Fourth Sunday of Lent: Radical Forgiveness

Lectionary Readings:

• Joshua 5: 9-12. The feast of Passover is celebrated on the plains of Jericho. The Israelites eat the produce of the Promised Land, and the manna ceases.
• 2 Corinthians 5: 17-21. “The old order has passed away; now all is new.” Christ who never sinned became “sin” that we might become the very holiness of God.
• Luke 15: 1-3, 11-32. The parable of the prodigal son, the story of a father’s forgiveness and a brother’s anger.

Thoughts for your consideration: By John Gonzalez

The theme with the lectionary readings for this week is reconciliation. Immediately after reading these Scripture passages I began to reflect on the book “The Shack” by William Young. As I was reading this book I recalled how I had to pause once I became aware of the crime that became the central issue for the main character. Mack (the main character) is a father who experiences the kidnapping and violent murder of his youngest daughter. As a father of a liitle girl myself I considered this experience to be unforgivable. The rest of the book was a mystical journey for Mack to forgive the unforgivable. This was a powerful narrative and to be sure I was moved and challenged by the journey that Mack had with the Holy Trinity. But could I take this same journey with God? I would like to hope so, but in my heart I remain very much challenged with regards to this dimension of reconciliation.

In the first reading we are told about how God reconciles with the Israelites who have entered the promise land in a place called “Gilgal”. In the second reading Paul tells us that “we are ambassadors for Christ” whose mission “was reconciling the world to Himself.” The parable of the prodigal son is a challenging portrayal of paternal forgiveness.  We Christians know that we are called to forgive and to promote reconciliation with each other. Yet while we can accept this dimension of our Christian calling in theory, there comes a point where we ask the question that Peter poses to Jesus, “How often must I forgive my brother?”

Christian eschatology, the ultimate establishment of the Kingdom of God in our midst, is theologically understood in the “already but not yet” formula. Jesus declared that through him the Kingdom of God is already present, but with his ascension we also understand that the culmination of the Kingdom of God will happen sometime in the future. In Romans 8 Paul asserts that “all creation is groaning in labor pains even until now” and in this week’s second reading Paul also reminds us that “whoever is in Christ is a new creation.” Christian theology teaches us that in the Divine timeline the Kingdom of God began with Christ and we continue living in this transitional phase until the moment that the Kingdom of God is fully established in our midst, a moment we also call the second coming of Christ. What Paul is reminding us in the second reading is that during this transitional phase we are called to be ambassadors in our society for the values and principles of the Kingdom of God. An essential dimension of this is our obligation to end the social cycle of violence by promoting reconciliation in our world.

We are imperfect ambassadors in this transitional phase. Radical forgiveness and reconciliation is a Christian value that will challenge us in the same way that it challenged the older brother in the parable of the prodigal son. But what is just as important as the fact the father forgave his youngest son is that the father also goes out to the field to consult and journey with the older son to have him understand this challenging level of reconciliation. “The Shack” demonstrates this same point at a deeper and more intimate level when Mack journeys with each member of Holy Trinity.

In our world and in our society there will be events and incidence that will challenge our ability to forgive members of the human family that hurt us or our society. Our Christian commitment is to allow ourselves to be challenged and try in whatever capacity to at least comprehend our call to promote reconciliation between God and all humanity. There will be times that we fail and at the moment maybe we simply cannot forgive and instead we go out to the field in anger, but we are called to allow ourselves to be open to God during these challenging moments.

Now some may say, “well that is all fine and well in a parable or in a fictional book but where is this value reflected in real life?” I recall asking that very same question as I finished reading “the Shack”. That following week a gunman shot all the girls at an Amish school in Pennsylvania. To my absolute amazement the Amish community, in an act of social reconciliation, forgave the gunman.