Late in the year 1623, a 51-year-old man was lying in bed, very sick, near death with typhus, a disease that is now all but eradicated due to simple modern sanitation. This was a man of means, but so many people died of so many preventable illnesses during his time. So many, in fact, that as he himself was lying in bed, confined and isolated, he heard the bells of St. Paul’s Cathedral ringing out for the funerals of its parishioners. His parishioners, in fact, since he was The Rev. John Donne, the Dean of St. Paul’s.

While Donne was facing his own death, he wrote a set of meditations–23 of them–intended to help his parishioners and others face their own deaths with faith and dignity. At this particular time, Donne survived his illness, living eight more years and dying at the ripe old age of 59, about twice that of the average life expectancy in London at the time. Donne knew death well. It had come for three of his children before their tenth birthdays, and his wife had died in childbirth. He had lost another child, Lucy, at 18 while he was the Dean of St. Paul’s.

Donne was a poet, a clergyman, and a parent, which gave him the ability to write meaningfully and beautifully about not only death itself, but how it connected all people, no matter their wealth, status, or age. So when he hears the bell tolling, he realizes that it is ringing for him, too; in fact, he writes, everything that the Church does for one person, she does for all people. When one person is baptized, or when one person is buried, the whole body of Christ changes, including himself. When one person is blessed, we all receive a blessing. When one person is harmed, we are all harmed. When one person is dying, and we hear the bells ringing out for them, we are all dying, all united together in human hope and human suffering.

Realizing the depth of this human connection led Donne to write the famous phrase “no [one] is an island; any [person’s] death diminishes me, because I am involved in [hu]mankind; therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.” In other words, we are, as Martin Luther King, Jr., later put it, “caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”

Or as the dearly departed Dolly Parton said in an interview in 2022, “we’re all pieces of God and we all have that little God-light inside us.” The image of God is stamped on every human, and in one very real sense, the purpose of life itself is to discover the image of God in others. It can be a delight when this happens. Some people have an easier time than others seeing the God-light in all people. Some people make it very hard to see the God-light in them, through actions that are hateful and hurtful. The God-light can be diminished, perhaps, but it can never go out completely.

I think we’ve almost gotten past the point where the frequent use of the word “unprecedented” was unprecedented. We talk openly and honestly these days about how terribly divided American society is, to an extent we couldn’t previously imagine. While this is absolutely true for us, Paul wrote to the fledgling Roman church in a society no less divided than ours. Conflicts of all sorts were intense, conflicts between Jews and Romans, conflicts within Judaism, and now, a generation or so after Christ, conflicts within the church that were so sharp and deep that it could feel like the whole thing was going to fall apart before it ever really got started. Wealthy Christians found it hard to accept that house slaves were at the same table with them, and that they all were expected to eat together, at the same time. Jewish Christians found it hard to accept that Gentile Christians would eat meat that had been sacrificed to the pagan gods of Rome.

Into a violently divided society, Paul says, the Church arrives with its arms wide open, open enough to embrace differences, open enough to know that the measure of faith will be, as Jesus himself said, only one thing: whether or not we love one another. And so he begins this beautiful section of his letter to the Roman Church by asking that the love that they have for one another be genuine–not forced or coerced. Not faked, not just a show–the word he uses for genuine literally means “the opposite of hypocritical.” Not something that we do as a pose or to gain the attention and favor of others, but because we really, truly, have found something in the love of Christ that we share with one another–genuine love, with mutual affection.

Paul himself was a product of Greco-Roman culture, even though he was Jewish. He knew the stories of gods and heroes, the stories that we still retell today, stories that have much to commend them, like The Odyssey. But Paul also knew that honor-bound cultures like the Greeks and the Romans were a dead end, because they treated honor like it was a zero-sum game. If you have honor, I can take it away from you. I have to protect my honor with my life. Only those who are deserving of honor gain it; the dishonored are forgotten by time and history. Honor conquers all.

Except in the early Church, where honor was transformed into something else entirely. When Paul talks about making honor into a kind of competition, it’s sort of an inside joke, a way of keying into his culture’s values and overturning them completely. He’s deconstructing the whole idea of honor. The early church was notorious for breaking social boundaries, for showing honor to people that the wider society, and even some within the church, did not consider honorable.

But there’s a consequence for this attitude, one that was even more countercultural than showing deference to members of the church who were on the low end of the social ladder. It’s taken directly from the words of Jesus: “Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse them.” (Keep in mind that blessing, here, means wishing good things for someone, and cursing means wishing bad things would happen to them.) “Do not repay anyone evil for evil.” “Live peaceably with all.” “Never avenge yourselves.” “Overcome evil with good.”

