Forgiveness: a road-trip
Evensong: Fourth Sunday of Lent (Mothering Sunday)
Prayer of Manasseh
2 Timothy 4.1-18
On this Mothering Sunday, as the mother of two young adults, I found that one phrase in particular from tonight’s readings struck a chord with me. It’s the part of our New Testament reading where the author of the Second Letter to Timothy, purporting to be St. Paul, writes, ‘When you come, bring the cloak that I left with Carpus at Troas, also the books and above all the parchments’. This kind of message is all too familiar – the only difference between then and now is that it tends to arrive on my phone by text. At this end of term, though, rather than conveying forgotten items, the job of the parent is more a case of bringing everything home, stuffed higgledy-piggledy into the car, and so in the past week or so, we have been making long journeys without being able to see out of the rear windscreen.
These journeys are a great opportunity for Dom and Eliza to educate their mother about an eclectic range of music, and for us all to have a proper catch-up and talk about all sorts of things. So, after I had had my fill of Shoegaze music (for the uninitiated, this is described as ‘a subgenre of Indie and alternative rock, characterised by its ethereal mixture of obscured vocals, guitar distortion and effects, feedback, and overwhelming volume’), and as it doesn’t get much air-time, I decided last week to lob the Prayer of Manasseh and the concept of divine forgiveness into the conversation and see where we went with it.
The Prayer of Manasseh is part of the Apocrypha – the non-canonical books which are nonetheless regarded by Anglicans as useful to read ‘for example of life and instruction of manners’, as Article 6 of the 39 Articles puts it. It is sometimes used as a canticle in our daily prayer, and it has the structure of a penitential psalm. It purports to be written by quite the worst king of Judah. Manasseh, the son of Hezekiah, reigned in the Seventh Century BC for 55 years. His father had banished idols and forbidden the worship of foreign gods, but Manasseh took it upon himself to reinstate them. The account of his life can be found in the Second Book of Kings and the Second Book of Chronicles, in which we read that he leads the people astray, and that they do not listen to the Lord, who, in response, becomes determined to secure the fall of Jerusalem, saying memorably that he will bring ‘such evil that the ears of everyone who hears of it will tingle’, and that he ‘will wipe Jerusalem as one wipes a dish, wiping it and turning it upside down’. 2 Kings speaks of Manasseh’s bloodshed, sin, and eventual death, but 2 Chronicles goes into more detail, outlining his capture and imprisonment in Babylon. Here we read that, while manacled and held captive, and in a state of distress, Manasseh humbled himself and prayed to the Lord. And so in this apocryphal text, we have an idea of what that prayer might have been.
Manasseh starts by invoking God – calling upon him directly, and telling of his power, but also of his compassion: ‘…[I]n the multitude of your mercies,’ he says, ‘you have appointed repentance for sinners, so that they may be saved’. And then he makes it personal: ‘…[Y]ou have appointed repentance for me, who am a sinner’. This leads to his confession – and it is a good one. He uses the iron fetters which literally bind him as an image for the weight of his sins, and through the writing, we are invited in to the experience of that weight – the heaviness which bows one’s head and averts one’s eyes from the searching light of truth.
In the final part of the prayer, he turns that crushing weight into a decisive and beautiful downwards action, as he asks for mercy: ‘And now I bend the knee of my heart, imploring you for your kindness’, he says. Twice, he acknowledges that he has sinned. Twice, he asks for forgiveness.
Going back to the account of Manasseh’s life in 2 Chronicles, we read that this repentance does indeed result in forgiveness: ‘God received his entreaty, heard his prayer and restored him again to Jerusalem and to his kingdom’. Then, having been himself restored by the grace of God, he goes on to restore the worship of the Lord in Jerusalem. The repentant Manasseh receives for his overwhelming sins, overwhelming forgiveness, which frees him to live in right relationship with God and his neighbours – a wonderful story for us to inhabit as we pause on this Refreshment Sunday.
The first question posed to me in the car, after we had talked about this, was an unexpected one. How, I was asked, does religion differ from Obsessive Compulsive Disorder? In some variants of OCD, the sufferer feels an urge to carry out rituals, in order to stop something bad happening. This, on one level, is what Manasseh is doing: he is, as we do, formally repenting, using an established threefold pattern of prayer – invocation, repentance, petition - in the hope that God will not ‘condemn’ him to ‘the depths of the earth’. Is this actually disordered thinking on his part? And as such, does it hold up a mirror to disordered thinking of our own?
