“As We Forgive Those Who Trespass Against Us…”
Homily for Thursday of the Eleventh Week in Ordinary Time at the USCCB Morning Mass
for Thursday, June 16th 2011
2 Corinthians 11:1-11; Matthew 6:7-15
Most Reverend Joseph J. Tyson, Bishop of Yakima
Peace be with you! A beautiful fountain graces the entrance to the Cathedral of St. Paul
in Yakima. It’s called the “Forgiveness Fountain” and it bears these words from today’s
Gospel: “Forgive us our trespass, as we forgive those who trespass against us.” We pray
those words many times a day – at Eucharist and in the Liturgy of the Hours.
But it while presiding at my first funeral as a bishop that I received the greatest example
of the living out of these words from the “Our Father.” That funeral was for a youth I’d
known as pastor in the south end of Seattle. A fight broke out at a party. Tempers
flared. Someone had a gun. The youth I’d know had been shot to death. His name was
Alefosio.
The night before the funeral at the vigil prayer service, some of the other youths were
gathered around their parked cars in the St. Edward parish parking lot. In their anger
and hurt they wanted revenge.
At the funeral Mass the next day, I banged my crosier on the terrazzo floor and firmly
preached: “No revenge!” But it was the father of the boy who got up at the funeral
Mass for the eulogy and spoke the most powerful words of healing and comfort. In his
broken English and native Tongan he told all of us that he’d forgiven the boy who’d shot
his son. He demanded --- he did not ask or request --- he demanded that every one of
us to the same.
Can you do that?
Can you do what that Tongan father demanded of us after the death of his nineteen
year-old son? Can you forgive those who have hurt you the most? If there’s a pause in
your response – as there is in mine – then that interior pause will allow you to consider
the absolute necessity to pray as Jesus taught us – to pray fervently and persistently in
forgiving and in seeking forgiveness.
“Forgiveness exacts a price,” notes our Holy Father Pope Benedict XVI, “—first of all
from the person who forgives. He must overcome within himself the evil done to him;
he must, as it were, burn it interiorly and in doing so renew himself.” Then but our Holy
Father goes on to note that forgiveness “…also involved the other, the trespasser for
“…both parties suffering all the way through and overcoming evil are made new.” (Jesus
of Nazareth, pp. 159-160)
No wonder that the praenotanda for the Church’s Rite of Penance emphasis that God is
the “author” of all forgiveness – it’s not something we manufacture on our own
emotional resources – and that the first step in reconciliation is – and the praenotanda
deliberately use the Greek here – is metanoia – which is defined in the Rite as a
“profound change of the whole person….For conversion should affect a person from
within toward a progressively deeper enlightenment and an ever-closer likeness to
Christ.” (Rite of Penance #6)
Isn't this precisely what those we serve seek in us as bishops -- servants who bear an
“ever-closer likeness to Christ?” We might want to ask ourselves, when our people look
at us who do they see? As I was preparing to return home after my first meeting on the
USCCB administrative board, I was typing out my boarding pass at the hotel’s front
kiosk. A woman came up to me and asked me where the umbrellas were. I pointed her
over to a brass stand. Then a man asked me for a tourist map that showed the location
of the local restaurants. I showed him the maps. Watching this from the next room, the
hotel clerk offered me a job! Suddenly I realized that in my clerical attire, my fellow
travelers saw me – not as a bishop – but as the bell-boy! I wanted to say, “See this
chain! It’s not your room key! There’s a cross on the end!”
Humor aside, the cross of Christ really is the interpretative key that unlocks our human
capacity both to forgive and to see forgiveness from those we’ve harmed. As St.
Augustine notes, “When we say: Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who
trespass against us, we are reminding ourselves of what we must ask and what we must
do in order to be worthy in turn to receive.” (Letter to Proba by St. Augustine as cited in
the Office of the Readings for Tuesday the Twenty Ninth Week of Ordinary Time.)
In citing those words of St. Augustine, I am often struck by the fact that the Church’s
Office of Readings places these words from St. Augustine’s homily on the “Our Father”
alongside the Sacred Scriptures from the Book of Esther from which we read for four
days during the Twenty-Ninth Week of Ordinary Time. You might recall that it was
Queen Ester who pleaded on behalf of her Jewish people to her husband King
Ahasuerus thus rescuing the Jews of Persia from certain slaughter at the hands of
Haman, the empire’s prime minister.
By aligning St. Augustine’s teaching on the Lord’s Prayer with Queen Esther’s fervent
prayer in the face of a threatened genocide, it’s as though the Church wants to remind
us that Jesus gives us this teaching on prayer – not because it’s easy – but because, in
the face of evil, fervent prayer is absolutely necessary. “Evil lives in a thousand forms,”
notes German theologian Reinhold Schneider, “Love just has one form – your Son!”
This is this Son – Jesus – who’s forgiving love we receive at this altar in all of his
humanity and all of his divinity. This is this Son – Jesus – whose love we encounter at
every liturgy and in every sacrament. All the more reason for us to be grateful as
bishops for those, who – like that Tongan dad grieving the death of his son – become
reconciling fount of faith allowing us to enter our Cathedral and teach with integrity
those reconciling words of Jesus: “Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who
trespass against us.” Peace be with you!