There are three things worth noticing about forgiveness. First, of all the petitions of the Lord’s Prayer, only the prayer to forgive is repeated and explained: “For if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you; but if you do not forgive others, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses” (Matthew 6.14).
Second, forgiveness gets a whole parable devoted to it at the end of Matthew 18 (the king settling accounts with his slaves).
Third, of all the topics on which I have preached over the years, the one which has consistently caused the strongest reaction is forgiveness. Every time I have referred in a sermon to the Christian duty to forgive, someone has come up to me after the service and said: “I felt that sermon was speaking to me.”
Clearly, there is a good reason why forgiveness is at the heart of Jesus’s teaching. He knew, in his wisdom, how many of us carry around secret burdens of resentment, anger, hostility, and grudges. He knew, too, that such things are not good for us, because they damage us as people; they corrupt us, and ultimately they can even destroy us.
Discussing forgiveness may seem to be a distraction from thinking about the scourging of Christ, but we cannot understand the scourging without thinking first of how deeply and intimately Jesus, being human, understood our human nature. Only because of his complete humanity, his incarnation, could he challenge us to move beyond our instinctive desire for revenge, resentment, and grudge-bearing.
Jesus knew there would be an adverse reaction to his preaching, and to his very way of life, his way of being. There is no challenger of the status quo who does not know likewise. And we who prefer a quiet life, and would rather not get into trouble with the authorities — we who fear conflict and avoid it at any cost — would do well to remember the example of Jesus, the next time we are too quick to judge others who campaign vociferously to overturn the status quo on behalf of the oppressed and the voiceless.
When Mel Gibson’s film The Passion of the Christ was released, one of the things that gave it such an impact was its super-realistic depiction of some of the events described in the Gospels.
One of the most appalling moments was the scourging of Jesus. The Roman soldiers who flogged Christ were not portrayed as military men getting on with an unpleasant but routine duty. They were shown as vicious, even bestial, in their savagery. The crudity of this depiction of Jesus was bad enough; but, as a whole, the scene was not just cruel, it was demonic.
Doubtless Gibson had his reasons for it all, but, to me, it was a parody of evil. The sadism of those soldiers reflected a vision of evil that we find it extremely easy — dangerously easy — to distance ourselves from, and think: “I could never be like that.”
History has not recorded for us the inner motivations of those nameless soldiers. It is possible that the soldiers who punished Jesus were sadists, who enjoyed inflicting pain. But it is much more likely that for them the scourging had none of the significance we attach to it.
The reality is that evil, especially the infliction of undeserved pain, is often humdrum and mundane. It is often enforced and reinforced in the petty spitefulness of ordinary living: in the refusal, in which we are all complicit, to recognise our own responsibility for the happiness of others; in the ease with which we can justify the sufferings of others as being somehow their own fault.
The Revd Dr Hammond is the Dean of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. This is an edited extract from her book Passionate Christianity: A Journey to the cross (SPCK, £6.99 (CT Bookshop £6.30); 978-0-281-05882-2).
|
back to Faith
previous story
|
next story 
back to top
