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O'Malley's Best Accepting
the Incomprehensible I
readily confess to being what many more dutiful than I would call a
"cafeteria Catholic." I truly
(and I suspect incurably) believe that God endowed each of us with intelligence
before He found need to bless us with authorities. In all candor, I suppose I also have to admit being a critical
Christian-insofar as I have difficulty here and there taking the gospels
literally in every word-choice and phrase (a difficulty which, again, the more
dutiful don't seem to share). In this
gospel passage, for instance, the King forgives his prime minister for a
malfeasance as large as the national debt, and the ingrate goes out and
throttles one of his own debtors who owes him no more than about three months'
wages. That's the core of the story, I
think. But a belief that the scriptures
are inspired by God doesn't constrain me to allegorize every last detail of the
story. For instance, as written, the
parable says the King handed over this official "to the torturers until he
paid back all that he owed." That
struck me (weak as I am) as incredible-that is to say, unworthy of literal
acceptance. On the one hand, it's
hardly possible for the miscreant to beg, borrow, or even steal enough to
divert the master's wrath while he is busy night and day shuttling between the
rack, the iron maiden, and the thumb screws.
On the other hand, if you want to defend Matthew's carelessness as an
editor and put the burden of recompense on the victim's family, the wife and
children would have to rob a great many banks, with lightning quickness, in
order to come up with the monstrous sum before their unfortunate husband and
father expired. If I'm
allowed, I can defend myself by invoking "willing suspension of
disbelief." That works when I read
Oedipus the King and tell myself I miss the whole point to ask small-minded
questions like why, given his oracle, Oedipus would marry at all or kill any
regal-looking old man. It also
precludes my asking why Jocaste was never curious enough to ask, "Oedipus,
honey. How did you ever get those
interesting scars on your ankles.?"
With any literature, including the Bible, I can salvage both the way the
text enriches my understanding and my common sense by not treating the text
like a math problem in which every single element stands for something
else. The
substance of the story is quite clear: If you don't forgive, you can't
legitimately expect forgiveness. And I
find that unpleasantly difficult enough to accept without getting finicky about
the story's embellishments. Especially
when Jesus tops off that statement by saying we have to forgive trespassers
against us, not seventy times, but four hundred-ninety times-each! The
whole world was impressed (very, very briefly) when Pope John-Paul II visited
his would-be assassin, Mehmet Ali Agca, in prison and prayed with him. Very nice, very idealistic, but, well,
hardly imitable by anyone without a visible halo. Every year I tell my classes about my Dad's partner absconding
with his wife and daughters and the entire joint business bank account, and my
father refusing to prosecute because, he said, "I don't want those two
little girls growing up knowing the father's a convict." The students really, really try not to
scoff, but you can see disbelief written all over their faces. They've been (they fiercely assert)
brainwashed by the Church--which is testimony enough to the ineffectiveness of
our religious education. My
college roommate's sister and her husband had a large family. Six or seven kids, I think. One of them, a rather shy girl in her early
teens accepted the invitation of a neighborhood boy everyone suspected of being
"not quite right in the head" into his family's basement to look at
his father's gun collection. No need to
draw it out. One of the guns went off
in the boy's hand and shot the girl in the head. What stunned us all at the funeral was that the family had asked
the boy to be one of the pallbearers.
It seems that Pope John-Paul, and my Dad, and the Coyle family really
took the gospel at its word-not literally, but reading its inescapable
intention. I don't
like that either. Not one bit. If you don't forgive, you can't legitimately
expect forgiveness. And not just one dramatic time, guys. Four hundred and ninety times. Each!
Okay. That's arguable. There comes a time when rejection of the
forgiveness makes it meaningless. But
there's no reassuring "line" where you can say, "Okay, that's
enough." Unlike
the detail about the torturers in this particular story, I can find no honest
way to evade that often infuriating request that we go on forgiving. The fact of the crucifix won't allow
it. "Father, forgive them. They don't know what they're doing." As
indigestible as a peach pit. |
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Copyright © 2008, McQuaid Jesuit |
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