I found this a challenging idea. My first instinct was simply to say no, but actually, I’m sure that many of us have a tendency to think a bit like this: there’s straightforward superstition, of course – if I wear this lucky charm, or recite these words, or don’t tread on the third paving stone, then it’ll all be OK. But this way of being can also creep into our lives of faith. It can lead us, paradoxically, to use ritual as a means of keeping God at bay: our general confession, for example, is tidy enough that we can recite it neatly and self-referentially, without daring to lift our averted eyes to the one we’re addressing: ‘If I do this, perhaps bad things won’t happen’.
But this thought pushed me back to the recollection of how Manasseh uses the ritual. This prayer is a cry from a heart whose knees are bending in supplication. Manasseh might be using an established pattern, but he is connecting, beyond himself and his rituals, with the One who has the power to liberate him. Tellingly, it is only when he has reached rock-bottom that he finally has the will to turn back to God, and then the response is immediate and filled with love. Significantly, too, God’s response engenders in him a spirit of obedience, and faithfulness, and love, which causes him to turn outwards from himself in service to God and his people.
The difference between this kind of use of religious ritual, and the deadening, never-ending cycles of mental obsession, is that because it takes us beyond ourselves, turning our faces to God, painful and nerve-jangling though the experience might be, this brings us life.
But then came a second question from one of my passengers: Is forgiveness a moment, or a state? After a bit of a wrestle, and a few more miles clocked up along the M20, this put me in mind of quantum physics, and the way in which light can be both a particle and a wave. I wanted to answer that, just like light, forgiveness exists in two forms at once: both a moment and a state.
Our own sin and repentance involves particular turning points. There was the prospect of tingling ears at the wrath of God, in 2 Chronicles, but in the Second Letter to Timothy, the ears are itching instead, as the author warns of whole swathes of people going astray, turning away from the truth and listening to those who peddle myths. This kind of turning away, which of course all of us do, necessitates a turning back - a decisive moment, like that of Manasseh’s confession. This turning back entails forcing ourselves to face the reality of what we have done, and to bring it into the light. And at this decisive moment, when we repent, we receive the grace of God.
So in that sense, forgiveness is a moment. But it is a moment made possible only by the presence of the constant stream of forgiveness which is always available to us. Rowan Williams, writing about the healing of memory in his book Resurrection, says, ‘The word of forgiveness is not audible for the one who has not “turned” to his or her past…’ He then goes on to address the issue of seemingly unforgivable people, such as those who perpetrated the Holocaust – those people who are not ‘there’ to be forgiven, who are, as he puts it, ‘shadows spinning on the path to annihilation’. The whole idea of forgiveness looks hopeless in the context of those who will not turn, ‘And yet,’ he goes on, ‘God holds and keeps open in his life, his “memory”, even such people’.
It is this open life, freely present to us, which gives rise to the words ascribed to Paul in this letter - words which can so easily sound arrogant and priggish, but which are fundamentally the expression, in the face of imminent death, of the living hope that is stronger than anything which can assail the body - he knows that a crown is reserved for him, because of the forgiveness that is at the heart of the relationships of our triune God, and the love which moves among them and invites us to participate in salvation. This is the state of forgiveness which is a constant in our lives, and which enables those moments – those turning points – in which we can know ourselves to be forgiven. But even before those turning points can happen, this is the state of forgiveness which provides the encouragement we need in order to make ourselves vulnerable enough to receive mercy. Because it is we who need to bend the knees of our hearts, before we can accept the abundance of God’s deliverance. John Donne tackles this issue in his Holy Sonnet IV – ‘Oh my black soul’, in which he addresses his seemingly condemned and imprisoned soul. He immediately identifies the stream of forgiveness, saying ‘Yet grace, if thou repent, thou canst not lack’, but at the same time wonders how to make that all-important turn: ‘But who shall give thee that grace to begin?’ The grace comes through making oneself black with mourning and red with blushing, he concludes, but also from consciously immersing oneself in the death-defying love of our Saviour: ‘[W]ash thee in Christ’s blood, which hath this might / That being red, it dyes red souls to white’.
So, like light itself, particle and wave, the forgiveness of God happens in specific times and places, but is also a dynamic entity – an energy which surrounds us, always desiring to bring us life.
I am very grateful to my in-car interlocutors for always pushing me to think hard, challenging my preconceptions, and providing fresh perspectives on things I thought I knew. And that long car journey came at a good time. This Sunday marks a tipping point in Lent, as we turn in these coming weeks towards the shedding of Christ’s blood for our sakes. So as we shift the focus of our prayer and our thinking, now is a good time to re-calibrate our repentance: to ensure that our familiar furrows of self-examination are actually doing what we intend them to do; to check whether we are being brave enough in accepting the grace we are offered; to allow ourselves, as we are overwhelmed by that grace, to know that we are forgiven, and to live as people whose red souls have been dyed white – and so to inhabit the beautiful paradox of our faith that as we draw closer to death in Christ, so we draw closer to life.
Amen.