Reading: Matthew 5:38-48, and 7:15-20
Children’s Story

The Diamond
The sannyasi had reached the outskirts of the village and settled down under a tree for the night when a villager came running up to him and said, “The stone! The stone! Give me the precious stone!” “What stone?” asked the sannyasi.
“Last night the Lord Shiva appeared to me in a dream,” said the villager, “and told me that if I went to the outskirts of the village at dusk I should find a sannyasi who would give me a precious stone that would make me rich forever.” The sannyasi rummaged in his bag and pulled out a stone. “He probably meant this one,” he said, as he handed the stone over to the villager. “I found it on a forest path some days ago. You can certainly have it.” The man gazed at the stone in wonder. It was a diamond, probably the largest diamond in the whole world, for it was as large as a person’s head. He took the diamond and walked away. All night he tossed about in bed, unable to sleep. Next day at the crack of dawn, he woke the sannyasi and said, “Give me the wealth that makes it possible for you to give this diamond away so easily.”
(Anthony de Mello, The Song of the Bird, pages 140-1)

ADDRESS
It was very easy for me to pick my woman of the year 2005. Her name is Verona Walker, the mother of Anthony Walker, the 17 year-old who was killed with an axe in a racially motivated attack in Liverpool in July of last year. After the trial of the two young men who perpetrated this unspeakable crime, Verona, an evangelical Christian, was interviewed by the press, and, in answer to the question, ‘Can you ever forgive your son’s murderers?’ she said simply, ‘I do forgive them. What choice do I have? When Jesus was dying on the cross, he said, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do,” and I have to forgive too.’
Who could fail to be moved, or even shocked, by such words? Even the cynical journalists, eager for some call for revenge to incorporate into the next day’s headlines – ‘Mother hopes son’s killers will rot in hell,’ or ‘Lock them up and throw away the key, says grieving mother,’ – seemed silenced by this noble woman’s quiet dignity. In yet another year in which we religious people seem to be making fools of ourselves, attacking this, protesting about that, demanding the other, Verona Walker expressed the essence of Christian morality in a couple of sentences, which have probably done more to further the Christian cause than any number of sermons, public demonstrations, or theological treatises. ‘What choice do I have?’ she asks, implying that, in some particulars at least, the message of Christ is so clear, so unequivocal, that there is no room for casuistical interpretation. ‘Jesus says we have to forgive our enemies, to pray for those who would injure us, and I, as a follower of Jesus, must do that. It is costly, but if I didn’t do it, I would have to stop calling myself a Christian.’ Such seem to be Verona’s sentiments.
Just how costly such an expression of forgiveness must be is, ironically, being dramatised currently in Coronation Street, Britain’s longest running soap opera. The elderly Emily Bishop has recently met and befriended a man in her church, a helpful, soft-spoken, gentle man, with whom Emily’s friend Eileen has started a romantic relationship. He’s made no secret of the fact that he has a prison record, but he claims to have found God in prison and to be a reformed character. Emily – whose Christianity is never parodied in Coronation Street – accepted the reality of his transformation. Until last Monday, that is, when Ed. told her that he had been in prison for murdering her husband Earnest in a bungled armed robbery twenty-odd years ago. Emily’s first reaction was to spurn the man’s request for forgiveness, to accuse him of trying to assuage his troubled conscience, and she asks him to leave the house. She cannot forgive him, she says, but she is already realising that her refusal to forgive seriously undermines her claim to be a Christian. It will be interesting to see how the scriptwriters handle this issue in future episodes.
What these two situations – one fictional, on all too real – illustrate is that one’s faith commitment is not tested by what one says, but by what one does. In the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7), which has stood for two thousand years as the standard by which all Christians must judge their own behaviour, Jesus says that the world will know his followers by their actions, not by the creeds they recite, or the type of worship they engage in. ‘By their fruits you will know them,’ he says. ‘Just as you know whether a tree is good or bad by the quality of fruit it produces, so you will know my disciples by the quality of life they lead.’ How strange then that the Christian world - in certain quarters – refusing to use the criterion of its master, and choosing instead to judge whether or not a person is a follower of Christ on the basis of what they say they believe. In complete defiance of Jesus’ words, Christians have tortured and killed each other over disagreements about words and formulae. The more extreme cases of inter-denominational persecution may be over, but in case you think the spirit of it is dead, I would like to direct your attention to this recent edition of the Inquirer, which has the headline, ‘Chester disinvites the G.A.’.
Let me explain. For the past few years the General Assembly of Unitarian and Free Christian Churches has held its annual meetings on a University campus in Chester, and because there is no really big Unitarian church nearby, our Anniversary Service has been held in Chester Anglican Cathedral. In the past we’ve been warmly welcomed by the Dean of the Cathedral, and congratulated on our sensitive, uplifting service. But we will not be invited again, because someone has protested against our presence. Who that person is I don’t know, but I can guess why he or she has protested. It’s because we Unitarians don’t accept that Jesus is God. That’s the simple reason. Not because we cavort naked around the altar, or sacrifice babies to Moloch, or utter blasphemies from the pulpit, or encourage civil strife, but because we do not say the Nicene Creed. As a consequence Chester Cathedral will lost the much-needed money we pay to hire the place, and we will have to make the lengthy and expensive trip to Ullett Road Unitarian church in Liverpool. The principle of ‘by their creeds you will know them’, seems to be alive and well in certain sections of Christendom. As Eric said to me last week, ‘Sectarians major on the minor.’
