Luke 15.11-24
Have you ever realised that you've done something wrong? That you’ve hurt someone else? Perhaps you didn’t mean to. Perhaps you didn’t really care how they felt at the time. Perhaps you hurt them on purpose. But then you felt sorry and wanted to put things right.
Did you manage to do that? The only way to really put things right is to say sorry. And we can also tell God that we’re sorry and that we want to do better.
Saying sorry isn’t easy, though, is it? It can go wrong.
Have you ever used the word ‘But’ in an apology? I know I have. ‘I’m sorry but…’ The people who ran the Post Office have practised different 'buts' and excuses when they tried to explain the huge miscarriage of justice which saw hundreds of subpostmasters bankrupted or imprisoned. And Boris Johnson had a lot of practice at this. ‘I’m sorry we had a party during Lockdown, but we had all been working very hard.’ We should never use ‘but’ when we say sorry because it suggests we’re not completely sorry.
There’s another way that saying sorry can go wrong. It’s like the apology with a ‘but’ in it, except it starts by talking about what the other person did. We might say, ‘You see, you upset me, that’s why I got angry.’ Vladimir Putin says he had to attack Ukraine because they wanted to join NATO. It’s just another way of saying, ‘What’s happened is really your fault.’ We can’t be really sorry if we say, ‘You started it.’ If we’re really sorry, we should only talk about what we have done.
If we’re genuinely sorry, we should always offer to put things right, at least as far as we can. Sometimes it’s not possible. If we break Mum’s favourite vase we may not be able to replace it. But if we can make things right we should offer to do so. The other person might say it’s all right, we don’t need to do that, but it’s their choice.
If we really mean it, one apology is always enough. We don’t need to keep on saying sorry. But an apology is only worth something if we truly mean not to do the same thing again.
A real apology never makes the other person feel worse than they did before, and it never demands that the other person does anything to help put things right. It doesn’t even ask them to forgive us.
So what about the son in the story? He was really badly behaved. He really upset his Mum and Dad, and he didn’t care about it. However, eventually, after a lot of bad stuff had happened, he realised he’d hurt them and he wanted to make things right.
Although he was also keen to get something to eat, his apology was sincere. He admitted that he was the only one at fault. There were no buts. He only talked about what he’d done wrong. He didn’t try saying, ‘You weren’t very nice to me, you know, when I was growing up.’ He offered to put things right by working for his father and he didn’t ask his father to do anything in return.
He didn’t need to, because his father wasn’t listening. He and his wife had already forgiven their son. They didn’t need him to keep apologising. They were just glad that he was home again.
Jesus says that’s how it can be for us when we’re really sorry. And he means us to realise that if we say sorry to God for behaving badly, God will always forgive us too.
One of the worrying things about the war in Ukraine is that most commentators say that Vladimir Putin has done things which are so wicked that he must be punished severely. If he stops prosecuting the war it won’t really change their minds. He’ll still be one of the world’s most wanted men. But what if he said that he'd miscalculated and made a terrible mistake? What if he offered to make amends in some way - at least a little bit - for what he’s done? What would we say then? Is the only option for him total and abject surrender or pressing on until he achieves complete victory? Or is there, as President Trump keeps hoping, some kind of deal to be done that would allow President Putin back into the magic circle of world leaders with whom we can do business? How does someone like that 'Say sorry'?
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