“People now marvel how it came to pass that a man like this should have been selected as the [presidential candidate] of any party. His weak, wishy-washy, namby-pamby efforts, imbecile and disgusting in manner, have made us the laughing stock of the whole world…[for he] indulges in simple twaddle which would disgrace a well bred school boy."
That ran in the Salem Advocate in Salem, Illinois. The year was 1860 and the candidate was Abraham Lincoln.
As we embark upon the homestretch of that season when candidates for great office in our State and in our Nation vie for the votes of our citizens, this noble enterprise seems all too often dominated by those who succumb to what our Holy Father, has called the “all-pervasive and growing culture of hate.”
And let me quick to say that such behavior is not the characteristic of any one party, person, ideology or office. Rather it is a disease so virulent that it infects us all with what one author has called “the startlingly hate-centered nature of our culture and discourse.”
Nor is this a new phenomenon, as the opening critique of our sixteenth President reminds us, for as the 1826 essay of William Hazlitt, “The Pleasure of Hating” opined “Without something to hate, we should lose the very spring of thought and action. . . . The white streak in our own fortunes is brightened (or just rendered visible) by making all around it as dark as possible.”
Nor is this an exclusively political reality, as the disciples remind us when they approach Jesus with the burning question “How often must I forgive my brother?” Now that’s a curious question, for what they are really asking is: “When can I stop forgiving my brother?” When can I call fire and brimstone down upon him for all he has done for me? When can I just let him have it!
It is the question of the fifth grader taunted by the bully at recess, the teenager jilted by his first love, the worker oppressed by a miserable boss, the divorced person negotiating alimony or the business person whose partner ran away with all the money.
"I have had it with all the hurt I have suffered and I just want them to suffer as well!"
The author of the Book of Sirach wrote this book of pithy sayings and deep thoughts a little over 2.000 year ago, but few of his sayings are quite as stark as the one we heard this morning:
“Wrath and anger are hateful things, yet the sinner hugs them tight.”
I don’t understand, Sirach’s disciples must have said to him. I’m more of an "eye-for-an eye" kinda guy. If he gives it to me, let me give it back to him twice as hard!
But Sirach disagrees. “The vengeful,” he tells them, “the vengeful will suffer the LORD’s vengeance.”
Then what does God want us to do? With the disciples, we run to Jesus and say:
Do you know what he did to me?
Do you know you know what she said about me?
Do you know how purely evil that one is?
Just let me at him!
And Jesus smiles at us, with an infinitely patient love, and says, you know what you need to do? Forgive him. Forgive him once and twice and three times, and four times and five times and six times and seven times and over and over and over agin.
“For do you really think,” he says to us, “Do you really think that your sin is so much less than his? Do you really think that you are so much more deserving of my love?
If you do, think again. And the next time you want to make your brother suffer to pay his debt to you, remember the guy in the parable who threw his debtor into prison, and remember the words spoken to him by his master: ’You wicked servant! I forgave you your entire debt because you begged me to. Should you not have had pity on your fellow servant, as I had pity on you?’
Remember what you pray so many times a day; “Forgive us our sins as, to the extent we forgive those who sin against us.
As in Matthew’s Gospel, the Lord goes on: “For if you forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father also will forgive you; but if you do not forgive men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.”
Thus has Pope Francis frequently warned us against fanning the flames of “a culture of hate.”
Pope Francis recently told the story of a priest back in Argentina who came to him with the sad story of an elderly woman who was on her deathbed. I’ll let him pick up the story.
“The poor woman could not speak. And the priest asked her: Madam, do you repent of your sins? The woman said yes; she could not confess them, but she said yes. It was sufficient. And then he asked her: Do you forgive others? And the woman said, on her deathbed: No. The priest was deeply distressed, because he knew from the Gospels that if you do not forgive others, God will not forgive you.”
For “Jesus,” the Holy Father continues, “has replaced the law of retaliation (what you have done to me, I will do to you) with the law of love (what God has done for me, I shall do for you in return!)”
One last story.
When Abraham Lincoln assembled his wartime cabinet, as Doris-Kearns Goodwin recently reminded us, he faced a critical choice in who he would choose as his Secretary of War.
Everyone urged him to choose the prestigious and talented lawyer Edwin Stanton, without knowing that Lincoln and Stanton had a history.
Decades before, the very young Lincoln had been chosen by a prestigious law firm to work with them on an important patent case. He was thrilled and for the first tin his young life, flattered. So, after working for months on his first big case, the young Lincoln took the train to Cincinatti, where the well-established and respected Stanton had been chosen to head the team on which Lincoln was to serve.
Stanton treated the young lawyer with nothing but contempt. He refused to read hi brief, did not allow him to sit with him in courtroom, and loudly questioned his colleagues why the firm to had sent him this “long armed ape.”
President Lincoln could have enjoyed his revenge on Stanton, but instead he asked him to be his Secretary of War, and to lead us effectively through the Civil War. For as Lincoln later wrote:
“I am slow to listen to recriminations among my friends, and never espouse their quarrels on either side. My only wish is that both sides will allow bygones to be bygones, and look to the present and future alone.”
On the night that President Lincoln died in that little room across from Ford’s Theatre, his cabinet gathered around the bed. And at the moment he breathed his last, it was Stanton who uttered those immortal words: “now he belongs to the ages.” And then he wept.
For, as the Psalmist reminds us, “the Lord is kind and merciful, slow to anger, and rich in compassion.” And he expects us to be the same.