But majoring on the minor is not a characteristic of Verona Walker. She understands that forgiveness – not belief or disbelief in the Trinity – is one of the basic, defining principles of Christianity, and it is this principle I want to explore very briefly in what’s left of this address. And the first thing I want to say about it is that it is not exclusively Christian. It is as central to Buddhism as it is to Christianity, and, in fact, it can be found in all the major religious systems of the world. And there is good reason for this: it has long been recognised by spiritual mentors – and is now being discovered by psychologists and counsellors – that forgiving one’s enemies is psychologically healthy. The Gospels tell us that if we forgive our enemies we will be rewarded by God, but we are not to infer from this that the reward will be given to us when we die. Verona Walker understands this. She said, ‘Why should the actions of my son’s killers condemn me to live with bitterness?’ Nursing grievances, harbouring thoughts of revenge, wishing evil on someone, actually corrodes the soul. But, you may be asking, how do you stop yourself feeling what it is perfectly natural to feel? The Gospels give the answer: you must pray for your enemies. You must force yourself to wish health and welfare to those who have abused you for the sake of your own psychological well-being. It is not a soppy act of resigned defeat, but a positive act of self-preservation, a refusal to allow the actions of another to determine your mental state.
But there is another dimension to this; the perpetrator does not get off scot free. In his Letter to the Romans (12:20-21), St. Paul says (quoting the Book of Proverbs in the Hebrew Scriptures), ‘If your enemy is hungry, feed him. If he is thirsty, give him something to drink. In doing this you will be heaping burning coals on his head.’ Be careful not to misinterpret this. Paul doesn’t mean that our kind actions will actually cause our enemy to suffer after death; he means that our kindness will cause a kind of transforming suffering in him now. People don’t know what to do with forgiveness; hatred we can handle; revenge we can understand; forgiveness leaves us disorientated. Imagine the reaction of the two young men who killed Anthony Walker to the news that Anthony’s mother has forgiven them; they will be thrown off balance, incapable of a predictable, automatic response. Suddenly they are forced into a serious reappraisal of their actions which most certainly would not have occurred had she refused to forgive them. If she had said she hated them, and that they should rot in hell, they would have fed off that hatred and no doubt their racism would have been intensified as a result. As it is, they probably don’t know where they are: the coals are burning on their heads, but these are the fires of purgation and transformation – at least potentially.
Jesus says, ‘If someone forces you to walk a mile with them, walk two.’ This is a reference to the custom by which a Roman soldier could conscript a Jewish citizen and force him to carry his pack. But he could only make him walk one mile, no more. If the conscripted one reluctantly picked up his burden, murmured imprecations under his breath as he walked, and dropped the pack the moment the mile was up, the soldier would be confirmed in his contempt, and would probably be quick to humiliate another Jew in this way. Imagine the other approach: bearing the burden cheerfully, and actually volunteering to continue after the mile was completed. Only a psychopath would remain unmoved. This is not weakness; it’s not even virtue; it’s strategy. (I would add, however, that this only works with someone who possesses the normal range of human emotions, however latent some of them might be. Psychopaths – people who do not have the full range – need to be handled differently.)
What applies to individuals applies equally to nations. Whenever an Israeli or Palestinian suicide bomber commits some atrocity, the first reaction of the injured nation is to call for reprisals. It is a perfectly comprehensible response, but you can guarantee that taking revenge will ensure that your side will suffer again in the future. Mark Twain explains it all very neatly in Huckleberry Finn, which is one of the truly great American novels. Huck finds himself with a young lad called Buck, who kills a member of an enemy family. Huck says:
"Did you want to kill him, Buck?"
"Well, I bet I did."
"What did he do to you?"
"Him? He never done nothing to me."
"Well, then, what did you want to kill him for?"
"Why, nothing -- only it’s on account of the feud."
"What’s a feud?"
"Why, where was you raised? Don’t you know what a feud is?"
"Never heard of it before -- tell me about it."
"Well," says Buck, "a feud is this way: A man has a quarrel with another man, and kills him; then that other man’s brother kills him; then the other brothers, on both sides, goes for one another; then the cousins chip in -- and by and by everybody’s killed off, and there ain’t no more feud. But it’s kind of slow, and takes a long time."
Isn’t that the way of it? Isn’t that international conflict in a nutshell? In Israel, in Northern Ireland, wherever you find these protracted engagements? In yet another irony in an area littered with ironies, we see how it takes the non-religious Mark Twain to teach religious people a few elementary principles.
‘Never did hatred put an end to hatred,’ says the Buddha. If you want to bring a stop to hatred, then stop hating. Verona Walker knows this well. What she has is a gift more precious than diamonds. Like the man in our children’s story today, we should all be asking her, ‘Give me what you have, that enables you to forgive your son’s killers,’ because until more of us have that gift, the world will continue spiralling into chaos.
Bill Darlison Dublin Unitarian Church 19th February, 2006