famously recorded, if not coined, by Leo Tolstoy in War and Peace, which I have yet to read:
“Tous comprendre, c’est tous pardonner.”
There is a reason it has become such a commonplace. It has some of the fundamental elements of graceful relationships: that we are all basically worthy of love and capable of forgiveness; that all of our motives are mixed, and many unfathomable; that our free will (and ultimate responsibility) are tempered by the pitfalls and stumbling blocks placed before us by original sin, or by nature or nurture, psychology or society; that healing comes from recognition of the good in one another.
Theologically, one might call upon the incarnation to bolster Tolstoy’s view. “For we have not a high priest who is unable to sympathise with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin.” (Hebrews 4:15)
Yet God already knew all there was to know about us; God had, after all, created our very essence and being. More telling, God had already decided to forgive us, out of God’s steadfast mercy and faithful love, testified over centuries before Jesus’ advent, before Jesus’ incarnation; why else send us this great high priest at all?
By the time anyone takes the trouble to understand the one who has hurt them, they have already opened their heart to the possibility of forgiveness. They have already chosen the road to reconciliation and healing. The understanding may be a vehicle to help the journey along, but unless forgiveness is already an option, we will not embark, and unless forgiveness is our firmly fixed destination, we will get stuck when the engine of understanding gets derailed by senseless acts of violence or betrayal, when wrong decisions were made which cannot be rationalized away, because there was a choice to do the right thing instead of the wrong.
If we make understanding a condition of forgiveness, then we are tempted to contort ourselves into unlikely shapes and positions in order to achieve it; I am reminded of Cinderella’s stepsisters forcing their feet into someone else’s shoes when they are simply not designed to fit. If an act can be understood sufficiently to be excused, then stepping into another’s shoes will help us to do that; but what about forgiving that which is inexcusable?
A friend sent me the link to a wonderful and difficult NY Times story about forgiveness, understanding and justice. It’s worth a read just for its own sake, but in this context, I am struck by the parents’ refusal to be derailed by the lack of mitigating circumstance, by the deficiencies in empathetic excuse. They do not forgive through intellectual understanding so much as through a decision to be forgiving, merciful, loving people. This is the legacy they wish to leave for their daughter. If they had relied on understanding everything in order to begin to forgive it all, this was the moment that would have ended the whole pious project:
“I thought it was going to make sense,” Andy [the father of the victim] told her. Later, Andy told me that he had fantasized or hoped that maybe it had been an accident, maybe Conor’s finger had slipped — that he would hear something unexpected to help him make sense of his daughter’s death. But Conor’s recitation didn’t bring that kind of solace.
… He didn’t try to shirk responsibility at the conference or in long conversations with me about the murder. “What I did was inexcusable,” he told me. “There is no why, there are no excuses, there is no reason.”
The essence of classical tragedy is the unfolding of an ironic series of events which seem so nearly inevitable as to be excruciatingly sympathetic; yet which we know could have been otherwise, had just one decision been differently executed.
Seeking to understand one another, to find God’s reflected image in one another, that divine spark which holds us together in love is a powerful and profound quest. Forgiveness, the giving and receiving of it, is likewise bound up with our understanding of the great Other: to err is human, we say, but to forgive is divine.
Yet they are not, I think, so tightly bound together as to depend on one another, and set free, they may be of more help to one another than tangled. Sometimes understanding will outstrip forgiveness, and it will take a while to apply the learnt knowledge of why hurt happened. Sometimes, forgiveness will defy understanding, strike out boldly in love and hope and in the face of all that is unreasonable and senseless.
At the least, it is important to divorce the concept of understanding from those of condoning, excusing, or rationalizing in order to forgive. That which most needs forgiveness is often that which is the least rational, reasonable, excusable, comprehensible in human activity. To hold our forgiveness hostage, in such a case, to internalizing all from which our minds and imaginations recoil, may be to make victims of ourselves all over again.
Archbishop Desmond Tutu, in a summing up for the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, spoke thus:
“We have been shocked and filled with revulsion to hear of the depths to which we are able to sink in our inhumanity to one another: …That is one side – the ghastly and somber side of the picture that is emerging thus far.
But there is another side, a more noble and inspiring one. We have been deeply touched and moved by the resilience of the human spirit… It is quite incredible the capacity people have shown to be magnanimous – refusing to be consumed by bitterness and hatred, willing to meet with those who have violated their persons and their rights, willing to meet in a spirit of forgiveness and reconciliation eager only to know the truth, to know the perpetrator so that they could forgive them.”Desmond Mpilo Tutu, No Future Without Forgiveness (New York: Doubleday, 1999), pages 119-120
