Foregiveness

Forgiveness

“Count yourselves dead to sin but alive to God in Christ Jesus.” Romans 6.11

It is said that when Leonardo Da Vinci painted the Last Supper he used the innocent face of a choir boy for his portrait of Our Lord. Much later (and he took many years to complete it) he looked for a suitable model for Judas and found it in the degenerate and corrupt face of a dissolute young man recruited from the gutter

Something familiar about the face prompted him to ask the young man about his origins. And to his surprise and horror it was the same choir boy who had fallen into a life of debauchery and sin.

And this is part of our common human dilemma. For the same face can present innocence and corruption. We, as fully human creatures, are endowed with the awful responsibility of choice.

As Paul puts it later on in this letter:

“So I find this law at work: when I want to do good, evil is right there with me.” (7.21)

Children: hands up if you never do anything wrong!

Let’s explore this subject by way of another sinner who struggled with the Flaw at the heart of human nature, John Donne (1573-1631). He belongs to that period of English church history that is presently hotly debated. His life spans the years in which Anglicanism as a distinctive form of Christianity – encompassing Catholic and Protestant elements – came into being.

Donne came from a Roman Catholic family. Yet, after a vivid and chaotic life, he embraced the current Anglicanism of Jacobean England. There is a debate about this. Was Donne a precursor of the Catholic-minded High Churchman or a convert to the prevailing Calvinism of the Church of England at that time?

One of his poems illustrates this debate very well – A Hymn to God the Father. It’s a poem about choice. And choice – God’s choice of us, His election, His predestination of His creatures – is at the heart of the Catholic/Calvinistic apposition, as it was at the heart of Donne’s life.

As you read this poem you are reminded of the choices and contrasts in Donne’s career: from ‘Don Juan’ to Dean of St Paul’s; from ‘Man of the World’ to ‘Man of God’; from dashing young love poet to the shrouded marble corpse that still stands today as his memorial in the aisle of St Paul’s Cathedral.

Donne knew all about original sin and Augustine and Calvin’s emphasis on the ‘total depravity’ of man. He would take very seriously indeed the 9th Article of Religion, formulated just before his birth: that "man… is of his own nature… inclined to evil".

Not surprisingly then in his poem Donne first confesses the effects of original sin: the sin of Adam; the first choice that went so very wrong, but also the choices now that we know will go wrong: the weight; the burden (almost too much to bear) of our ethical, moral being.

Even from outside the Garden we still hear God’s voice announcing: "Behold the man is become like one of us, knowing good from evil". Donne writhes in that Calvinistic, that human consciousness of the trapped-ness of existence. And to lighten it a little, he makes a play on his name ‘Donne’, throughout the poem. Let me read the first verse that looks back to Adam’s sin:

Wilt Thou forgive that sin where I begun,
Which was my sin, though it were done before?
Wilt Thou forgive that sin through which I run,
And do run still, though still I do deplore?
When Thou hast done, Thou hast not done;
For I have more.

He’s trapped. And yet, even within this moral prison, he is aware of something else: a counter weight that is both a clue to Donne’s own spiritual experience and to the internal workings of Anglican spirituality in general. The clue is in the second verse, and it lies in this corporate nature of our sin. We’re in this together.

Wilt Thou forgive that sin by which I won
Others to sin, and made my sin their door?
Wilt Thou forgive that sin which I did shun
A year or two, but wallow'd in a score?
When Thou hast done, Thou hast not done;
For I have more.

Donne’s past life was a torment to him. He knew only too well the lure, the compulsion, of sin. But he was especially shamed by the memory of those he had won to sin by his own sins: those who made his sin their door to corruption. And this is most painful to him as it is to us!

But look more closely at this poem. In this torture there is healing. In this remorse there is redemption. And here maybe is the Catholic counter-point to Donne’s Calvinism. For the Church teaches that sin is relational. We drag others down with our sin.

But at the same time the opposite is true. Namely, that our repentance, or sanctity, can raise others up! Furthermore, we can be redeemed by that same common humanity that was this first cause of our sin.

And here is the pivotal point of the poem as it was the pivotal point of Donne’s life. Yes, he found degradation in abuse, the rage of his human relationships. But his ultimate salvation comes through that humanity: our humanity which God has made the instrument of our redemption in the human Christ Jesus.

Donne is perhaps the first truly Anglican poet. For in this poem we see him poised – historically, doctrinally - between Protestant and Catholic insight; between saint and sinner; between human experience and biblical truth. This is what Paul wrestles with in this epistle.

For Donne, this resolution is fully worked out as the poem (more of a confession than poem) reaches its climax in the final verse – a final verse that, curiously enough, reminds us of another 17th century poet with far better Protestant credentials; namely John Bunyan.

You may recall in Pilgrim’s Progress, Christian is shown a vision of a man locked in a room: the room of his own despair; despair that he can ever be saved; despair that he can ever be loved by God.

And this too is Donne’s last fear – his greatest horror. Why? Because it is the underlying neurosis of the human condition; now, in the 21st century, as then in the 17th.

We too fear being locked into an empty Godless universe. We too fear being locked out from the love of an Almighty Parent-God.

But Donne, unlike many today in the West, can see - can allow himself to see - the human face of God shining from the face of this clouded universe.

John Donne believes in the Incarnation; believes that God and Man, the objective and the subjective, the spiritual and the material, meet in the person of Jesus Christ – we are alive to God in Christ Jesus.

I have a sin of fear, that when I've spun
My last thread, I shall perish on the shore;
But swear by Thyself that at my death Thy Son
Shall shine as He shines now and heretofore:
And having done that, Thou hast done;
I fear no more.

In our sophisticated, liberal Western lives, we sometimes forget the simple assurance and wonder of the Gospel: that our sins are forgiven.

I remember Neil, who had a past, after communion – tears streaming down his face – 'you ought to put tissues in the pews!' he stammered. He was overwhelmed with the fact that he was forgiven and loved by God.

Let this Gospel sacrament this morning remind you, as you taste the bread and the wine, that you are forgiven, and that you should

“Count yourselves dead to sin but alive to God in Christ Jesus.” Romans 6.11