Address 7: Forgiveness
by Sarah Coakley
Salisbury Cathedral, Good Friday, March 29, 2013
A reading from the gospel of Luke, ch. 22
‘And when they came to the place which is called the Skull, there they crucified him, and the criminals, one on the right and one on the left. And Jesus said, “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do”’ (Luke 22. 33-34)
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Some things are unforgivable – aren’t they? And aren’t there proper conditions for forgiveness – dues and punishments? State stability and the penal system seem founded on such an idea. Or is human responsibility after all a chimera, and we are all blundering around in the dark, not ‘knowing what we do’?
The sublime question of forgiveness in Jesus’s teaching, and again here on the cross, faces these issues squarely and in so doing leads us at a new level into the ‘why’ question about Jesus’s death, its human injustice and its deeper, divine implications. And how significant it is that here, even on the cross, Jesus asks his Father to do the forgiving. This presents a paradox. Could he not have just done it himself? Is not this after all the Jesus who insisted in his very own prayer, the Lord’s Prayer, that our human forgiveness of trespasses must go hand in hand with, indeed even precede, our request that God forgive us our own? And did not Jesus himself claim to forgive sins, to the outrage of the Pharisees?
Lest Jesus’s penchant for forgiveness be seen as in tension with his own Jewish heritage at its deepest, let us recall how profoundly the Joseph stories at the end of the book of Genesis approach the question of betrayal and forgiveness. When Joseph’s brothers finally come to ask forgiveness for their attempt to kill Joseph, years before, they ask more out of fear of retribution than of real remorse. But in the one of the most extraordinary moments in the Hebrew bible, and one that directly draws us into the heart of the cross, Joseph gently defers the question to God, even as he lets all resentment go: ‘Am I in the place of God?’ he says. ‘God intended all this for good’ (Genesis 50. 19-20). Forgiveness, we are reminded again here, is in the Hebrew scriptures, is something fearful, awesome, precisely because it is divine: ‘For there is forgiveness with thee’, says the Psalmist, ‘Therefore thou art to be feared’ (Psalm 130. 4). Even the verb form most characteristically used for divine forgiveness [salah], as here, is only used of God.
So when Jesus asks his Father to forgive his persecutors he is summoning a Jewish tradition of ecstatic referral of the problem of forgiveness to God. Even though he also demands of us, in his parables and his Prayer, that we do and must, humanly-speaking, forgive others, the implication seems to be that our capacity to forgive has already to be sustained by this divine act, a divine exchange between Father and Son of Man beyond the strict calculations of justice and book-keeping. Recall again how controversial it was in Jesus’s ministry when he himself claimed to forgive sins. But the point was that Jesus saw his own forgiveness, as the Son of Man, as an extension of the Father’s, and – from there – as one thereby opened up to humanity more generally: into this life of ecstatic love and generosity we too can step (Mark 2. 10).
In Jesus’s own act of forgiveness on the cross, then, we see this logic of gift as a sign of the eternal Father/Son relationship, and we glimpse how the cross may thus release us into a new capacity for forgiveness, even as we are willing to be caught up into the relationship.
In a remarkable little book called The Forgiveness of Sins, written in 1940 as the German bombed rained on London, the spiritual writer Charles Williams formed his own theory of divine ‘exchange’ to account for the possibility of forgiveness in the face of seeming impossibility. Only, he said, if we can step out of ourselves ecstatically into the place of our enemy and persecutor, and see ourselves from that perspective, can we come to a true appreciation of, and capacity for, the forgiveness of sins. But that act of ecstasis is itself an essentially divine act available only in the mystical body: in it I participate in the eternal exchange of love between Father and Son which breaks every hold on my resentment and bitterness.
‘Father, forgive them’: though this, too, defies meaning, we again begin to glimpse a meaning beyond meaning.
Silence
Prayer: Set us free, O God, from the bondage of our failure to forgive, we beseech you, and give us the liberty of that abundant life which you have manifested to us in your Son our Saviour Jesus Christ; who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
