Please forgive the topic this morning; it’s tragic and horrific.
I want to talk about what happened on October 2, 2006, when Charles Roberts, tormented for years by the loss of his infant daughter, finally snapped. Randomly, it seems, he entered a small Amish schoolhouse near Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania and opened fire; five young girls lost their lives, more were injured. A crime now hellishly common, this is but one of them. You may remember it, you may not, now that we’ve become so numb to this sort of thing, this sort of thing now sadly normal.
But it’s not the crime that I want to talk about, nor the phenomena of violence in our society which we can’t seem to figure out, much less stop. Rather, it’s what happened after this horrible crime, only hours after, in fact, that I find so remarkable.
The killer had a wife, named Amy, and other children too, and extended family. Roberts had called his wife just before the shooting; she and her family were, obviously, devastated by this blindside tragedy, huddled together in a world now reeling in anger as news of what their husband, father, and son had done spread all over the world. Alone, they had no one by their side, and no one cared either, understandably, because of the wickedness of one of their own.
Except, however, for the people who should’ve hated them the most, which is the remarkable thing I want us to think about. You see, within hours of the shooting, members of the Amish community were at the door of the killer’s family. There in their living room, they expressed sorrow for the killer’s wife and her family, and they told them they didn’t hold anything against them, that they forgave them. One Amish man held the killer’s father (a retired police officer) in his arms for an hour; “We forgive you,” he said. At one of the funerals, the grandfather of one of the victims said, “We shouldn’t think evil of the man who did this.” Later, that same grandfather said of the killer’s family: “I hope they stay around here. They’ll have lots of friends and support.” When, a few days later, the killer himself was buried in the little Methodist cemetery nearby, dozens of Amish showed up at the graveside and consoled the family; the funeral director said, “that is something I’ll never forget…I knew that I was witnessing a miracle.” Several weeks later when the killer’s family and the families of the victims came together in the local fire station, they just talked and cried; as one who was there said, “There were a lot of tears shed that day. There was a higher power in the room.”
A reaction many didn’t expect, it bewildered many. That the Amish would forgive so quickly, and seemingly so genuinely, made headlines across the world. “Do you have any anger toward the gunman’s family?” one reporter asked the grandfather of one of the victims. “No,” he answered. “Have you already forgiven them?” “In my heart, yes.” “How is that possible?” she asked. “Through God’s help,” he said. Accused of ignoring reality, the number of sideline voices—opinion columnists and scholars and so-called experts—so many of them criticized what the Amish had done, calling them naïve, misdirected by their strange, isolated faith.
But as one Amish man said of all the criticism: “Why is everybody all surprised? It’s just standard Christian forgiveness; it’s what everybody should be doing.” For the Amish, their reaction, their forgiveness: it’s just what Christians do, they believe. For them, the words of Jesus about forgiveness, the words of the Lord’s Prayer, are clear and simple, needing no further interpretation: “forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.” “We have to forgive,” one Amish woman said, “in order for God to forgive us.” This is what so many others couldn’t understand, what made some angry: that forgiveness could be like that, that it should be so quick and given so freely; that it should happen just like Jesus said.
“It’s just standard Christian forgiveness;” that’s what I want us to think about, because it’s something many of us don’t believe. That Christians are called to forgive like that, immediately, to forgive the worst sort of crime and the worst sort of criminal: most of us don’t believe that. We think we should forgive someone only when our emotions allow it, when we feel like forgiving someone; and some things we shouldn’t forgive. Just because Jesus said love your enemies and forgive those who sin against you, that doesn’t change the bitter reality of this bitter world, so we think. “It’s just standard Christian forgiveness,” he said; that’s what I want us to think about. Because it’s the Gospel; it’s Christianity; it’s what Jesus taught, what the Amish did when they embraced that killer’s family mere hours after the shooting. That is what Christianity looks like, grace like light in darkness.
But, as I said, many of us don’t believe this; because, again as I said, many of us misunderstand what Jesus meant when he told his disciples to forgive. When Jesus commanded his disciples to forgive, he wasn’t talking about the emotions or feelings we normally associate with forgiveness; Jesus wasn’t saying I want you to feel forgiveness, rather, he just commanded us to forgive. He wasn’t talking about our feelings; he was talking about our actions. Our feelings are our feelings. We may feel angry or sad or indifferent; that’s just the way humans are. Jesus wasn’t asking us to change our feelings. Of course, there are times to feel angry or sad, but that’s not what Jesus was talking about when he commanded his disciples to forgive. Rather, he was talking about action, the act of the will. What he meant was that his disciples should be the sort of people who can, because of their faith and because of a little grace, transcend their emotions and act out a love that’s God-like; like God’s love for the ungodly and wicked, love so great his sent his only Son to die for them against all common sense.
Forgiveness as action, not feeling: that’s Christianity. As one victim’s father put it, “Our forgiveness is not in our words, it’s in our actions; it’s not what we said, but what we did. That was our forgiveness.” Following the shooting, members of the Amish community brought the gunman’s family flowers and meals. When a fund was started to help victims’ families, they asked, “Who will take care of them now since they have no income?” They collected money for the gunman’s family, because they needed help too. Forgiveness that’s an act of love, not bound by our emotions: that’s what Jesus taught. It’s what he wanted his disciples to practice. As I said, this is Christianity, however strange it sounds to you. This is the Gospel; to put it plainly, it is simply how you and I are called to live as followers of Jesus. That is, if we really mean what we say we believe. If the love of God is really different; if our faith is real.
Now I bring this up this Sunday in Advent—a Sunday traditionally given over to the Gospel’s message of repentance and forgiveness—because it’s a truth essential to our faith, but which many of us either don’t know, profoundly misunderstand, or disbelieve. It’s confusion common among Christians as well as unbelievers, to miss this essential radical element of Jesus’ teaching, replacing our own emotional pettiness with the clear teaching of Jesus to forgive. Most of us unwilling to live the gospel of forgiveness, we practice merely an emotional religion. It’s why so much of the Gospel makes no sense to us, because we don’t let it question our grudges and prejudices. Because we refuse to see how the Gospel is simple and that Jesus is actually talking to us about our real lives, about the people in our lives we stubbornly refuse to forgive.
When Christ first appeared, when the Gospel was first preached, the world was full of noise, full of distraction. It was the Gospel that was small, hard to find, seemingly insignificant, easy to overlook. “In the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar, when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea;” never mind them, Luke says, pay attention to John. In the second year of the Trump administration, when Greg Abbott was governor of Texas, when Ted Cruz barely beat Beto; never mind them, pay attention to your own lives, your own relationships, your own sins. Don’t get distracted. Look to yourself and your own family; because it’s there you’ll see what God wants you to see; there you’ll find what you need to repent of, what you need to change. That’s where the Gospel matters first: in our own lives, in whether we’re willing, finally, to live the simple radical truth of Jesus and quit faking it.
It’s why in this Advent season if you want to find Christ, you’ll find him only in the forgiveness of those sins you need to confess and in the person you refuse to forgive, that person for whom you bear that bitter grudge. Christ is indeed hard to find. In fact, he may be hiding from you, hiding behind the person you still won’t forgive, because you refuse to listen to his teaching because you refuse to soften your heart. That’s likely reason you can’t see him, or that you see some false image of him. And it’s also why this, really, is the work of Advent, the work of mercy, the work of your soul, the work you must do. Amen.
-Fr. Joshua J. Whitfield
