Tonight at SEITE we looked at emotions and forgiveness in church.

Forgiveness is an interesting subject to look at, particularly how we talk of it, how we act it out and how we confer it.

In part of the lecture we watched the part in The Mission where the Slave Trader chooses some penance to do. It’s a very poignant scene and illustrates well some peoples need to feel the effects of something, to make some penance, as taking a rather bland ‘Jesus forgives you’ is too easy and unhelpful, although it is true.
We chatted about the difficulty of accepting the idea of penance when in our protestant tradition we teach Jesus is enough and penance is an unnecessary baggage to inflict on people.

While I agree with that in part as we were talking it became clear that actually many of us, including this character in the film, need to actually do something to be able to effect and take on board the weight, or release, of God’s forgiveness and doing something helps in this. I have often felt in ‘normal’ services that the general confession and absolution does not really help in a concrete way. In fact it is possible to blink and miss what is going on due to familiarity.

I was struck in the lecture that we may have been encouraging a form of penance in youth and alt worship for some time. I have been involved in many services where we have invited people to bring things symbolically after a time of confession and place them at the foot of the cross, or to wrap things with incense and burn them, or hold tight a pebble and throw it as far in to the sea as possible.

I wonder if this is a kind of penance – an act where we are helping people realise both the seriousness of their sin, but the greater seriousness of God’s love which releases them from the effects of that sin. Acting out symbolically the act of God’s forgiveness in the destruction of the negative effects of sin can be quite a powerful act in our discipleship.