These are hard things in our faith. These are things that all of us really struggle with. They are the things that Peter himself struggled with, because, in reality, they form the cross-shaped life that Jesus calls us to, the cross that Peter desperately wanted Jesus to avoid. The cross that Jesus called Peter to, the cross he still calls each one of us, to take up daily.

After all, when we look to Jesus on the cross, we hear each of Paul’s phrases taking on their true weight and meaning: “bless those who persecute you” becomes “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” “Do not repay anyone evil for evil” becomes an image of Jesus, who commanded all the powers of Creation, refusing to evade human suffering by some divine magic trick. “Overcome evil with good” shows us Jesus, the one who would rather have died than to use violence on his enemies, receiving God’s approval and blessing through resurrection rather than revenge.

One of the greatest human rights heroes of the 20th century was also someone who found a way to live these values out in extraordinarily difficult circumstances: Archbishop Desmond Tutu. After the end of apartheid in South Africa and the liberation of Nelson Mandela from his 27 years of hard prison time, Tutu was selected to lead the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

The goal of the Commission was restorative and reparative justice rather than revenge. The goal was forgiveness. This was incredibly challenging work, since the human rights abuses of apartheid were terrible, and since Tutu and the Commission had to overcome the basic human problem of seeking violent retribution rather than embracing Jesus’s counterintuitive ethic of forgiveness.

Tutu was clear that, as he said later reflecting on this time in his life, “Forgiveness is not pretending that things are other than they really are.” Forgiveness, he believed, requires confrontation. Confrontation with the truth: “looking the beast in the eye.” It is not simply a blanket pardon. There is hard work here, the work to uncover the truth, to tell the truth, to expose the truth.

But where forgiveness really does its work is in letting go–not letting go of the past completely, but, as Tutu said: “[forgiveness is] letting go of your right to retaliation. It is like opening a window to let the fresh air rush into a dank closed room, it is drawing the curtains apart to let the light stream into a dark room.”

This understanding of forgiveness comes from Tutu’s Christian faith, but also from his African philosophy of ubuntu–meaning that a person is only a person because of other people. No one is an island. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality. And so forgiveness is the means by which we recognize our common humanity. It’s the means by which we see the face of God in one another. Violence and vengeance don’t just destroy the enemy; they destroy me, myself, because, as Tutu said, “we destroy ourselves when we destroy each other.”

I could give you more examples from Desmond Tutu, from Martin Luther King, Jr., from prophets and sages and ordinary people throughout the history of our faith. But I think you know that those stories, inspiring and beautiful as they are, are not where the rubber really meets the road. And so I would rather ask you to imagine your enemy right now. The one who stands against everything you believe in. The one who is so easy to curse. Or just someone who made a mistake that involved you. What does it look like to let go of your right to retaliation?

My grandfather, whom we called “Pop,” died in 2009. He was 87, a veteran of World War II who fought his way through central Europe, a carpenter, an artist, a boatbuilder, and a minister. At his funeral, our family had asked for military honors, and so the Army had sent an Honor Guard. But these were very young men. I don’t know if this was the first time they had done this, but they bungled it–I mean, they really screwed it up. It took them about 5 minutes to fold the flag, having to start over several times. The solemn mood that we craved in those moments was broken. It didn’t feel very honoring of Pop. And yet, after the ceremony, my grandmother was gracious and kind, thanking the young men for being there. She said later, “It’s okay–Pop was a young man, once, too. He made mistakes. We all do. He would have forgiven them, and I do, too.”

This week has been full of some profound conversations in the media. The rapper and ex-convict Jelly Roll, who had been serving as a guest host on The Jimmy Kimmel Show, offered a touching tribute to Dolly Parton as well as an apology for not, as he put it, “standing up for what’s right” in dodging political questions from reporters after he won 3 Grammys a few months ago.

I think one of the reasons that all of America has been feeling the death of Dolly Parton so deeply was beautifully put by Jelly Roll: she was, he said, “the last American that everyone liked.” She was someone who took Paul’s words very seriously: “If it is possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all.”

Desmond Tutu said “there is no future without forgiveness.” He meant it quite literally: letting go of our right to retaliation is the only way we can stay connected with our brothers, sisters, and siblings. It is the only way that we can live out the values and vision of Jesus Christ. It is the only way that we can find a love that is genuine. It is the only way that we, ourselves, can ask for and receive forgiveness from others, and from God, when we have fallen short of those same ideals. It is the only way that we can see, appreciate, and love the God-pieces in ourselves, and in one another.

AMEN.

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Read this post on Substack: https://adarmond.substack.com/p/no-future-without-forgiveness