24th Sunday Year A - Homily 1

Homily 1 - 2011

Today’s parable is a classic parable.  It raises so many questions, so many “yes, buts”, that it leaves unanswered: about forgiveness, about God.  Is God really the infinitely violent, vindictive one – exempt from Jesus’ target of the 77-times – who angrily hands sinners over to the torturers (or their eternal equivalent)?  Parables are meant to get us thinking.  They don’t give clear answers or impose moral messages.  They are not a holy version of Aesop’s fables.  The way that each of us tries to make sense of today’s parable will reflect our own level of maturity – but, hopefully, whatever that level, what we make of it won’t totally satisfy us but will leave us restless, and invite us to look yet more deeply, more openly.

Forgiveness is not only difficult.  It can be disturbing, confusing and threatening.  Yet the image that concludes today’s parable: handed over to the torturers is not a bad description, even if highly poetical, of how it feels when we choose not to forgive but to harbour our resentments and allow our bitterness to torture us.  It’s not a bad description either of life in a world where people generally do not forgive – life in our world as we know it (and have got too used to): locally, nationally, and, especially, internationally [as the ongoing events since 9/11 too clearly illustrate].

Jesus emphasised forgiveness.  Interestingly, he rarely, if ever, explicitly insisted on the need to say sorry.  (Can you think of any time when he did?)  Yet, though he emphasised the need for us to forgive (if we ever wish to experience true inner peace) – he didn’t start with our forgiving.  Something else is necessary first.  Indeed, the Gospel showed Jesus beginning his whole mission with the message: The Kingdom of heaven is close at hand …  and it’s Good News … but only if you believe it.

He insisted that the initiative is God’s.  That’s where it all starts.  God has come near; and the God who has come near is the God who causes his sun to rise on bad as well as good, his rain to fall on honest and dishonest alike – a God who is, apparently, in no way influenced by what we are like: bad or good, honest or dishonest… but who simply loves us all – without conditions; because God can’t help it! That’s the way God is.

The problem is that we won’t believe it – and the more upright we are, the more reluctant we are to believe it.  (Work that one out.)  We need to get in touch with God’s love – which is the same as we need to get in touch with God’s forgiveness and allow ourselves to be overwhelmed by it.  That is where it all starts – God’s unconditional love for us is where the possibility, the energy and the desire for us in turn to love and to forgive come from.  Until we depth God’s love and forgiveness for us, and are caught up in the sheer wonder of it, I don’t think we can love or forgive others truly.  We just don’t have the wherewithal.

Hurts can go deep.  To be hurt, betrayed, or abused [emotionally, physically or sexually], particularly by someone loved, or trusted, or even just respected, can wound a person’s deepest inner core.  Particularly if they were abused when they were young, before they ever had a strong sense of their identity and radical worth, that deepest inner core can even dry up.  That is why pedophilia is so frighteningly destructive.  To expect people to forgive is grossly unfair.  God’s love can set them free – free enough.  It can be truly healing, truly creative.  But God’s love can also be elusive: God hasn’t got skin (as a little boy once lamented!).  The most that others can do is to try to embody, to enflesh God’s love through their own love, their profound respect, and patience… and total absence of expectations.

We are all “works in progress”.  Sometimes we can be wounded healers.  Sometimes God’s creative power can work through us.  That, for me, is Good News.