Forgive

Preparation for Great Lent in the Eastern Church begins on a deeply personal note: forgiveness. Forgiveness is not just something you say, for that would be to mock the one you forgive and to mock God. Forgiveness must begin in the soul and proceed with sincerity. It is an intimate act. That is, Lent is about relationship, which is unfamiliar ground for those formed in the West.

Western formation traces back to a question we first heard as children: "What are you giving up for Lent?" Well, I understood the concept well enough — that something I desired must be suspended for some period of time. — like when President Eisenhower came on television, and every channel depicted the same, gray screen depicting an old, bald man whose words droned on and on .... as we children saw it. Yet, this unpleasantness would pass, and soon things would get back to normal. I could recommence my intent preoccupation with the cartoons or shows that were the center of my formation .... in those years.

In this, I got something wrong, and I got something right. What I got wrong was the idea that the purpose of Lent is self-denial, even of self-sacrifice, to express kinship with the sufferings of Christ for some length of time. In some cases, length might be crucial, as expressed by the Old English word lencten giving rise to our Modern English word Lenten. For example, Francis of Assisi ventured into this dangerous length fasting for forty days, a devotion which would eventually claim his life (as scholars believe today). From here it is but a short jump to Roman Catholic men in the Philippines who endure literal crucifixion for some period of hours. But, as I say, this is what I got wrong, for this leads into an intense meditation on Christ's death.

What I got right was a fascination with Christ's life. For the time that would have been devoted to television, I spent exploring the woods, the creeks, and rivers near our home. What I got right was walking away from a path that led to spiritual death. And I could actually feel the exhilaration of wholesome life: exploring, canoeing, fishing in the woods. And this outdoors life would also lead me in a direction. Everything we do does, you know.

Six weeks without television for me was analogous to the outings undertaken by the Boy Scout Explorers (older boys I admired), who were building up strengths and skills readying them for a summer-long expedition through the high peaks of the White Mountains, and from there, on to lives that were lived vigorously and abundantly.

There was a relational dimension here, too. For the wilderness leaves no room for petty differences. There is too much to get done. This is life lived close to the marrow: of surviving together, of testing one's mettle, of bonding with others on whom you depend (as we do here). If collisions of ego appear, they must be resolved and reconciled so that new relationship can be formed in friendship.

Here are elemental differences: an imitation of Jesus' passion and death vs. an imitation of abundant life.

Lenten devotions intended to imitate Jesus' self-offering on the Cross contemplate a death-exchanged-for-life sacrifice. You see, "This is the moment! The moment of our salvation!" But this proposition came a thousand years after Jesus' death, invented by an Italian monk named Anselmo, who speculated that each life of sin piled up a debt owed to God. "The honour taken away must be repaid or punishment must follow" he wrote in his treatise Cur Deus Homo (1098).

Not long after the Great Schism, Anselmo was installed as Archbishop of Canterbury, bringing his teachings into England's most influential See. Subsequently, he was named "Doctor of the Roman Catholic Church." And his innovative theology would come to dominate Western thinking for the next thousand years and unto the present day. I need hardly say that this is the centerpiece of Protestant theology on our salvation.

But the Orthodox Church does not accept this grisly calculus, does not accept this abhorrent depiction of Father God as a wrathful deed-holder demanding payment. As Metropolitan Hilarion Alfeyev has written, this death-for-life proposition does appear in the writings of some Fathers, but it never gained currency and certainly never rose to the level of Patristic Consensus.

The Orthodox Church follows the Early Greek Fathers Origen, Irenaeus, and Athanasius, who understood that we are renewed, not by Jesus' human death but by His Divine Life lived amongst us.

Without question, His death and resurrection were a glorious display of Divinity made manifest to everyone. You see, there's no doubt now! But the Divinity of Jesus does not depend upon everyone's opinion. You cannot vote on the truth. And His renovation of the world was brought about through relationship: His touching the Creation with His Divine Life, His setting an example of human nobility, and His friendship inviting us into adoption by the Father .... these are the things that have redeemed us and continue to.

If Lent is about being reconciled to God, then surely it must involve imitating Jesus' nobility, accepting His friendship which is to live His kind of life, and to claim our adoption as sons and daughters of God.

