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Page 31
And then, presently, my friend does understand that he has wronged me;
that the gossip he repeated or the construction he put upon my actions
was not fair or true. And immediately that I become aware of this, from
him or from another, my resentment goes, if I have any natural virtue at
all; it goes because my wounded pride is healed. I forgive him easily
and naturally because he knows now what he has done.
II. How entirely different from this easy, self-loving, human
forgiveness is the Divine Forgiveness of Christ! Now it is true that in
the conscience of Pilate, the unjust representative of justice, and in
that thing that called itself conscience in Herod, and in the hearts of
the priests who denounced their God, and of the soldiers who executed
their overlord, and of Judas who betrayed his friend, in all these there
was surely a certain uneasiness--such an uneasiness is actually recorded
of the first and the last of the list--a certain faint shadow of
perception and knowledge of what it was that they had done and were
doing. And, for the natural man, it would have been comparatively easy
to forgive such injuries on that account. "I forgive them," such a man
might have said from his cross, "because there is just a glimmer of
knowledge left; there is just one spark in their hearts that still does
me justice, and for the sake of that I can try, at least, to put away my
resentment and ask God to forgive them."
But Jesus Christ cries, "Forgive them because they do _not_ know what
they do! Forgive them because they need it so terribly, since they do
not even know that they need it! Forgive in them that which is
unforgivable!"
III. Two obvious points present themselves in conclusion.
(1) First, it is _Divine_ Forgiveness that we need, since no sinner of
us all knows the full malice of sin. One man is a slave, let us say, to
a sin of the flesh, and seeks to reassure himself by the reflection that
he injures no one but himself; ignorant as he is of the outrage to God
the Holy Ghost Whose temple he is ruining. Or a woman repeats again
every piece of slanderous gossip that comes her way and comforts herself
in moments of compunction by reflecting that she "means no harm";
ignorant as she is of the discouragement of souls of which she is the
cause and of the seeds of distrust and enmity sown among friends. In
fact it is incredible that any sinner ever _knows what it is that he
does_ by sin. We need, therefore, the Divine Forgiveness and not the
human, the pardon that descends when we are unaware that we must have it
or die; the love of the Father Who, _while we are yet a great way off,
runs to meet_ us, and Who teaches us for the first time, by the warmth
of His welcome, the icy distances to which we had wandered. If we
_knew_, anyone could forgive us. It is because we do not that only God,
Who knows all things, can forgive us effectively.
(2) And it is this _Divine_ Forgiveness that we ourselves have to extend
to those that sin against us, since only those who so forgive can be
forgiven. We must not wait until wounded pride is made whole by the
conscious shame of our enemy; until the debt is paid by acknowledgment
and we are complacent once more in the knowledge that justice has been
done to us at last. On the contrary, the only forgiveness that is
supernatural, and which, therefore, alone is meritorious, is that which
reach out to men's ignorance and not their knowledge of their need.
THE SECOND WORD
_Amen I say to thee, to-day thou shalt be with Me in Paradise._
Our Divine Lord, in this Second Word, immediately applies and
illustrates the First and drives its lesson home. He shows us how the
rain of mercy that poured out of heaven in answer to the prayer He made
just now enlightens the man who, above all others present on Calvary,
was the most abjectly ignorant of all; the man who, himself at the very
heart of the tragedy, understood it less, probably, than the smallest
child on the outskirts of the crowd.
His life had been one long defiance of the laws of both God and man. He
had been a member of one of those troops of human vermin that crawl
round Jerusalem, raiding solitary houses, attacking solitary travellers,
guilty of sins at once the bloodiest and the meanest, comparable only to
the French _apaches_ of our own day. Well, he had been gripped at last
by the Roman machine, caught in some sordid adventure, and here,
resentful and furious and contemptuous, full of bravado and terror, he
snarled like a polecat at every human face he saw, snarled and spat at
the Divine Face Itself that looked at him from a cross that was like his
own; and, since he had not even a spark of the honour that is reputed to
exist "among thieves," taunted his "fellow criminal" for the folly of
His "crime."
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