Forgive and Be Merciful

 Father Pothin’s Reflection for the 4th after Trinity

The Gospel. St Luke vi. 36.

That may be your best gift on this father’s day weekend. Forgiveness is the only thing that is new. The world contains only one thing that is truly novel, forgiveness. Everything else is an old tape repeating itself endlessly over and over again. There is normally only one song that gets sung: betrayal-hurt-resentment-non-forgiveness. That pattern never changes. There is an unbroken chain of unforgiven resentment and anger stretching back to Adam and Eve. We are all part of that chain. Everyone is wounded and everyone wounds. Everyone sins and everyone is sinned against. Everyone needs to forgive and everyone needs to be forgiven. Betrayal is an archetypal structure within the human soul, just as sin is innate within the human condition. We, all of us, betray and sin. We betray ourselves. We betray our loved ones. We betray our communities. And we sin against our God. Everyone stands in need of forgiveness. But we are also, each one of us, betrayed and sinned against. We are betrayed by our loved ones, by our families, and, in a manner of speaking, even by our God. Hence, as badly as we need to be forgiven, we also need to forgive. We have hurt others and we have been hurt. We have sinned and we have been sinned against. And when we wake up to that we have a choice. Like Judas we can cleanse ourselves of this, figuratively speaking, by taking what we have gained by our sin (the thirty pieces of silver), throwing it back into the temple and walking away, purified but unforgiven, walking straight towards suicide. Or conversely, we can do like Peter after his great betrayal, weep bitterly and then return, humbled, compromised and scarred but forgiven, walking solidly into life. In forgiveness lies the difference between the choice for suicide and the choice for life.

But forgiveness is not easy. As the old adage says: To err is human, to forgive is divine.

–Fr Pothin