My favourite U2 music video has to be “Sweetest Thing” (1) when Bono gets up in the horse drawn carriage with his wife Ali Hewson in Fitzwilliam Street in Dublin and tries to make it up to her (apparently the song was written by Bono as an apology for forgetting her birthday while he was on tour one year), even enlisting the help of the lads from Boyzone, and the cast of Riverdance among others!!
Whether it’s his gormless face, or just that he encapsulates what every man feels when things have gone a bit haywire, and you just want to somehow put things back the way they were, it cracks me up every time I see it.
Come to think of it, an awful lot of the sentiments expressed in our popular culture have to do with the business of forgiveness, the longing to set things right, and that horrible feeling that there’s not going to be a way back, and you've just gone one step too far.
“It's sad, so sad
Why can't we talk it over Oh it seems to me
That sorry seems to be the hardest word” (Elton John)
“It's too late to apologize, it's too late........ I said
it's too late to apologize, it's too late” (Timbaland)
Lately, we saw the movie based pm Ian McEwan’s book “Atonement” with Keira Knightley and James McAvoy. Apart from the fact that it should have been awarded the Oscar and is an excellent film, it somehow touches the heart of how it feels to need forgiveness for some wrong done in the past and not to find it, and how that can eat someone’s life away.
How amazing then in the run up to Easter to know that its all there in those two pieces of wood nailed together and raised aloft on a distant hill. That all that we ever need in the way of forgiveness, either because of what we have done to someone we love, or against the God who made and created and loved us, it’s all dealt with in the cross. Not the shiny dangly thing that hangs around a hundred thousand necks, nor the dark images that cast shadows in a hundred thousand cathedral naves. It’s in that cross that stood as the harsh sadistic symbol of Roman capital punishment and was used to dispose of God’s own son.
And He does what we find we can’t do. He forgives. He puts all the sin and the pain and the hatred behind him. In the words of Psalm 103, “As far as the East is from the West, so far has He removed our sins from us”. Amazing Love. Amazing Grace.
Gretchen Peters is a
n American songwriter in the “alt-country” tradition, and I heard a song of hers recently, "Revival", in which she sings, (as they often do) concerning a broken relationship that can't seem to get fixed :
"Now I have done everything that I know to do
But you left a hole that I just can't fill
And If God can forgive me baby why can't you
But I guess you never will" (2)
If God can forgive us so completely, so constantly and so utterly, how come we find it so difficult to put behind us the petty upsets and annoyances that we get from others.
(2) "Revival" by Gretchen Peters from the album "Trio Live" (2005)
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