Sunday, July 28, 2019

Seeking Forgiveness

Nelson Mandela sought forgiveness with one another
In today’s news, we sometimes hear of corruption: for example, funds sent for disaster relief, yet rebuilding seems mysteriously slow.

The word of God today takes us back to Abraham, who is talking/praying with God about the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah: cities symbolizing corruption. Abraham engages in a spirited conversation with God about justice: why should the innocent suffer? Abraham’s openness indicates his close relationship with God.

We know the end of those two corrupt cities. Some scholars say they were destroyed in a catastrophe, probably an earthquake. Anyway, the story challenges us to ask ourselves about our relationship with God. How do we pray? As a close friend? A distant relative? A stranger?

Paul, in his letter to the Christian community at Colossae, speaks of the new identity we have through baptism. We have become sons and daughters of God our Father, heirs to the kingdom of God, graced by God. Paul may be asking whether we live a life worthy of our calling.

In the Gospel of Luke, the disciples ask how Jesus talks to his heavenly Father. Jesus speaks to God like a trusting son or daughter with a parent, like a close friend. Jesus urges us to be persistent in prayer, to go on asking, seeking, knocking, even though our heavenly Father knows what we need. God likes to hear our voice.

There’s a pattern to prayer that Jesus taught us. Here’s a paraphrase:
Our Father, because we are family, heirs to God’s kingdom; Your name be honored and reverenced; May your kingdom of justice and peace and freedom permeate everyone; May your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Satisfy our basic needs. Forgive us for the things we do wrong as we forgive those who wrong us. And protect us from evils that jeopardize our relationship with you.
This is the pattern Jesus gave us.

When I think of modern examples of forgiveness, I recall Nelson Mandela. For nineteen years as a political prisoner in South Africa, he was forced to do hard labor, ate little and slept in a six by five cell. That he overcame hardship, that he saw the glory of God in his fellow prisoners and in his jailers was remarkable. When Mandela was released, he asked all South Africans to seek not vengeance but to seek reconciliation and forgiveness with one another.

We are all sinners, Pope Francis reminds us. The third chapter from the book of Genesis, the so-called fall from grace, is a sketch about how we sin: through ingratitude, self-absorption/narcissism, the arrogance that believes that we can get along without God.

It’s interesting that the people who really upset Jesus were not sinners but hypocrites, those who refused to see anything wrong with their own prejudices, those who had no sense of a need for repentance, those who were smug.

But Jesus offered forgiveness aplenty to those who admitted they needed it. May that forgiving hand change us. And may our active forgiveness change our fellow human beings.