Archbishop Alan Harper’s Enthronement Sermon

I want to speak of the single most important issue for all of us here, in this island of Ireland, today. I want to speak of forgiveness and reconciliation

I begin - and I shall end – with these words:

I say to you that listen, Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you. If anyone strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also; and for anyone who takes away your coat do not withhold even your shirt. Give to anyone who begs from you; and, if anyone takes away your goods, do not ask for them again. Do to others as you would have them do to you.

These are the words of Jesus Christ recorded in their most radical, stark and un-worldly form by the healer and evangelist St Luke. They strike our ears as naïve, unreasonable, impractical, unattainable. They represent, however, the standard against which our individual and corporate living out of the Gospel will be measured.

I doubt if there are any here today who have never suffered hurt and offence at some point in their lives. Similarly, if anyone here has never given hurt or caused offence I should be, frankly, amazed. Any one of us, looking deeply into the mirror of our true selves, will swiftly recognise that not only have we suffered offence we have given offence or stood by while offence was being given. That is part of what it is to be human.

Therefore the ministry of Jesus Christ, and the Gospels that bear witness to that ministry, resound with the themes of reconciliation and forgiveness, culminating in the cross, where Christ enabled the reconciliation of the penitent malefactor and forgave the very persons who were in the act of perpetrating his judicial murder. Here is the supreme exposition of the unlimited scope of forgiveness and the freedom delivered through reconciliation.

There are other events and stories, however, which explore the theme of forgiveness and reconciliation. One in particular speaks urgently because it resonates precisely with our daily experience: the story we know as the Parable of the Prodigal Son, although it would be better to call it the Parable of the Loving, Forgiving Father. It is the story of the patient forbearance of a parent and the arrogant impetuosity of youth.

The younger of two sons demands that, here and now, he be given that part of the family estate that will properly fall to him only when the old man dies. The depth of the hurt and offence caused by this uncompromising demand is immeasurable. It amounts to a declaration that, as far as the younger son is concerned, his father is as good as dead. He wants his share and he wants it now!

Despite the hurt and offence the father denies his son nothing. But then insult is added to injury as the son turns his back upon the whole family. The fabric of the family is utterly rent, from top to bottom. Henceforth they go their separate ways.

In the madness of youth, the younger son journeys far from home to live a profligate and dissolute life. But it is the outcome of that profligate and dissolute life that really matters. Assailed by the most profound sense of degradation as well as destitution; worse than that, realising that he had no one to blame but himself; the young man longingly thinks of home.

The Gospel does not so much describe the young man as stricken with remorse as desperate to survive. Thus, he turns towards the only destination he knows which offers hope of salvation. He turns towards the home he had abandoned and the father he had dismissed as no more significant than a corpse.

You know the story: the father, still looking and longing for his son, senses him approaching from afar. He rushes to meet him, refusing to compound his son’s humiliation by forcing the boy to grovel. He embraces his son, welcomes him, washes, clothes him, feeds him.

What did the young man see as he looked into the smiling face of the father he had counted as dead? Did he see grey hairs placed there by the pain of rejection? Did he see the deep furrows of strain that mark every parent’s anxiety over the child that they have lost? Did he see, in other words, the cost of the things that he had done? And did he marvel, at least a little, at the generosity - the fullness – of the father’s love, which alone made reconciliation possible and complete?

At a human level this gospel story could be replicated many times in the personal experience of people here today. But, even more significantly, this is a story we must ponder for our community life.

The wounds that are the sign of our divisions are deep and stubbornly hard to heal, yet you and I, with the whole Church of God, are charged with that healing. We must declare - yes, even the disobedient, divided and historically quarrelsome Church must declare - that the will of Christ is unity, that the Church is a family with shared DNA, and also that we, the people who share a home here, belong to each other: we are one community, tragically divided but not separate, not competing, not alien, communities.

Our antagonisms, some very ancient, others painfully fresh, have damaged and compromised our family life. For many the hurt is personal, deep and sickeningly painful. As the son looked into the face of his father, there to behold the cost of family division, so we must look into one another’s faces, honestly to descry, deeply and permanently etched there, a reminder of the disfigurement our past has wrought, and so be compelled to confront our own part in causing those marks.

The Churches must be the first to confront the sins of the past - the beams in our own eye – to be committed, as much in deed as in word, to modelling the relationships of the Kingdom. What we cannot do is pretend that, like some miracle brand of face cream, the lines of suffering can be instantly erased. What we can do, as a first step, is to turn to one another to embrace a restored way of relating, nourished by a commitment to unconditional love and generous forgiveness. While we wait for the fullness of communion, which is the will of Christ for his Church, let us not neglect the communion of common prayer with and for one another. My personal commitment is to offer that prayer and to enter such an embrace, confident of the love that calls us and holds us.

Just as there is no cheap grace, there is also no such thing as undemanding love. We shall find the exercise of unconditional love and forgiveness immensely demanding. Therefore, when things press hard upon us, we shall need to focus afresh upon the marks of our shared pain, those etched lines, those scars: they are our reminder of the cost of failure to love and forgive.

But this story of a loving father and a reconciled son is not yet complete. There was another son, the elder, and it is this son who earths our story once more in human experience.

The elder son had never disowned his father, never deserted his home or disgraced the family name. He had been loyal and diligent, respectful and caring, but now it is his turn to bring down his father’s grey hairs and to further furrow his father’s brow. The elder resents his returning brother. He resents the undeserved welcome; he is angry and hurt for all the pain and distress his father has suffered; he desires no swift reconciliation.

Such a reaction roots us in a reality we know well. The indignation of those who have watched the betrayal and injury of others is sometimes sharper and more sustained than that of the victims themselves. And that is where we find ourselves now in Northern Ireland: some exhausted by pain and enmity yet longing to begin anew; others finding old hurts hard to put away, reminded, by the ravages of pain in the faces of the people they love, of a past they find it hard to leave behind. Therein is the challenge confronting us all but, especially, those newly called to elected office.

Lest this all seem impossibly daunting let me reflect finally, on the animating dynamic which thrills through the whole of our parable. I mean the inexhaustible love of the father for both of his sons and the will of the father that both should find a secure home – a shared future - under the benign and reconciling shelter of his loving embrace. That dynamic, that holy energy and unshakeable will, is still at work for us and in us. It still calls, it still enables, it still has the power to shape anew.

Our task is to sew together the rent fabric of our common life, not with invisible mending, (such a thing is neither possible nor desirable,) but with sutures of mutual acceptance, strong enough to secure time for sustained healing to knit us together in love.

It is time to turn from truce to peace – to love our neighbours and ourselves in equal measure in the Name and through the power of that one God of Love whom almost all of us claim to worship.

Let me remind you of where we began:

Therefore I say to you that listen, love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you. If anyone strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also; and from anyone who takes away your coat do not withhold even your shirt. Give to everyone who begs from you; and if anyone takes away your goods do not ask for them again. Do to others as you would have them do to you.

This is the Word of the Lord!