Greetings to the Koonung Heights Community

I received some positive comments about the sermon on Joseph, anger and forgiveness last Sunday. A few said it spoke to them in their own struggles to overcome either guilt or challenges in forgiving others. As I said last Sunday these are issues everyone faces, not just religious people. Perhaps the difference is in the Church we have the language, tradition, stories, liturgy, sacraments and hopefully personal experience of being forgiven and in turn forgiving others. One of the most powerful illustrations I have seen of all this was in the film The Mission. In it Robert De Niro plays a character named Rodrigo Mendoza, a mercenary and slave trader in 18th-century South America. He’s a violent man—profiting from the misery of others, hardened by power and guilt. But then something happens that breaks him: he kills his own brother in a fit of jealousy.

Overcome with shame, Mendoza plunges into despair. He joins a group of Jesuit missionaries who take him on a gruelling journey into the jungle—to the very tribe he once enslaved.

As penance, Mendoza drags behind him a massive net filled with weapons and armour—the tools of his old life. We see scene after scene of him pulling it up mountains, through rivers, across rocky terrain. It’s heavy, slow, humiliating. Once he slides down a cliff and is dragged to the bottom by the weight. Slowly he picks himself up and without a word shoulders his burden and painfully, slowly begins climbing up the cliff. You can see on his face: he believes he deserves the burden.

Finally, the group reaches the tribe. One of the tribal men—who should have every reason to hate Mendoza— walks up to him. He is holding a knife, and Mendoza stands with no protection, no weapon, ready to receive his deserved fate. Dramatically the man before him cuts the rope. The burden tumbles down the cliff and into the river below. Mendoza weeps. For the first time, he’s free—not just physically, but spiritually. Interesting it was someone he previously wronged that finally cut the burden away. It is often messy, costly, slow with many steps, but finally we can be liberated by both being forgiven and forgiving others. Thanks be to God

All the best,

Ray