What I got right about Lent was to throw open the door to abundant and wholesome life. Or let us think of Lent in terms of an annual checkup. We are examined to ensure that we are on the right road to health. The blood work must go out to the lab. And, it turns out, that one powerful medicine is forgiveness.

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Matthew, the tax collector, understood forgiveness only in terms of money. We know the formula well: "forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors." We plead today, "Forgive me this debt!" The Parable of the Unforgiving Steward, which appears only in St. Matthew's Gospel, contrasts two debtors, monetary debtors, and should be read as a gloss on Matthew's understanding of the Lord's Prayer.

The Roman Church followed Matthew's version:

A more literal translation of dimitte would be dismiss: Dismiss our debts!

By contrast, Luke, the physician, understood Jesus' prayer in terms of illness. He wrote,

which is translated, "And purge us of this sickness!"

Where Matthew conceived of this in terms of financial obligations: οφειληματα / opheilemata a word which means "a legal obligation, a debt under law," Luke understood something completely different: hamartía, "a sickness unto death," and, in particular, "spiritual or moral death."

As a cultured Greek, Luke would have known that hamartía pointed to that spiritual disease which causes great men to fall. If you read the Greek Tragedies, it is this notion of a "tragic flaw." It begins as a little deformation of character, a nearly undetectable inflammation, we might say. But as time passes, this inflammation overwhelms, leading to a tragic end.

You see, it is not inborn. It is a flaw in character — a bit of recklessness, of letting down your guard, of self-indulgence and then forgiving yourself, .... which gets out of hand.

The Apostle to the Greeks, St. Paul, used the term repeatedly. When he writes, "all have sinned" (Rom 5:12), the underlying word is hamartía. When he says that both Jew and Greek labor under the power of sin (Rom 3:9), again the underlying term is hamartía, describing a force within humans that is vast and nearly irresistible.

St. Luke understands this disease in terms of relational interchange. First, there is our relationship with God, Who effects a cure through forgiveness:

We might translate this as "forgive us our sins," but the Greek imperative verb áphes is a very rich one, also meaning to release, to purge, to free: "Purge us of that inner defect which will surely destroy us if left ignored."

Then there is a second level of social interchange, which is our more modest effort (as we are mere humans) to relieve burden. We do not have the power to cure hamartía in others, but we can do something:

which is translated, "and I release others from the legal compulsions that subjugate them to me." In this we hear echoes of the Two Great Commandments: as God loves us, so we love others.

Was hamartía related to my television habits? Well, I came to realize that I had abandoned my imagination, my powers of reasoning, even my submission to temptation for many hours on end. I was spending nearly all my free time sitting before the glowing box. As a boy I walked down the streets of my small, seacoast community, where houses are built side-by-side, closely together (lots 50' apart). And I saw that our entire town, every evening, was alit with the blue glow of television. Walking down the empty streets, our neighbors bathing themselves in the blue light was plain to see. It poured out of the windows on to their lawns. Every single night they submitted themselves and their children to the influences and manipulations latent in their programs, which, upon reflection, is what it was: for they were being "programmed."

If you think this an exaggeration, then consider the present state of the moral ruin around us and ask what the single most powerful influencer of the past half-century has been. Any who have raised children will quickly discover that nothing you say or do can compete with television.

What would have been the alternative? Conversation, social interchange, relationship. When I was a boy, the time after supper was reserved for conversation. Everyone would have their coffee or tea, and we would sit and talk. In the summer, the family would retire to the porch and just talk. Sometimes there would be stories, on occasion jokes. But often the conversation discussed the events of the day and what we thought. In all of this, two things would happen: first, I was trained to think. You know, if you are sitting there, and everyone is expressing their opinions, you realize, "I may be called upon. What do I think?" The second thing that happened was that relationship with others deepened. My grandfather and my grandmother became people who had thoughts and, over time, definite trends of thinking.

Jesus lived amongst us that we might know abundant life. (This is what He tells us.) This knowledge is the work of a lifetime: His lifetime and ours.

Another error latent within the proposition that "Jesus died for my sins" is the idea is that this act equates to salvation.

