A Message:

By Rev. James Farrell

 

I watched a fascinating history piece on TV not long ago ... it was a 2 hr interview with Traudl Junge. If that name isn't familiar for reasons beyond my poor pronunciation, she was Adolf Hitler's private secretary from Autumn 1942 until the collapse of the Nazi regime. She worked for him at the Wolfsschanze in Obersalzberg, on his private train and, finally, in his bunker in the besieged capital.

 

It was Traudl Junge to whom Hitler dictated his final testament. The documentary I watched was her first ever on­-camera interview, recorded in the spring of 2001 when she was 81 years old. While very sharp mentally, she chain smoked throughout the interview and seemed quite nervous. That said, she was honest and forthcoming with all her statements and everything she had to say about her time with Hitler.

 

It was a fantastic window into a very macabre time. Fifty-six years after the end of the Second World War Traudl Junge was persuaded to share the memories that she alone could share. Thanks to a persistent film maker we have her story.

 

Still, throughout the interview she is painfully aware of the world that she witnessed and seems incapable of forgiving the young girl she once was ‑ for her naiveté, her ignorance, and, at times, her liking for Hitler.

 

At one point, Junge spoke of how Hitler poisoned his dog Blondi, an Alsatian dog, and Eva Braun's spaniel using the poison tablets they had been given in the event of a possible need should their capture prove imminent. Junge said: Hitler wanted to be sure they were fast acting.

 

After much very poignant testimony, she struggles to conclude the interview with the words: “I think I'm finally able to forgive myself."

 

She died of cancer not long after the interview in 2002. Throughout the interview, one can't help get the impression that she never really did forgive herself.

 

I hope she did.

 

Forgiveness is a funny thing ... we withhold it ... we offer it lightly without thinking much about it ... we hold it as a personal prize to be given only as a trophy when people have somehow earned it ... but the only message we receive from God on the subject is that it should be given freely. And that includes forgiving ourselves.

 

It is an act I have, on occasion, withheld from myself. I know its sting.

 

I don't talk a lot about sin in my sermons ... largely because so much effort has been expended lifting sin to places of high drama, connecting it with devils, demons and other unhelpful images so that to speak about it presents immediate difficulties in differentiating what "I'm trying to share" from the stock pile of baggage that the word carries from centuries of abuse by folks within and outside of the church.

 

Sin isn't as much about doing as it is a matter of being out of relationship with God and God's creation.

 

Sin is one of those words like salvation that gets bounced around to the point of confusion and even gets used as a club to dismiss what God has welcomed into God's communion.

 

Reinhold Niebuhr understood the nature of soteriology ... that is the theology of salvation and he described it this way:

Nothing worth doing is completed in our lifetime. Therefore, we are saved by hope.

Nothing true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history.

Therefore, we are saved by faith.

Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone.

Therefore, we are saved by love.

No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as from our own.

Therefore, we are saved by the final form of love which is forgiveness.

 

I read the story of the paralytic man lowered through a hole in the roof and we get a vision of a palapa or a thatched roof structure made from the wonderful weaving of palm branches... oh wait a minute, I better stop talking about that or I'll find myself dreaming of being pool‑side in Mexico shaded from the intense heat of the near equatorial sunshine by the glorious cover of a palapa...

 

Where was I?

 

Oh yah, back to the paralytic man being lowered through the roof. He was in the right place at the right time to be the catalyst in a very important encounter between Jesus and the religious leaders.

 

In this story, Jesus, for the first time in this gospel, goes head to head with the religious leaders. He does it by going to the very heart of his message.

 

It is unimaginable that Jesus would not have been aware of the impact the words, "your sins are forgiven," would have on those listening.

 

Given the growing reputation that Jesus was gaining as a healer, and given the lengths that the paralytic's friends went to, to get the man to Jesus, no doubt the man's friends were as amazed and perhaps as put out as the religious leaders at Jesus' response.

 

They wanted physical healing because physical healing is an understandable, recognizable here‑and‑now event. Forgiveness of sins is a different kind of experience, one that must be taken on faith.

 

Ancient Near Eastern cultures believed that sin and illness were connected.

 

In healing the man's body and proclaiming the man forgiven, Jesus was making it clear that the gospel he was preaching was about all of life and "the whole person".

 

Likewise, any gospel we preach must also speak to life in all its complexity.

 

Through examples that Jesus gave us, this being just one, it is clear that we are invited to participate in a blessing that embraces all of our life with God.