THE FIFTH PETITION

A couple of posts ago, I said that I’d write something about forgiveness. One of my reasons for doing so is that I’ve been rereading Joseph Ratzinger’s (Benedict XVI’s) Jesus of Nazareth, one of the most gloriously intelligent books on Christianity I have seen for a long time. And in his section on the Lord’s Prayer, his chapter on the Fifth Petition (“Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive them that trespass against us”) is a model of perceptive and noble insight. I will try to repeat here what he says, partly in quotation, partly in précis, because it is very much worth pondering.

            First, there is trespass – we all know that. ‘How to overcome guilt is a central question for every human life’. What does one do about offence? The first human reaction is to retaliate. As the old Marines’ saying has it, ‘Yea, I shall walk through the valley of death and fear no evil, because I am the meanest son of a bitch in the valley.’ In real life, of course, retaliation has no logical end and becomes vendetta. But ‘with this petition, the Lord is telling us that guilt can be overcome only by forgiveness, not by retaliation.’

           And it is God, not we, who has taken the initiative. ‘We should keep in mind that God himself – knowing that we human beings stood against him, unreconciled – stepped out of his divinity in order to come toward us, to reconcile us.’ He washed his disciples’ feet; he told the story of the unforgiving servant (Matthew 18:25-35).

            So what do we do? Here I have to quote at slightly greater length, because the argument is dense and pertinent. First, if we want to get into this properly, we have to ask ourselves, ‘What is forgiveness, really? What happens when forgiveness takes place?

Guilt is a reality, an objective force; it has caused destruction that must be repaired. For this reason, forgiveness must be more that a matter of ignoring, or merely trying to forget. Guilt must me worked through, healed, and thus overcome.’

            (Notice that he treats ‘guilt’ not as a feeling, but as a fact. Not ‘I feel guilty’ but ‘I am guilty.’ That is already a biggish step, in a lot of situations.)

            ‘Forgiveness exacts a price – first of all from the person who forgives. He must overcome within himself the evil done to him; he must, as it were, burn it interiorly and in so doing renew himself.’ (My emphasis.) This I find extraordinary in its profound perception. The sentence is worth copying out and meditating on.

            ‘As a result, he also involves the other, the trespasser, in this process of transformation, of inner purification, and both parties, suffering all the way through and overcoming evil, are made new.’

            Sounds wonderful, we say. But does it work in real life? Damned hard. Offence is offence; evil is evil. (It may not help that ‘bad’ and ‘wicked’ have become compliments . . .) We are not good at confronting evil, because when we do we discover how powerful it is. It is bigger than us: as Reinhold Schneider says, ‘it lives in a thousand forms; it occupies the pinnacles of power . . .it bubbles up from the abyss.’ And then he says (to God): ‘Love has just one form – your Son.’

            This is where one the one hand the solution lies, but where on the other hand it gets difficult. ‘The idea that God allowed the forgiveness of guilt, the healing of man from within, to cost him the death of his Son has come to seem quite alien to us today.’ For two reasons: one is that, even while we take the horrors of history as proof that God can’t exist, we trivialize evil: we don’t see the horrors as emanations of something. (‘Shit happens.’) The other reason is that we tend to see the human being as being solely an individual, ‘ensconced in himself alone’. We find it hard to think of all human beings as deeply interwoven, and as all in turn being encompassed by ‘the One – the Incarnate Son.’

            Perhaps, says JR, an idea of John Henry Newman’s (the Victorian Anglican who became a Catholic and a Cardinal) my suffice. ‘Newman once said that while God could create the whole world [read: universe] out of nothing with just one word, he could overcome men’s guilt and suffering only by bringing himself into play, by becoming in his Son a sufferer who carried this burden and overcame it through his self-surrender.’

As such, we have a model we can follow: however hard it is, we aren’t pathless. ‘The overcoming of guilt has a price. We must put our heart – or better, our whole existence – on the line. And even this act is insufficient: it can become effective only through communion with the One who bore the burdens of us all . . . who allowed forgiveness to cost him descent into the hardship of human existence and death on the Cross.’ We need first to give thanks for that, ‘and then, with him, to work through and suffer through evil by means of love.’ We are not terribly good at this, and we keep falling down; but we are held within the power his His love, which means that our puny attempts ‘can still become a power of healing.’

In all honesty, I’ve never read such a profound and powerful analysis of what it means to forgive – not just the little things, the friend who forgot my birthday or the teacher who gave me an unfair mark, but the big things: they know what they are. To forgive and to be forgiven: it means, inevitably, a relationship, a coming together in a challenge. Without prayer, it’s all but impossible; with prayer, it’s hard, but we are not alone. The Force is with us.   

        

Thanks to Rick McNary at rickmcnary.me for the image.