Now, don't get me wrong. I say over and over that Jesus' Life redeemed me from my sins, which became known to all as Divine Life at His death and resurrection. But shouldn't this have been seen before then? He revealed it over and over again. The Cross does not equate to salvation; His Life does.

But let us also understand this word salvation. For the Greek word underlying it is sotería, which does not mean "going to Heaven." It means "to clear debris, to remove clutter" .... impeding the path ahead. The journey is ours.

The principle source of debris and clutter of my boyhood was unquestionably television. Today, the glowing box has new powerful allies: smart phones and computers. These began as baby-sitters in the lives of our children, which have addicted them, nearly all of them. Car trips are no longer places where you sing with the family. Car trips are no longer places where you talk with the kinds or tell stories about their grandparents and great-grandparents. Everybody sits in his or her corner with earbuds plugged in. If you drive around teenagers and their friends, you discover that they don't talk to each other. You would think that the whole purpose of your exertions was that they be together. But each sits alone with earbuds plugged-in occupying solitariness, all sitting side-by-side. You see, they too have submitted their minds and souls to programming. They are being programmed.

A key moment in my spiritual development was to sweep television and its culture of ideas out of my life. When I was a pastor, parishioners would ask me about my spiritual life. They would come to me about their children asking, "What can I do?" They could see a deformation, a disease in progress, that had gotten hold of their children.

I would ask, "Are you serious about this?"

"Yes, we're serious, Father!" they protested.

"Then we when you get home," I said. "Open a window, walk over to the television, and throw it out of the house!"

Well, they thought I was crazy. "Life without television?! Unthinkable!"

Addiction .... in this case, multi-generational addiction.

In this, we might think of Lent as being a kind of "spring cleaning." What a wonderful sight! Walking down the street watching televisions flying out windows.

Like spring cleaning, it is work we should have been doing all along. Once it is accomplished — you all know this: that peace and calm that comes from seeing your life the way it was supposed to be. From here, we are free to envision a new kind of life, orderly and tranquil.

The spring cleaning of Lent is not a once-for-all undertaking. It is an opportunity to get our lives back on track, removing the dust cloud of debris that has obscured God, in many cases leading us into a life opposed to godliness.

Once our world is ordered, once our mind is cleared, we are able to think and feel rightly again, no longer poisoned by moral and spiritual pollution.

And what are the first thoughts that come once the bad vapors have lifted? What are those first thoughts? After we have spent time enjoying our restoration, after we have marveled at the lightness of being that once again is ours, and after we have offered many prayers of thanks, a whole new wave of thoughts will inevitably arrive.

We will begin to regret. We will regret the many things we wish we had not done. And we will see our lives with new clarity, looking back with both a clear eye and a tender heart, bringing us to an all-important epiphany: we have hurt many, many people. Yes, in some cases we simply consented to their self-destructiveness. But make no mistake about this: we had a choice

Recently, a team of neurosurgeons at the University of Louisville published a study concerning the EEG of a man who had died during the test. He had a heart attack. They observed his brain waves before and after his heart had stopped. And they saw brain regions being activated consistent with an activity that hospice chaplains commonly see: life review. As he was dying and after his heart had stopped, the memories of a lifetime were assembled before him.

We Christians, of course, already knew this. At the end of our lives, our whole life is set before us, written upon the face of our Lord, we might say. This is the essence of the Last Judgment. It is the ultimate spring cleaning. All the photo albums come out. No clutter remains to obscure the truth. All debris is gone. Everything we are and everything we have done is seen with perfect clarity: our love of God and our failure to love Him, our love of others and our failure to love them and care for them and protect them. That is, in the end the Two Great Commandments move to the center .... where they have always been.

The Lord has handed to us everything we need to know. We begin by entering into relationship with Him. As He is God, that relationship is a deep and powerful love. And then we turn and see the world. We realize that we are to love them, too. But in order to do this, we must remove the clutter. And the door into that clarity is forgiveness. We must forgive from our most sincere hearts. And we must receive sincere forgiveness with compassion.

This Great Lent, let us remove the clutter. Let us sweep away the debris. For this is our sotería, which is salvation.

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.