Death, the Cross and Forgiveness
I picked up a birthday card recently that made me smile, so I sent it to my Godson. It read: Why do old men wear black socks and sandals? You are one year closer to finding out.
“Remember your last days, set enmity aside” (Sirach 28:6). Forgiveness is a tall order when it comes to our enemies. Here is a tall example of forgiving:
After the French Revolution a world-weary elderly man was begging at the church doors. A young priest approached him, gave him a cloak and invited him to his home.
After receiving the hospitality of his new friend, the man decided to come back to the church, tearfully confessing to the priest that he had betrayed the family he had worked for as a young man, handing them over to the authorities. All but the youngest child were sent to the guillotine.
After telling his story, the man lifted his eyes and saw a portrait of the very family he had betrayed. He asked where the painting came from, and the young priest tearfully said that this was his family. Everyone else had been executed during the Revolution. Uttering the words of absolution, the priest added, “and I forgive you as well. Be at peace.”
No one on their deathbed wishes they had spent more time at work, or holding grudges. They do wish they had spent more time with family and loved ones.
Forgiveness becomes easier when we consider God’s forgiving nature. The story is told of a nun in the Middle Ages who was having visions of God. The bishop wanted proof, so he asked the nun to ask God what the bishop’s great sin had been before he entered the priesthood.
The next time the nun came to see him, he asked her if she had asked the Lord. She said, “Yes.” Anxiously the bishop asked, “What did he say it was?” The nun said, “He said, ‘I forgot’.”
God’s sacrifice for us is Jesus on the Cross. The beauty of this death is that Jesus took our place on the Cross and died for our sins. For our forgiveness. All our pain and suffering, our very death, when it comes, united to the suffering of Christ, can sanctify us.
Pain is a spiritual process. It can be a spiritual experience. Even if we lack the fanaticism of the martyrs who sang as they suffered, we can accept that Christ’s sacrifice has something to do with this spiritual process. Just as His suffering saved the world, so our suffering, added to the suffering of Christ, will lead to the eventual and total victory of Good over Evil.
Ira Byock’s book The Four Things that Matter gives us his main point in the opening sentence: “The four most important things you will ever say are: Please forgive me. I forgive you. Thank you. I love you.” These are words people tend to utter on their deathbeds. Byock urges, it is best to start saying them long before our loved ones gather round our deathbed. The saddest words we say? “It might have been!”
Do not take for granted that your children know you love them, or that brother or sister knows that you have forgiven them. “Please forgive me. I forgive you. Thank you. I love you. These four simple statements … carry the core wisdom of what people who are dying have taught me about what matters most in life,” Byock says.
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