Lenten Reflection

I can do that.  I can be merciful, forgiving, and generous.  I can stop judging and condemning.  It’s very easy here in the chapel.  Yes, but out there in the world it is not very easy

Jesus is not talking today about avoiding sin; he is talking about how we react to the evil committed by others.

Perhaps one of us has been the victim of evil; perhaps a relative, a friend or a neighbor has suffered.  Surely, we have all too recently and too often learned in the news about serious acts of violence.

We can feel it deep inside where our emotions well up, and our blood literally begins to boil.  That’s when Jesus’ words are hard to live.

At times like these, we don’t feel any mercy at all. But Jesus counsels us to be merciful.  We can’t change the past, and neither can the perpetrator. Two years after being shot, Blessed John Paul the Second visited the shooter in his prison cell.  The meeting was secret, but John Paul reported “I spoke to him as a brother whom I have pardoned and who has my complete trust.”

Withholding judgment of a perpetrator is certainly difficult.  Jesus says “Stop” But even that is not enough.  We also need to withhold judgment of both those who support and those who assail perpetrators.  Jesus is telling us not to judge the family of a murderer or the fellow believers of a terrorist.  Neither should we judge demonstrators on either side of a controversial issue.

Condemnation leads to nowhere.  But stopping it can.   In 1978, after years of bloody warfare and bitter hostility, Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat met with Jimmy Carter to negotiate and to sign the Camp David Accords. Then they shook hands.  Since that day, 35 more years of turmoil have racked the Middle East, but the peace they forged between Israel and Egypt still holds.

It is easy to give lip service to forgiveness and to mouth hollow words, but real forgiveness is arduous.  After the fall of apartheid, Archbishop Desmond Tutu headed the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa.  He said, “Forgiving is not forgetting; it’s actually remembering--remembering and not using your right to hit back. It’s a second chance for a new beginning. And the remembering part is particularly important. Especially if you don’t want to repeat what happened.”

It seems strange that Jesus choose to include giving in his list. It doesn’t seem to fit with the others.  But he is not talking about giving that is easy but about giving that is difficult.  It is easy to give to our friends and relatives.  It is easy to give to charities and disaster relief.  Elsewhere he talks about how much more the widow who gives her last penny has done than the rich man who gives a fortune. 

In today’s context he is talking about giving to our enemy.  During the American Revolution, British Admiral Lord Howe met a delegation from the Second Continental Congress in an attempt to negotiate peace.  Howe carried two lists.  The longer list contained the names of those he had the authority to pardon.  The second list contained the name of John Adams, the most outspoken advocate of independence; Adams was to be hung on the spot.

 A few years earlier, after the Boston Massacre, the British soldiers who were charged could not find a defense attorney because every lawyer in Massachusetts thought that taking the job would end his career.  John Adams took the case, had six of them acquitted of all charges, and the other two acquitted of murder, although found guilty of manslaughter.  Adams gift to his enemies did not end his career.  That year he was elected to the colonial legislature, later he was sent to both Continental Congresses, negotiated the Treaty of Paris, was first American ambassador to Great Britain, the first Vice President of the United States, and our second President.   “A good measure packed together, shaken down, and overflowing.”  Jesus words are difficult.  They are not impossible.  - Dr. Jim Carpenter