I wonder if you have heard of a man by the name of Jean Vanier.In 1968, Jean went into a state run asylum in France, invited two men with mental and physical handicaps to come home with him, and began making a life with them.The day he did this, Jean knew there was no going back.There wasn’t because you don’t simply invite persons into your life and then turn them out again when you no longer feel up to it.Somehow, you make it work whether you’re up to it or not.
This was the beginning of a worldwide movement of communities call L’Arche, French for ‘The Ark.’These are communities of persons with mental disabilities living with their assistants.Jean Vanier speaks of the central human and spiritual ‘event’ that takes place when a person of ‘normal capacities’ begins a life lived with those who have significant handicaps.As the person of ‘normal capacities’ looks into, through daily contact, a life filled with brokenness and wounds, they begin to encounter, often in most unpleasant ways, their own brokenness and woundedness.In the encounter, deep-seated anger rises to the surface, an incredible lack of patience and tolerance appears, one’s powerlessness to love, to really love the other is encountered over and over again.In the midst of this, one is confronted with a dramatic choice, either to despair over one’s own emptiness or to turn to Jesus for healing, mercy, and salvation.In short, the encounter with woundedness in the other exposes one’s own woundedness and brings about the awareness of one’s profound need for a Savior, for Jesus Christ.
Somehow, this gets us at the point Jesus is attempting to make in the parable he tells in today’s gospel (Mt 18:21-35).How is it that we are made into a person of true compassion, a person capable of forgiving hurts done against us seven times seventy-seven times, a person truly sympathetic to the other?Somehow is can only happen when we are deeply and profoundly aware of the depths of our own woundedness, our own need for forgiveness and healing.It is only out of a wounded heart, a heart that has desperately needed and found forgiveness in God and others and has allowed that experience of forgiveness to authentically shape it, that one can be truly free, truly liberated from the need to hold on to hurts that come into one’s life.
Notice, please notice, this is not about feeling badly about ourselves.It is not because we do in fact have a Savior, we do indeed have a source of healing and forgiveness, our Lord, Jesus Christ. No, it is about liberty and authentic freedom.Liberty and freedom to live, not in the clutches of pasts hurts, but in the joy of new beginnings and fresh days.Still, somehow, to touch that freedom, the liberty of being able to truly forgive and move into that new life, we simply must come to the recognition of our own, prior need for just such mercy and forgiveness.Only mercy received can be mercy given.
Am I truly aware of my brokenness and my desperate need for a Savior?How and where, what are the relationships in my life, that reveal my real emptiness and thus my need to be filled with the compassion of Christ?When have I known, really known the need to be forgiven, the need for tender mercy?
We are moving toward the celebration of that act of love which brought Jesus to offer his very life for us on the cross to the Father.That act, that horrendous act, is utterly incomprehensible apart for the knowledge of our enormous need for a savoir. It is simply beyond anyone to conceive why the Son of God went to such lengths apart from the deep experience of our own need to be healed and redeemed.