One of the supplementary questions posed under this topic jarred on me. It was about the need for restitution before forgiveness. This sounds altogether too legalistic. Jesus approached sinners as people, rather than sin as an offence. He approached it as a healer, not as a judge.

Take, for example, the parable of the Prodigal Son (Luke 15,11-32). The son’s motive for returning to his father was not of the highest, hardly what we would call perfect contrition, but his father was waiting anxiously for him and welcomed him with a forgiving embrace before he could even complete his prepared speech of repentance and laid on a feast to celebrate his return, so that his stay-at-home older brother felt aggrieved, but their father said:

Jesus’ own practice matches this parable. His explanation to his host of his accepting the sinful woman who came in while they were at table and wept at his feet shows acceptance, not judgment:

There is a variant reading of this text in some old manuscripts. Some versions read: “she has loved much because many sins were forgiven her” rather than the other way round (“she has been forgiven much because she loved much”) as the more common reading goes. This shows that Jesus did not say she had to “love much” in order to be forgiven, (one reading of the words: “her … sins are forgiven because she has loved much”) but that the love she showed was a sign that she was forgiven. He is not going deep into moral theology. He is just stating an observable fact. The closing clause of v.47 says much the same: “he who is forgiven little, loves little”: either the love is a result of forgiveness, or a sign of its presence. God is not miserly when He gives out forgiveness.

He did not wait for Zacchaeus the publican to ask for forgiveness or to offer restitution. He called him down from his viewing point up a tree, and the rest followed:

I was always rather puzzled, when I was of an age to worry about these things, how Zacchaeus could give away half his goods, and still fully restore fourfold what he had swindled. The simple explanation is that Jesus didn’t demand full restoration before absolution: all He required was good will. He didn’t start by asking Zacchaeus whether he wanted forgiveness: He invited Himself to Zacchaeus’ house, and let it flow from there.

If it comes to that, He didn’t seem to consider “words of absolution” so important either. He isn’t recorded as telling many sinners “Your sins are forgiven” or “I forgive you” With the “sinful woman” above, he put more emphasis on pointing out the evidence that she was forgiven: her gesture of love. He treated Zacchaeus’ response the same way: He had invited Himself to Zacchaeus’ house, Zacchaeus accepted that and Jesus reminded the complaining bystanders that “He too is a son of Israel . . . salvation has come to this house.”

He did on occasion use the words “Your sins are forgiven”, as in Matthew 9,2-7:

but this was again in a context of healing. The man’s paralysis needed healing, but there was a deeper problem (we don’t know what the “sins” were). which had to be dealt with before the paralysis was healed.

He led the woman at Jacob’s Well on gently to an admission of her state and to a change of life. You won’t find words of absolution in John 4,5-30, but the essence of change, opening the way to healing and new growth, is there. These examples could be multiplied.

When I look at those who are popularly considered “terrible sinners”, I find it more and more difficult to see them as evil people, who clearly choose to do evil with “full knowledge and full consent”, as we were taught in the old pre-Vatican II catechism. (That was a marvellously concise summary of essential doctrines: in a different age, we must recognize its virtues. If it has been criticized by our generation, the criticism is more properly aimed at how it was used). I see enough of evil deeds and their consequences, but the more I see of the perpetrators, I can only feel they are sick, deeply sick in heart, mind and soul. I meet a young woman who has seen her husband beaten to death, her home burnt down, her child assaulted so that he died later of the injuries, was herself beaten up and gang-raped, and when she found a new refuge she was further tormented because she showed less than total enthusiasm for spending the night chanting the party slogans of the people who did all this. People she turned to for help got threatening phone calls - all this is diabolical, I agree, but there is a terrible sickness at the root of it. I hear the leaders who inspire all this spewing their hate on radio and TV and I can only say to myself “These people are sick”.  I can recognize too how easily the same sickness could infect me if I am not centred on His love and mercy. That is the root sickness Jesus came to heal.

In my personal contacts with Robert Mugabe and some of his cronies and enthusiastic supporters, the one descriptive word that springs to my mind for all of them is “paranoid”. That is a sickness, not a sin in terms of the definition I was taught all those years ago from the Penny Catechism. Looking back over my sixty-something years, I can only recall ever encountering one or two people whom I would be inclined, on what I know of them, to describe as evil. That is such a small number out of a large sample of humanity that those one or two are either untypical or I am misjudging because my knowledge is inadequate. I am not belittling the evil they do, but sinners, big and small, are, I conclude, not so much evil people as sick people. There is even a successful school of psychotherapy which draws its inspiration from a close study of St. John’s Gospel.

That doesn’t let you and me off the hook. Our sins may be more the result of our sickness and wounded ness, coming perhaps from our early experience, even before birth, or that of our parents and earlier forebears, but we have some responsibility for our own spiritual and psychological health. It may be more difficult to exercise this responsibility than it is for our bodily health, to which these do relate in ways that are sometimes fairly clear, sometimes not immediately clear at all. I am speaking in a world dominated by the Western model of medicine of recent centuries. Other cultures still retain at least parts of a more holistic view, in which the health of a human being as body-mind-spirit is seen as a seamless whole.

