When it comes to forgiveness Christians should be well ahead of the game. At the dark centre of the Christian message is a cross, occupied by a crucified Messiah, whose last words were a howl of abandonment (Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthami - My God why have you forsaken me? Mk 15.34), followed by the brokenhearted sigh of resignation (Father, into your hands I commit my spirit. Lk 23.46).
The earliest Gospel is unflinching in its storytelling, and offers no comment on that anguished cry of dereliction. Several decades later it would take Paul at his most penetrating as out of that story of crucified love he forged a theology adequate to the Christian experience of forgiveness. "God made him who had no sin, to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God." (2 Cor 5.21)
And those words only tiptoe to the edge of the abyss;there is much more, hinted at earlier in Paul's argument about the necessity, meaning, cost and consequences of reconciliation: "He died for all that those who live should live no longer for themselves, but for him, who died and was raised again." (v15)
Sixteen hundred years later the quiet Anglican parson, George Herbert, also teetered on the edsge of the mystery. In a poem that demolishes human pride, whether from complacency or defiance Herbert distilled words into such a concentrated sequence of images that his poem remains one of the most potent analyses of the anguish and cost of forgiveness. In "The Agonie", the forgiver is the Holy Creator redeeming fallen humanity and absorbing into the eternal heart of God the sin and suffering of a broken creation, turning judgment to mercy and guilt to forgiveness in an alchemy of holy love condemning sin to nothingness. But at a cost both fatal and vital.
The Agonie
Philosophers have measur'd mountains,
Fathom'd the depths of the seas, of states, and kings,
Walk'd with a staff to heav'n, and traced fountains:
But there are two vast, spacious things,
The which to measure it doth more behove:
Yet few there are that sound them; Sin and Love.
Who would know SIn, let him repair
Unto mount Olivet; there shall he see
A man so wrung with pains, that all his hair,
His skin, his garments bloody be.
Sin is that press and vice, which forceth pain
To hunt his cruel food through ev'ry vein.
Who knows not Love, let him assay
And taste that juice, which on the cross a pike
Did set again abroach, then let him say
If ever he did taste the like.
Love is that liquor sweet and most divine,
Which my God feels as blood; but I, as wine.
Paul's magnificent argument for reconciliation in 2 Corinthians 5 is anchored in the granite of a grace that is eternal, infinite, unsearchable, and embodied in Jesus. "No one has ever seen God; the only son who is in the bosom of the Father, he has made him known...and from his fullness we ahve all received grace upon grace." Herbert takes that bedrock truth of grace unspeakable and unthinkable and uses it as a lens to look at the passion story of Jesus. And the mystery, abysmal and beyond any horizon reachable by reason, is that the man so wrung with pains is the one in whom the holy love of God confronted and suffered the deepest sin, the darkest hours, the fatal consequences, of the soul abandoned by God to the point of extinction. Reading that poem, entitled "The Agonie" is an education in the greatest mystery of human life - the existence of evil and suffering as negations of hope, joy and life itself.
Herbert is not offering explanations; neither is Paul. To "sound" sin and love, to plumb the depths of that eternal antithesis, is beyond human capacity. But out of that antithesis came a reversal of reality so potent with creative power that it is best described as a new beginning. The death and resurrection of Jesus called in question, indeed contradicted, the powers of hate, the destructiveness of violence, the permanence of despair and death as the ultimate threat to life. That's why Paul could say, "If anyone is in Christ they are a new creation, the old has gone, the new has come." (2 Cor 5.17)
Forgiveness is the reality that is called into being by a holy love that confronts sin and nullifies it by absorbing its cost and consequence, by an eternal patience that both judges and suffers the worst sin can do, and by a grace of such rich mercy that through it God evokes and answering love, a grateful gladness and a hope both durable and plausible.
The photo was taken by my friend Graeme Clarke - sunset on one of the iron crosses on the cloister railings of Paisley Abbey
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