I would add as much again

I would add as much again

The late Fr Raymond Kapito, whose grandmother in Mutoko once attacked a lion and whose grandson could have done the same, used to hammer the message of forgiveness. He sensed that people have a hard time in letting go of hurts and hang on to resentments as though they were precious property. God isn’t like that. He just loves to forgive. When the ‘prodigal’ – or lost – son returns with his speech prepared about how he had sinned and wasn’t “worthy to be called your son” his father interrupts him and calls for the fatted calf to be slaughtered; “we are going to celebrate.”

David was the most successful king of Israel. He ruled from “Dan to Bersheba” meaning the promised land in its entirety. He had power and wealth, lands and wives. Yet all this was not enough. His head was turned by the sight of the wife of Uriah the Hittite and he used his power to get her. We know what happened next. Nathan the prophet gave him a tongue lashing. But in the midst of castigating the king he said, “I have given you so much and I would do as much again for you.” In God the urge to forgive is so strong; it is crazy.

When Jesus is dining in the house of Simon the Pharisee, Simon is shocked by the his guest’s allowing a woman “with a bad name” to approach him and weep at his feet. “If he was a real prophet” he thought, he would know what to do with this woman and send her away to join the countless rejected poor outcasts in the Galilee of the first century. But Jesus didn’t. He rejoiced in the new life this woman had discovered through the change in her way of thinking. He shared her joy at discovering life again. Simon, good man that he was, couldn’t understand it at all.  

Forgiveness is, indeed, crazy. So is compassion. So, ultimately, is love. But Jesus came to tell us that these are the brand names of God. Yesterday we had a day’s seminar on John Bradburne, a ‘crazy’ (he was far from such) Englishman who came out to this country and spent the 1970s living with and serving the people with leprosy at Mutemwa, near Mutoko. One speaker told us the people of Mutemwa ‘made’ John who he was. He was an eccentric holy loner until he met these people who suffered so much. On his first visit he was filled with horror to see a man eat his food under a sack so that the dogs would not get the food. Compassion overflowed in him and he set himself to wash their wounds and feed and care for them. He lived there – misunderstood and rejected by many - for ten years before he was taken out and shot a week before the Lancaster House talks in 1979.

God works among us, and he will do as much again when we welcome him.

16 June 2013               Sunday 11, Year C

2 Sam 12:7-10, 13       Gal 2:16, 19-21           Luke 7:36-8:3