Needing Forgiveness
Highland Avenue Church of the Brethren
Pastor Katie Shaw Thompson – 4/10/22, Palm Sunday
Needing Forgiveness – Luke 19
Like many of you, I’ve never been to the Holy Land. And, as many of you know, while I can make words all day long, I’m somewhat lacking in spatial intelligence, and I struggle to find my way using cardinal directions. I often need to stand in a place or hold something in my hand to understand where something is, how it works, or how it will look.I have empathy for days, I love stories about feelings, but I have a hard time imagining physical things with detail. And, I’ve never stood in the city of Jerusalem and looked up at the Mount of Olives. So, no matter how many times I have read this story that we celebrate on Palm Sunday, some of the logistical, physical details have often escaped me.
But this year in reading this story I found myself interested in the physical details of the place. Jerusalem is a tangible, physical place after all. It’s still a city today, if a different one. There are more computers and cars and such there now than in Jesus’ day, but it’s still made up of humans, animals, plants, buildings, stones, and dirt.
The Mount of Olives is a tangible, physical place, too. There are fewer olive trees on it now than in biblical times, but it's still a mountain range east of and adjacent to Jerusalem’s Old City. It seems like if you were down below in the city that day making all the preparations for Passover festivities and the influx of family, friends, and visitors that would be crowding in, that if you stepped out into the street from most places in the city you would be able to see someone coming down that hilly path from the Mount of Olives. If there was an incredible shouting, running, and ruckus, you might especially take a moment to stop what you were doing to look up, see it, and maybe even join in.
You might notice that the humble colt the man who seemed to be the cause of all this commotion was riding was a far cry from the Roman war horses that arrived with Pontius Pilate. You might notice that the high up religious leaders watched this spectacle with reserve, disdain, and distrust. You might know that it has happened before that around this time of year someone has shown up claiming to be the long awaited Messiah. But maybe you’d heard of this particular carpenter from Galilee with his strange teachings and wild miracles. You might have wondered–even hoped–that he was different–the real deal.
I can imagine that. I can imagine joining in those hopeful cries of Hosanna! I can imagine throwing cloaks and palm branches on the road like a prayer. There are so many ways now and then that the world is messed up. There was real harm then and there is real harm now. I am harmed by others and unfortunately, I am also part of the harming.
And here comes this man, parading into town for all to see, his every action, from healing miracles to eating with sinners to flipping tables to confounding the religious leaders, reveals the harm–especially, it seems, the harm so many of us have learned to deny, keep secret, or pretend not to see.
He’s laying it all bare. Like a nurse starting to clean an infected wound, he’s revealing all the rot and while it may sting, it may also be exciting to know that this is a step toward real healing. That’s what Hosanna means. It means, roughly, save us. Save us. Save us.
Then and now the rot was all around. It’s in our government, in our religious practices, in our communities, in our families, in our relationships, and much as we’d like to deny it, it’s in our own actions, too.
One of the religious leaders who profited and got power from the rotten status quo, couldn’t bear the sting of having it all revealed. “Teacher,” he stepped forward to demand, “order your followers to stop.” But Jesus just replied, “I tell you if these were silent, the stones would shout out.” The stones. The stones. The stones would shout out.
Do you know what we’ve been using in our Book of Forgiving Sunday School class to symbolize hurt and grudges and forgiveness we’re not ready to give? Stones. We’ve been using stones.
Like I said, I tend to be a thinky, feely person. So, walks in the woods, winding through labyrinths, good yoga stretches, and having physical things to touch and move like stones all help to balance me out. I don’t know about you but there are things my head and heart don’t process without some physical outlet or connection.
I know I’m not alone in that because I know a number of people who have dealt with their heartache, trauma, anger, grief, and depression by finding physical things to do like shooting hoops on a basketball court for hours every day or playing the same strand of music over and over or mowing their lawn obsessively and everyone else’s in the neighborhood, too, or taking off to hike the entire Appalachian Trail.
Sometimes, we don’t even realize why we’re doing what we’re doing. We just know we gotta do it. In his book, My Grandmother’s Hands, Resma Menakem writes about the noises his grandmother made when she felt the trauma of her life catching up with her. She had ways of blowing out her breath and shaking her limbs that let it all go. When grown-up Resma studied trauma and neurobiology, he saw anew how profoundly wise his grandmother had been in listening to her body’s need to process the anguish she was holding inside.
It can be such a mercy to not have to process our hurts all at once. The brain and the body have mysterious ways of shutting out what’s too much to handle in the moment. But not dealing with it doesn’t make it go away. Sooner or later that hurt we thought we had so carefully hidden will make itself known. It will cry out like the stones.
Walking the path of forgiveness is one way to find healing. Sometimes we need to forgive others who have caused us harm. Sometimes we need to forgive people we love for dying. Sometimes we need to forgive ourselves for causing harm or for just causing disappointment or for just being limited in our ability to stop harm from happening. Sometimes we need to ask for forgiveness for all that we have done and not done.
In walking my own path of forgiveness, I have often found that forgiveness is as much as anything about canceling my expectations of safety, comfort, or perfection and learning to trust that despite the inescapable reality of suffering and wrong, true safety lies in the inescapable reality of my unbreakable connection to God, the one who mysteriously called the atoms of this universe into being from the oceans to the mountains to the stones.
While there are times when it seems God is very far away and we have been cast into the outer darkness, I trust that God is with us still. I trust that God is not afraid of our suffering and our wrongs, because God in Jesus was not afraid to take on a frail physical body, to bear the emotional grief of rejection by his own people, and to endure suffering and death on a wooden cross. When we need courage to face the hurt in our lives that we have caused or that has been caused to us, we can turn to this one who knows what it is to suffer and who knows the healing power of letting go.
As we read later in this same gospel of Luke, even on the cross, Jesus prayed for those who harmed him, “Forgive them for they know not what they do.” To the wrongdoer hanging on the cross next to him who admitted his wrong and acknowledged the harm he had caused, Jesus assured him, “today you will be with me in paradise.”
I do understand forgiveness as a pathway to paradise, even if I understand it a little differently than I used to when I was first taught about sin and forgiveness as if it were a math equation. I have personally found it less than helpful to swim in a sea of shame about my depravity as a human. Neither have I found it helpful to pretend I don’t have any flaws. What I have found helpful is being able to hold sin and forgiveness with both hands. I do things that are harmful. I do things I wish I didn’t. I don’t do things I wish I did. Others do things that are harmful. Others do things I wish they didn’t. Others don’t do things I wish they did. And, yet, forgiveness remains. And yet, the capacity for healing remains. And yet, God remains, full of grace and transformational, new-life-creating glory. That’s the paradise I’m most interested in these days–one where we are all being healed, made whole, and reconciled in God’s all powerful love.
Maybe it’s like a garden full of roses that are not diminished for the thorns. Maybe it’s a place we will only know in full when these physical bodies have returned back to the blessed stardust and stone from which they have come. Maybe it’s also a place we can experience now in small or large life-saving and relationship-healing moments of storytelling, hurt-naming, forgiveness-giving, and new-life-bearing.
For me that would be the good news of great joy of which the angels sang, for unto us is indeed born a savior, Jesus the Messiah, and in the fully revealed love, mercy, truth, and forgiveness he embodies in his life, death, and resurrection, indeed, we need not be afraid.
Praise God that it is so. Amen
