'Forgive them, for they know not what they do.' Luke 23.34
[1][1]The first word given to us today is of forgiveness. Forgiveness comes before the crucifixion, before the insults and the death. Forgiveness is always first. Maybe we could not cope with listening to the passion of Christ if we did not begin with forgiveness. Before we ever sin, we are forgiven. We do not have to earn it. We do not even have to be sorry. Forgiveness is there, waiting for us.
This sounds very beautiful, but might it not also be a little patronizing? It may seem to make our acts unimportant. Some friends of mine invited me to go and have a rest with them a few weeks ago. They have charming young twins, and a theory that these twins must be allowed to do whatever they want. They could smash things, shout and scream, and change their minds every two minutes. I returned home having enjoyed myself enormously but giving thanks for celibacy. The theory was that they would grow up with a deep feeling of security, knowing that they would be loved whatever they did. I wondered. Might they not also come to think that their actions were unimportant? If you know that you are going to be forgiven whatever you do, then why bother to try to be good? 'Dear old Timothy; he has just murdered another of the brethren. It is so tedious, but the dear Lord will forgive him so it does not matter.'
Forgiveness comes first. That is the scandal of the gospel. But it does not mean that God does not take seriously what we do. God does not forget that we crucified his Son. We do not put it out of our minds. Indeed on Good Friday we gather to listen to the passion and death of Christ, and to remember that humanity rejected, humiliated and murdered the Son of God. It is because of forgiveness that we can dare to remember that most terrible deed.
Forgiveness is not God forgetting Good Friday. It is the Father raising the Son on Easter Sunday. If forgiveness were forgetting then God would have to suffer the most acute amnesia, but it is God's unimaginable creativity, which takes what we have done and makes it fruitful. The medieval image of God's forgiveness was the flowering of the cross. The cross is the ugly sign of torture. It is the symbol of humanity's ability to reject love and to do what is utterly sterile. But the artists of the Middle Ages showed this cross flowering on Easter Sunday, as in the apse of San Clemente in Rome, which illustrates the third of Jesus' last words. The dead wood put out tendrils and flowers. Forgiveness makes the dead live and the ugly beautiful.
Forgiveness means that the cross is our new tree of life from which we are invited to eat. In the fourth century, St John Chrysostom wrote of the cross:
The Tree is my eternal salvation. It is my nourishment and my banquet. Amidst its roots, I cast my own roots deep. Beneath its boughs I grow. Flying from the burning heart, I have set up my tent in its shadow and have found there a resting place, fresh with dew. I flower with its flowers. Its fruits bring perfect joy, fruits which have been preserved for me since time began, fruits which now I freely eat. This tree is food, sweet food, for my hunger and a fountain for my thirst; it is clothing for my nakedness; its leaves are the breath of life. Ifl fear God, this is my protection; if I stumble this is my staff; this is the prize for which I fight, the reward of my victory. This is my straight and narrow path; this is Jacob's ladder, where angels go up and down, and where the Lord himself stands at the top.'
Forgiveness means that we dare to face what we have done. We dare to remember all of our lives, with the failures and defeats, with our cruelties and lack of love. We dare to remember all the times that we have been mean and ungenerous, the ugliness of our deeds. We dare to remember not so as to feel awful, but so as to open our lives to this creative transformation. It does not leave us as we are, as if nothing we did ever mattered. If we step into that forgiveness, then it will change and transform us. Whatever is sterile and barren will bear fruit. All that is pointless will find meaning. At the end of Lord of the Rings Sam scatters around the barren shire the magical fertilizer that the elves have given him, and the next spring every tree blossoms. That is an image of forgiveness.
Jesus asks for forgiveness not just for what they do to him. He is not crucified alone. There are two people on either side. They stand for all the millions of people throughout history whom we have crucified. Think of the Holocaust with which so many Christians were either complicit or else failed to resist. Pope John XXIII prayed:
We realize that the mark of Cain stands on our foreheads. Across the centuries our brother Abel has lain in blood which we drew or shed tears we caused forgetting Thy love. Forgive us for the curse we falsely attached to their name as Jews. Forgive us for crucifying Thee a second time in their flesh. For we knew not what we did.
Who are the people whom we crucify now, with our economic imperialism that is producing so much poverty? Who are we crucifying through our violence and war? Whom do we wound even within our own homes? Because we know that forgiveness comes first, then we can dare to open our eyes.
A Cross by Michael Finn
This is a cross that was made by a friend of mine, Michael Finn, who is also the father of a friend and brother of mine in St Dominic, Richard. Michael is well known for his abstract paintings but in the last twenty years of his life he created some extraordinarily powerful crucifixes. These were often made with the driftwood that he and his wife Cely found when they walked on the beaches near their home in Cornwall.[1] Michael died on Palm Sunday 2002, the day that Jesus enters Jerusalem to face his own death.
If forgiveness is God's creativity breaking in and transforming us, our ugliness and sterility, then maybe we need artists like Michael to express it best. Beauty is not decorative but makes visible the working of grace in our lives. Simone Weil said that it was sacramental of God's smile. Art can reveal how even that supremely ugly object which is the cross can come to be seen as beautiful. In The Dream of the Rood it is described as:
A wondrous Tree towering in the air, Most shining of crosses compassed with light. Brightly that beacon was gilded with gold; Jewels adorned it fair at the foot, five on the should-beam blazing in splendour.[1]
It is said that Michelangelo found an ugly piece of marble which another artist had been trying to carve but had failed and had ruined the stone. Michelangelo carved out of it his famous David. This is what God's forgiveness does in a way that is beyond our understanding. Forgiveness means that our sins can find their place in our path to God. No failure need be a dead end. And so Augustine spoke of Adam and Eve's sin as a felix culpa, a happy fault, because it led to the coming of Christ. When we sin, we commit acts which are fruitless and absurd, and which subvert the meaning of our lives. Forgiveness means that a story can be told which goes somewhere, to happiness.
In the eighteenth century there was a famous Japanese artist called Hokusai. He painted a vase with a superb view of the holy mountain, Fuji Yama. Then one day someone dropped the vase! Slowly he glued the pieces back together. But to acknowledge what had happened to this vase, its broken history, he lined each join with a thread of gold. The vase was more beautiful than ever before.