HOMILY for the 24th Sunday of Ordinary Time [A], September 17th., 2017

“Forgive your brother from your heart”

Last week included another mournful anniversary of the events of 9/11 in America in 2001, the fateful 11th. of September. But we can see echoes of this terrible day by looking back in history.

The year 1198. The Pope, Innocent III, declares the Fourth Crusade against “the infidel”, to reach Jerusalem by way of Egypt. This enterprise requires a large army and a large navy. The navy is assembled courtesy of the mighty city of Venice, the army takes rather longer.

While waiting, the Venetian navy has some practise by attacking a rival city controlled by the King of Hungary – who is a Christian. The Venetians are excommunicated, but re-communicated in time for the crusade to set out. But the Venetians have different ideas from the Pope. They have a profitable trade agreement with Egypt; why attack them? Why not attack their great rival in trade, Constantinople or Byzantium, despite the fact that Constantinople is one of the greatest centres of Christianity – albeit separated from Rome.

And after several false starts this is what duly happened, on April 12th., 1204. The Crusaders stormed Constantinople, sacked the city, killed thousands, looted monasteries and convents. The holy church of Santa Sophia was ransacked. There was an incalculable loss of art treasures, many of them taken back to Venice to adorn churches there. A catastrophe.

But why mention an event of history 813 years ago?

Because it has never been forgiven. The most determined of Orthodox Christians – and we have our equivalents – will not forgive the West for what they did. Go to holy Mount Athos in Greece and announce you are a Catholic and – I exaggerate slightly – the monks will give you the evil eye. It is as though we did the deed ourselves.

It is like Cromwell’s atrocities at Drogheda or the Battle of the Boyne for Irish Catholics; it is something that cannot be forgiven.

We are told we remember in order not to repeat. As the Pharisees said to Jesus about the murder of the prophets: “We would not have done this if we had lived in our fathers’ times”. But we should not remember in order to remain fixed and hard-hearted.

There is a fashion now for forgiving and apologising on behalf of others who are no longer around to do it themselves: the Holocaust, the slave trade. But really this is impossible. We can regret, but that is different. Those who did these things and those who suffered are dead. Proper forgiveness can only be exchanged between the living.

Why is forgiveness important? Because otherwise we are trapped in our past. We are called to be aware of the present (this is something which Buddhists, who have such a strong awareness of the present moment, sometimes feel Christians lack). If we really focus on the person as they are now, we are not affected by the past. Forgiveness then allows the past to melt away.

When the Twin Towers in New York were brought down, it was said that the world of order had been destroyed by the world of chaos. The greatest democracy on earth, the greatest economic power, torn apart. But – if I may say so – chaos is not always bad. In fact, forgiveness belongs to the realm of ‘chaos’. It breaks a cycle, destroys a pattern, confounds expectations. Jesus, as St. Paul puts it, “tore up” the sentence against the whole human race and nailed it to his cross. All that forgiveness in the image of a few ripped-up pieces of paper.

One of the saddest things to say about somebody is that they are unforgiving. As time goes by, and we move towards old age and death, by being unforgiving we are pushed further and further backwards, crushed by an ever-heavier burden of the past. Think of the lesson of Constantinople.

If we compile a list of people we find hard to forgive – and I imagine we can all do that – we must be honest and include ourselves too. We often find it very difficult to live with ourselves in this present moment of time which is God’s gift. One of the things priests most often hear in the confessional is: “Father, I just can’t forgive [or I can’t forgive myself]. I know it’s wrong and I know it’s a sin, but I just can’t”. Well, certainly nobody said it was easy. In the case of the forgiveness which Jesus gave, it required him to mount the Cross.

Many languages like our own link the ideas of “forgive” and “give” – French pardoner, donner, German vergeben, geben, and so on. Those who cannot forgive cannot give. They cling on to their own self, their own well-being, their own accumulated tradition.

This year is the 500th. anniversary of what is seen as the beginning of the Christian Reformation. Pope Francis seems particularly keen to make the most of this occasion to to promote reconciliation. In fact some of his critics say that he tends to downplay or ignore the negative features of Martin Luther, the former Catholic friar.

One thinks back to those bad old days when the Church sold indulgences in order to build St. Peter’s, the break with Rome, and the interminable arguments about justification which followed. Were we made righteous – forgiven - by God’s gift, or by our own efforts? However in 1999, in an amazing breakthrough, the Lutheran and Catholic churches signed a joint declaration on this very theme (thereby ending the Reformation, one might say): justification is entirely a free gift from God, to which we appropriately respond with our behaviour, our actions, our deeds. A free gift. Forgive, give.

But joint declaration or no joint declaration, there is still a lot of arguing about the ‘small print’.

There is a modern novel, “Each Man in his Darkness”, by Julien Green, in which one character shoots his dearest friend, for no apparent reason whatsoever. But he shoots him because, before he dies, he wants to hear him whisper the words: “I forgive you”, which would be the clearest proof that his friend truly loved him.

We are certainly not called to do that, but it reminds us that forgiveness is indeed the greatest proof of love, and so, as Jesus says today, it cannot be quantified, cannot literally be multiplied (or divided) by seven or ten or eleven, cannot be limited.

As a great German writer † has said: “How could we live at all, if we did not grant forgiveness every night to ourselves, and to everyone else?”

† Goethe