April 12, 2009

Easter Forgiveness

Although she tried to go on with her life, Thompson was consumed by her anger at her attacker.  She and her fiancé broke up.  Cotton continued to profess his innocence, but no one listened.  As he worked on his appeals, he, too, fought his own rage at being unfairly convicted, in spite of his claim of innocence and the alibi his friends and family offered at his trial.

Then, after nearly eleven years in prison, DNA evidence showed that he had not raped Jennifer Thompson. Confronted by this new evidence, a different man confessed to the crime, and on June 30, 1995, Ronald Cotton he was set free.  Soon after his release, he and his lawyer appeared on Larry King’s TV program, and King asked, “And you’re not angry, right?”  Cotton said that while in prison he had let go of his anger and frustration, knowing that they led nowhere.  Writing later about his reasoning, he said this:  “Since I had gotten out [of prison], I went twice a week to Hester Grove Baptist Church, and came to feel that God had given me a second chance at life, a chance to really make something of myself….  Anger would have just kept me stuck, as if I’d never left prison.” (Jennifer Thompson-Cannino and Ronald Cotton, with Erin Torneo, Picking Cotton:  Our Memoir of Injustice and Redemption, New York:  St. Martin’s Press, page 225.)

Not long after that, Jennifer Thompson-Cannino, married now and the mother of triplets, met Ronald Cotton to ask for his forgiveness.  She said, “If I spent the rest of my life telling you how sorry I am, it wouldn’t come close to how I feel.  Can you ever forgive me?”  Ronald Cotton, who had spent eleven years of his life in prison for a crime he didn’t commit, responded to the woman whose identification had put him there.  “I forgive you,” he said.  “All I want is for us all to go on and have a happy life.”  (Ibid., pages 244-245.)

These days, Ron and Jennifer are friends.  They know that both of their lives were nearly taken away, and certainly changed, by the man who attacked Jennifer that night.  Still, their ability to forgive each other, and themselves, gave them a new life neither imagined before those tragic events unfolded. 

Cotton’s and Thompson’s story is very much an Easter story: new life born from despair.  But, even more than that, theirs is an Easter story in the sense that it is forgiveness that engenders redemption.  It’s a story about the theological meaning of Easter.

And that’s no small thing, for we are not sure what to make of this Easter story.  Because its meaning eludes us, we often get stuck in defending its details, as if the truth of new life is somehow needs to be proved at the empty tomb. For me, the pertinent issue of Easter is partly what we make of it, also what it makes of us.  So I ask myself again, “What does it mean?”

Lingering over that question puts me in good company, I think.  For the early church seems a bit confused by Easter, too.  If you paid attention to the end of Mark’s version of that first Easter, maybe you noticed that Mark describes the resurrection as an event creating chaos:  “So they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.”  (Mark 16:8, New Revised Standard Version)  Most scholars now believe that the gospel ends just there, with the women running away in terror. For Mark, it seems, Easter meant confusion.  Mark lived in the time when church and synagogue were just beginning their name-calling, recriminations, and theological disputes.  It was a confusing time, brought on by this fantastic message, held as truth by the earliest Christians, and the central story that distinguished their new life: “Christ is risen,” they said.  “Christ is risen, indeed.”

But, quite normally, early confusion gives way to deeper reflection. So notice how Luke’s later account, the lesson we heard from Acts, has begun to see a different theological meaning in the resurrection story.  For Luke and his community, the meaning of the empty tomb isn’t chaos, but community. And this new community of faith is born to new life through forgiveness: God’s forgiveness.  That message, too, is at the end of the lesson, is the same Easter message as Mark’s but with Luke’s particular meaning attached.  Here it is again:  “God raise [Jesus] on the third day and allowed him to appear, not to all the people but to us who were chosen by God as witnesses, and … everyone who believes in him receives forgiveness of sins through his name.” (Acts 10:40-41, 43, New Revised Standard Version.)

I said here last week that Lent is about repentance, that is, about our facing our own sinfulness.  We put Jesus on the cross, I suggested, because we, like Pilate and the other Romans, worship might more than right; we crucified him with thieves, because we follow religion’s demands, not the freedom of love; we join the crowd’s cry “crucify him,” when we bow to injustice and to greed; and we ask more love of him than we are willing to give to him, marks of our betrayal.  We fail to live as Christ has lived, and we find ourselves in need of both repentance and forgiveness.  Or, as Bill Coffin said to his church, “’Were you there when they crucified my Lord?’ Of course you were – all of us were, hammer in hand.” (“Alone, Yet Not Alone,” The Collected Sermons of William Sloane Coffin:  The Riverside Years, Louisville:  Westminster John Knox Press, page 419.)

We were all there, as the gospel reminds us throughout Lent.  We were all there at the cross, because we are all complicit in being human. And, being human, we sin.  Consciously or unconsciously, whether our sins are arrogantly deliberate or self-deceptively unaware, we sin. Even when, like Jennifer Thompson, we believe we are doing our best, we sometimes do our worst.  Yes, we are fully complicit in sin.  Figuratively at least, crossed our own making dot our past.

But the gospel message of Easter is the message of forgiveness. Whatever the details of that first morning, the truth of Easter is that God’s love endures death – no, God’s love conquers death – so that we might be free again to live.  In spite of our collusion with injustice, God is beside us, saying, as Ron Cotton said to the woman whose mistaken identification convicted him and took eleven years of his life:  “I forgive you.  All I want is for us all to go on and have a happy life.”

We shouldn’t be surprised, I suppose, to discover here a core message of God’s graceful, forgiving love. Forgiveness is about new life, and all new life in some sense depends on forgiveness:  letting go of all that’s behind, and living eagerly in the present with hope for our future.  The empty tomb is as frightening as Mark implies; but it is also as liberating as Luke proclaims.  On that first Easter day, God not only gives Jesus new life, God gives us new life, too.  And our new Easter life is not merely in our heavenly future, but here and now, as forgiven and therefore redeemed people.

Notice, too, that as God has forgiven us for our offence at the cross, God hopes that we will learn to live in forgiveness, too.  Why else would Jesus instruct his followers, including us, to pray daily, “Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us?”  God has already forgiven us.  How can we, then, not forgive?

And, if we can learn to forgive both our neighbors, and ourselves then our lives will open as miraculously and wonderfully as new life began for Jesus on that first Easter morning.  Knowing God in a new way, we will relate to each other anew as well.  Or, as Rowan Williams, the archbishop of Canterbury writes, “The risen-ness of Jesus has to do with the sense of absolution by God….  The resurrection creates forgiven persons, whose relation with God, and derivatively, with each other, is transformed.”  (Rowan Williams, Resurrection:  Interpreting the Easter Gospel, Cleveland:  Pilgrim Press, page xii.)

Yes, Easter is about transformation – of Jesus Christ from death to life, of course.  But it’s about our transformation, too.  And that, my friends, may be the even greater miracle. 

Christ is alive.  And in him, so are we.