Lent Week Five

When Jesus had entered Capernaum, a centurion came to him, asking for help. “Lord,” he said, “my servant lies at home paralyzed, suffering terribly.” Jesus said to him, “Shall I come and heal him?” The centurion replied, “Lord, I do not deserve to have you come under my roof. But just say the word, and my servant will be healed. For I myself am a man under authority, with soldiers under me. I tell this one, ‘Go,’ and he goes; and that one, ‘Come,’ and he comes. I say to my servant, ‘Do this,’ and he does it.”

When Jesus heard this, he was amazed and said to those following him, “Truly I tell you, I have not found anyone in Israel with such great faith. I say to you that many will come from the east and the west, and will take their places at the feast with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven. But the subjects of the kingdom will be thrown outside, into the darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.” Then Jesus said to the centurion, “Go! Let it be done just as you believed it would.” And his servant was healed at that moment.

Matthew 8:5-13

‘If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them! But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?’ (Alexander Solzhenitsyn).

In my experience, the strongest motivation for forgiveness is always the sense of having received forgiveness ourselves, or – if we do not have that – an awareness that, like everyone else in the human race, we are imperfect and have done things we need to be forgiven for. Jared, an African-American student from Boston, says that was definitely the case with him:

I was six year old when I awoke to the reality of racism: from the sheltered environment of my home, I was pushed out into the world – a local primary school just down the road from our house. I went there for only a month before city law mandated that I be bussed across town to another school. My parents were not happy with this; they wanted me to go to a school where I was known and loved. They owned a farm out in the country, and so we moved there.

My father, a veteran of the civil rights movement. taught me love and respect for everyone – white or black. They tried to teach me not to see everything in life along racial line. All the same, I was the only black child in my new school, and many of the other children had obviously been taught to hate. Children can be brutal about each other’s differences. They may begin with an innocent question – ‘Why is your skin brown?’ – but then they start to laugh at you and mock you, because somewhere along the line they have been taught that if you’re different (not ‘normal’), there is something wrong with you.

I was a fish out of water, and these kids didn’t make it easy for me. I’ll never forget one especially painful incident: I introduced one of my white friends to another white kid on the bus one day, and from then on they always sat together but left me out. Shawn symbolised everything that we knew about whites and their history: the humiliation of our people, lynchings, the mobs, and the slave trade. We took out all our bitterness and anger on him. I was never able to apologise to Shawn. By the time I saw my racism for what it was, we had parted ways. But I did ask God to forgive me for the harm I caused Shawn, and I resolve to forgive the guys who didn’t have a heart for me when I was the only black kid in their midst.

Johann Christoph Arnold, Why Forgive?, Plough Publishing House, 2008, 17-18.

When we carry resentments and grudges, what is happening? What is in it for us? What are the consequences? Why is it so difficult to apologise?