Homily for September 12,
2004 Year
C - Cycle II 24th Sunday in Ordinary
Time By Dcn. Ray Alcouffe Topic:
Forgiveness + + +
Gospel
Reading:
Luke 15:32 ". . . We
must
celebrate and rejoice because he was lost and has been found."
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Today,
St. Paul tells us "Christ Jesus
came into the world to save sinners." In the Gospel, we hear from Jesus
himself, who gives us a trilogy of parables whose main theme is: Come,
celebrate with me and rejoice because what was lost has been found. In
other words, a sinner has been saved and it is cause not for
condemnation but for rejoicing. Well now, we are all in that
distinguished company of what we call sinners and we have all accepted
Jesus Christ. Thus, we are saved - but - have we all had the
experience of being lost and now are found? There are some who have had
that experience and can relate very well to these parables. Does this
apply to the rest of us? Do we have a reason to rejoice? IT DOES AND WE
DO.
Jesus is giving us these parables not to congratulate the big sinners
for their great conversion but as a warning and wake up call to all of
us sinners. This is articulated as a minor theme. We hear
at the beginning, "But the Pharisees and Scribes began to complain
saying, "This man welcomes sinners and eats with them." This theme is
picked up by the older son, "He became angry and said, 'Look, all these
years I served you and not once did I disobey your orders; yet you
never gave me even a young goat to feast on with my friends.'" In
a nutshell, the minor theme is that resentment overwhelms our lives
even in the presence of the good that is from God and we cannot then
join in the celebration and rejoice.
Thus, it seems that the key for us to live joyful lives, is in how we
handle our resentments. Resentment is defined as a feeling of
displeasure or indignation that comes from a sense of being injured or
offended. Resentments come in all shapes and strengths, from
minor irritations to deep pain and from the deliberate acts of malice
against us. Harboring resentments or holding grudges work their
destructiveness on us and on others. We have been witnesses to
their destruction in the events of three years ago today and in the
tragedies from suicide bombers at that Russian school two weeks ago.
Harboring resentments also work their destructiveness on our body, soul
and spirit. Scholarly psychological research has shown that
the harmful physical effects are cardiovascular damage and pulmonary
disorders. The psychological effects are anxiety and obsessions.
There are profound spiritual effects because harboring resentments eats
away at inner peace and kills the joy of life. But we all still
do it. We seem to enjoy our resentments without realizing it. It
is said, though, that entertaining resentments is like taking poison
and then waiting for the other guy to die.
As the definition says, resentments come from two sources - a sense of
being offended and a sense of being injured. The sense of being
offended is an expression of our powerlessness in the face of certain
events. A partial list includes: facing old age; coping with bad
or declining health; the incompetence of government; taxes; a spouses
irritating habits; grown children who reject our values; mismanagement
in the work place. The list goes on but how do we cope with
it? The short answer is that you have to let go of the
resentment. One-way of doing that is to apply the wisdom of the
first three steps of the12 step program of AA: (1) admit that I am
powerless to lose my resentments, (2) there is one who can, (3) I ask
the Lord to do just that.
Resentments that come from a sense of being injured require a proactive
response - it goes by the name of FORGIVENESS. In the book, "The Art of Forgiving" by
Lewis Smedes, we read, "We forgive when someone does something that
hurts us and that we can blame them for. Forgiveness is a journey
- The deeper the wound, the longer the journey." Forgiveness is
not about forgiving the person, it is about forgiving their actions
that hurt us.
Joan and I have had this experience together when our son Mike was
critically injured in a car wreck in Las Cruces 21 years ago this
month. As he was laying in the ICU, fighting for his recovery,
Joan was at his side. I had just left with our other four kids so that
they could get back to school. The father of the boy that was driving
the other vehicle called Joan out of the ICU. He asked how Mike
was doing and then asked Joan what we were going to do about the damage
to his vehicle (a Bronco with a dent in the front bumper). This
is the man who had pulled his insurance coverage off his vehicle when
his son turned 18 and let the boy drive it without insurance.
Joan got livid. When she told me about, I felt this seething anger grow
in me. Even now, after all this time, I can feel that anger as I
remember the hurt that was inflicted on Joan. But we have
forgiven the insensitivity of that father. We haven't seen or
heard from him since but his actions are forgiven - not for his sake
but for ours. For our physical, psychological and spiritual
health, we had to let go of our resentment by forgiving.
Our hurt is nothing like the hurt and pain I imagine of those caught in
the concentration camps of the Holocaust. Yet, even there, the spirit
of forgiveness shines forth when an unknown woman in the Ravensbruck
Concentration Camp wrote this prayer and pinned it to the dead body of
a little girl there. "Oh Lord, remember not only the men and women of
good will but also those of ill will. But do not remember all the
sufferings they have inflicted on us. Remember rather the fruits
we have bought, thanks to our suffering: our comradeship, our loyalty,
our humility, our courage, our generosity; the greatness of heart,
which has grown out of all this. And when they come to judgment,
let all the fruits which we have borne be their forgiveness."
I agree with Smedes when he says, "Forgiving is the only way to heal
the wounds of a past we cannot change and cannot forget.
Forgiving changes a bitter memory into a grateful memory. It is
the height of self-respect to forgive."
When we are in the far country of harboring our resentments, we are
lost. When we make the decision to release ourselves from
resentment, either through forgiveness or offering them to God to take
away, we become found. To the degree we become found, that is,
become a part of God's life, joy comes into our lives and we once again
join in the major theme of today's Gospel and can celebrate and
rejoice.