Good Friday 2010 |
St James’, Peace River |
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About fifteen years ago I watched a TV documentary about forgiveness. Well of course they didn’t say it was about forgiveness, that would be a little too religious for a public broadcaster. It was about a young man who did something terrible. He and his friends had been out drinking just around the time of their high school graduation. He got in the car and was driving them home, but there was a crash. He escaped uninjured. But his best friend, who was sitting in the passenger seat, died. The story wasn’t about the crash, because that kind of thing happens way too often to be news. The story was about what happened afterward. And it was about the parents of the boy who died. Their response was what turned a terrible mistake into something different. They decided not to hate the boy who was responsible. He had spent so much time in their house; he had been their son’s best friend; he was practically a member of their family. They decided instead to forgive him. Not just to say, forget it, or it’s OK, now scram. They decided to welcome him back into their lives. They continued to spend time with him. They even went with him to court when he had to face charges arising from the accident: not to give a victim impact statement, but to support him. And to ask the judge to consider a sentencing plan. They wanted to see this young man commit his time over the next few years to telling his story – talking to school audiences about what he did, what he felt about it, and what it meant to survive. Helping other kids lean to make different choices. And they would be there too, telling their side of the story, and still supporting him. And that’s what happened. I’m telling you about this because what I heard in it was a story about forgiveness. The kind of forgiveness that we are talking about today, when we remember and bear witness to Jesus’ death by crucifixion. People sometimes choose to describe Good Friday in terms of a price that had to be paid, as a picture of love that costs. But if we use words like that, we need to have something in mind that will help us understand what they mean. And the story of parents who forgave a young man who killed their son – for me, that’s the clearest human picture I’ve ever seen of love that costs. When human beings executed the son of God, that should have been the end. There should have been such a wave of divine grief and anger as to sweep away the whole world that could do such a thing. God chose differently. God chose to forgive. A costly choice, because it didn’t just mean holding back on a one-time divine vengeance. It meant living with us for the rest of time. Not just the people who did the deed back in 1st century Palestine, but all of us who continue to bear the same guilt. Let’s make no mistake about that. We weren’t there two millennia ago, we haven’t nailed anyone to a cross. But when I say we bear the same guilt, I don’t just mean that in some abstract sense, Jesus died for all our sins. I mean that by the time I finish this sentence, someone somewhere will have died from violence, starvation or disease, because we have decided not to do anything about it. God is continually facing the stark reality of what we bear responsibility for, and is continually choosing to look us in the face, with sorrow, forgiveness, and love. Do we think that the cost of that love is paid by God alone? In one sense, of course, yes. No one else could decide to commit God to the course of loving human beings who are capable of such terrible acts. It was God’s son who died; no one else can deal with it. And the offer of God’s love and forgiveness to us is truly free – there are no stipulations, no preconditions we must meet before God will look us in the eye again. Does that mean that we don’t pay a price for God’s love? If we think that, then we miss what love and forgiveness are really about. In the TV documentary I mentioned, it was clear that the young man was sharing the burden of costly love. He didn’t have to earn the right to be loved by his friend’s parents. But he did have to do something about it, if he wanted to be able to live with himself. He also had to choose – to spend time with them, to work with them, to look them in the eye as they looked at him. Not an easy choice, when it meant being reminded on a daily basis of what he had done, what he had lost, what hurt he had inflicted on others. Thanks to the wisdom and grace of the parents who made that choice available to him, he took it. The alternative would have been a descent into dishonesty, denial, and who knows what kind of soul-killing behaviours which he could have adopted to pretend to himself that he had left the consequences of his actions behind him. Instead, he accepted forgiveness – and that sounds too simple. It was no more simple than the parents’ decision to forgive, and it took just as much time and just as much effort to play out. Because forgiving and being forgiven are, after all, two sides of the same coin. Being forgiven doesn’t mean being set free, as though that’s all there is to it. It means being given the strength and the grace and the honesty to see the real truth about what you’ve done and why you did it; it means being given the empathy and compassion to feel the hurt you’ve inflicted; it means being given the love which creates a new life for you to live into. And when you’ve done all that, you’ve been set free, but by that point you probably don’t care very much about what free means any more, because you’ve already made the choices you were set free to make. When we look at Jesus today, we know we are being offered the same deal. God forgives us. Not just for Jesus’ death. For everything. For all that we’ve done, and all that we’ve failed to do, all that hurts and all that falls short of the truth and beauty of who we were created to be. Jesus’ own willingness to suffer and die only hints at the price God has paid and continues to pay to make us that offer. But we are still being asked, will you accept? Are you willing to take on the consequences of being forgiven? The question is not, are you able to pay that price – no one is, not by themselves at least, but that’s not the issue: we know that God will be with us to work through every moment of that awful weight of being forgiven, because that’s what the promise of forgiveness means. The question is, will you choose to walk the path that God has opened to you – the path of painful honesty and costly sympathy; the path of dying to your self-centredness and partnering instead with God; the path of transformation which opens up a new life. The path to the cross. * |
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