By now, I hope it is clear that I am rephrasing our traditional belief in original sin. We may have fallen into a mechanistic way of considering that. A major adolescent problem in faith came to me when I read of early hominid remains showing evidence of devastating dental caries - when I thought that all suffering and death itself came as a result of the Fall, understood as an automatic penalty for a specific act of disobedience by our first human parents. Now I can only say that original sin is a fact which explains our observation that here is a deep disorder in our world and in our lives which surely is not the will of God. Perhaps even of the Second Law of Thermodynamics (entropy, which can be treated as a statistical measure of disorder, always tends to increase) is a result of that disorder? Opinions of both scientists and theologians would be divided on that point.

We do have a responsibility for our mental and spiritual health and that of others, and we won’t  exercise it effectively within a mechanistic model which has a clear list of sins, with a clear categorising of the degree of guilt of each act and, as in Dante’s “Inferno”, a proportionate punishment for each, delivered automatically.

This identifies sin as the act, whereas we know sin lies in the intention. It is not the act that is sinful (carries guilt with it), but the intention of the person performing the act. I can never judge that another person, whatever horrible deeds s/he might commit, is actually condemned by God or by his/her own conscience. All I can know is my own guilt, my own conscious choice of the evil or the less good. If we remain aware of this, we cannot make any claim to be better than anyone else, whatever we might see that person doing. The mechanical “tit-for-tat” view of sin and punishment belittles God and devalues the human will and conscience.

The mechanistic model sees our sin (all sin is ultimately original sin) as something like a fault in the operation of a machine. The first response to it is to try to fix it. Cut out the sin, replace it with a virtue,. . . . and if we can’t fix it within that mode of thinking and operating, we try to dissociate ourselves from it. “It was the Devil, or possibly bad company, who led me into it.” Or whatever the reason, my sinfulness is not recognized as a part of me. The legalistic approach leads to the mechanistic approach, of extirpating our vices and building virtues which emerged in the late Middle Ages, most notably in such works as Thomas A Kempis’ “The Imitation of Christ”. If I am honest, I admit that I always had problems relating that to the Jesus of the Gospels.

If we condemn the big public sinners, we must say they are somehow different from us. When we open our spiritual eyes a bit wider, we see something of them in ourselves and must dissociate ourselves from that. We seek a perfection in which we will be free of this “external” sinfulness. But when we go deeper, we realise the deep christian truth that we never will succeed in this task during our life on this earth.

Another problem with the mechanistic model is that it puts the burden of re-forming ourselves firmly on our own weak human shoulders, rather than where it should be, on the shoulders of Christ. That is the weight of His cross. (I am by-passing here the theology of our sharing in that. We do share it, but, even if we have any strength, it comes from Him, and this model tends to ignore that.) This approach emphasises the strong stoical man, fighting his vices, building virtues and keeping an account of his “progress” in this effort.  Incidentally, he is more often a man. My mother suffered the pain of seeing both her father and my own father die of illnesses they insisted on bearing alone and “not troubling the women”. That same stoicism drove them to deny, at least to those nearest to them, the terminal illness they were struggling with, and to implicitly, by this denial, reject help in that struggle. At least in my father’s case, my mother suffered far greater anxiety from knowing there was something very wrong with him, but not knowing what it was that if he had told her clearly: “The doctor has given me this diagnosis and reckons I have only so many months to live.”

If we need that kind of support in our bodily illnesses, surely we need it in our spiritual struggles too?

We will never be perfect in this life, so why don’t we cherish our imperfect selves? Another valid insight of modern psychology is that we can never love others, warts and all, if we do not, at that level, love ourselves, warts and all. That implies a different model of how the whole system works. If you are setting out to repair a machine, you don’t need to love the machine (though sailors’ tradition of calling their ship “she” shows an attempt at a more human attitude to this vehicle) and surely the most powerful force for christian transformation is love? We can never completely escape from an older, more valid model appropriate to living, growing things. Even the word “extirpate”, which I used above, means originally to remove by the roots, an agricultural image. You can love growing things or a garden. The best gardeners are said to have green fingers, a way with plants which shows they care for them. There will always be weeds, bugs and slugs in a garden, but you don’t need to extirpate a lot of what you find there or smother the place with weed killers and pesticides. We know now that such a method only produces tougher weeds and pests. You help everything to find its place. A weed has been described as a plant that is out its proper place. In our garden last year one solitary stalk of corn shot up among the ornamental flowers. There, you could have called it a weed. In fact, to emphasise what great eaters of corn meal and drinkers of corn beer Zimbabweans are, we left it there and if visitors commented on it, we said “Isn’t it our national flower?” But I digress.

A good gardener loves his garden and tries to bring out the best in it. He or she doesn’t plant his most demanding and delicate flowers in the rocky corner: he may make a rockery there. S/he gets to know which plants help each other, either by fertilising the soil for each other (with fallen leaves, or nitrogen they fix in the soil), shade those which need shade, or discourage insect pests. Some even include a pond so that frogs and maybe even ducks will make a home there and improve the garden by eating insect pests. This seems to me an altogether more appropriate model for our spiritual life. I leave you to develop that parable, but be careful. Parables, even Jesus’ parables, don’t stand attempts to turn them into allegory, which fits the exemplar at every point.