Based on a chapter called the Final Judgement in Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini’ s book “Piccolo Manuale della Speranza – Vivere con Fiducia il Nostro Tempo” [A Small manual of Hope – Living our lives in Trust]. Giunti Editore S.p.A. Milano, 2012.
All biblical quotations are from ‘The Jerusalem Bible’, Darton, Longman & Todd, London, 1966.
The Gospel word, accepted by us with faith, takes us to conversion that is made concrete with baptism. This is the Christian journey we have considered so far. Baptism introduces us to the baptised community, the Church. In fact, the Christian is not a solitary seeker of God: Christians are members of a community. This belonging gives us some rights and imposes on us some duties.
The Church, then, is not a generic conglomerate of goodwill: it is a well-structured community, wherein there is an authority established by Jesus himself, and in which there are functions and services.
Being a complex institution in which inevitably the conflictual nature of man raises its head, it is important that the community continually renews its readiness to forgive and pardon.
What is in the Christian experience the meaning of forgiveness? We can start from Mark’s gospel where it says, “And when you stand in prayer, forgive whatever you have against anybody, so that your Father in heaven may forgive your failings too.” (Mk 11,25)*.
On reading these words we are reminded of the prayer of Our Father, taught to us by Jesus, in which we ask to be forgiven as we forgive those who have offended us: “Forgive our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us”. The extremely strict relationship that is evidenced in Mark both in Our Father and in verse 25, shows how fundamental this aspect, that we call forgiveness and pardon, of Christian life is.
Maybe we do not give this much thought used as we are to conflicts in our life, from which rise the detestable violence that surrounds us. We naively think that violence is overpowered using its own forces and using the same methods that it uses.
In reality, in the Christian community the main method of resolving conflict is not through repression but through reconciliation and pardon.
While meditating on baptism, we discussed the fact that for many of us our baptism is a long gone, nearly infantile experience. Now we have a concrete way to verify whether the fruits of baptism are still operating in us. We can ask ourselves: how ready am I to forgive, to understand others, to make reconciliating gestures?
Answering this question should not be difficult: we are continuously surrounded by events that tend to damage the community’s fabric. If in these situations we always insist that things go only our way, that others submit to our methods, it means that we are not yet in the baptismal spirit.
It is the baptismal power in us that leads to reconciliation. An ability that does not originate from us. Our ability to forgive has deeper roots which is the forgiveness offered to us by God himself. The baptismal experience is in fact the experience of God’s mercy as announced by the Gospel and accepted by us. The baptised person feels forgiven, reconciled with God and hence with himself and with his interior conflicts. With this reconciliation as a starting point, it then becomes easier to offer others the same experience of forgiveness that we have received already.
The forgiveness of God is continuously offered to us in the Church, through the power of the death and resurrection of our Lord, and is a sacrament: the sacrament of reconciliation, also known as the “sacrament of confession”.
The word “confession” quickly recalls the confessions we have made in the past and perhaps even a detailed list of sins we had prepared, a practice that sometimes may have created in us a sense of discomfort and maybe even a rejection of this sacrament.
Declaring the sins during confession is, though, not an end in itself. It is only a way of submitting them to God for forgiveness, and to reconciling force of the Church’s sacrament.
It is then a marvellous and transforming experience, capable of making us joyfully relive the baptismal experience on a daily basis.
From this starting point, we can become operators of peace, able to raise forgiveness around us and to pardon others. Today’s society needs nothing more urgently than peace and sources of peace.
It is important to note that the forgiveness that we are talking about is not mere condoning, a sort of closing of one eye, an easy acceptance of evil: not at all. Forgiveness is the recognition of the large scale of evil and its transformation through a positive creative action. This is what God does to us when he forgives us and it is the same thing that we, transformed by God’s forgiveness, try to do with others, thus becoming the agents of reconciliation and peace. We now pray with some extracts from the psalm 51[50]**, the “Miserere”.
** There are 150 psalms, numbered from 1 to 150. Regrettably, the Jewish and Christians numbering systems differ from psalm 9 onwards. This is because some psalms are merged in one system and not in the other. That is why you will see 2 numbers for each quoted psalm with a number higher than 9.