mission pending

James Bond is dead.

At last, the James Bond Festival at the House with No Name has come to a close. I bumped off the last in the series last night. I can now say I have done it. That and 12 pesos will buy me a bottle of mineral water at Oxxo.

The Amazon package that brought me the 25-CD collection of Bond movies also contained three other selections: the Criterion Collection's version of Alfred Hitchock's Notorious, a very writerly-scripted Stranger Than Fiction, and The Mission.

Today The Mission had its turn in my movie machine.

I have no idea why I did not see the movie when it was released in 1984. That was the height of my movie theater phase. Given the choice, I will always watch a movie in a large auditorium. Movies were built for that atmosphere.

Whatever the reason was that I did not see it in the 1980s, I didn't. It was not until our former minister, Ron Klein, mentioned it twice in sermons that my curiosity was piqued.

The Mission is the tale of a Spanish slave trader, Rodrigo Mendoza. He kidnaps Indians and then sells them to plantations in his homeland of Argentina. His life falls apart when he kills his brother in a duel.

A Jesuit priest persuades Mendoza to accompany him as an act of penance on a mission trip to the Guarani, one of the tribes Mendoza had plundered in the past. As part of his penance, he hauls his entire armor and arms in a net over the ever-increasing rough terrain.

When Mendoza finally makes the climb to the top of a steep waterfall, he encounters the Guarani, who immediately recognize him as their sworn enemy. One of the warriors approaches him with an unsheathed knife -- and cuts the rope tied to his baggage. That is the moment in the image at top. Expecting a death blow, Mendoza receives something he could not have imagined.

It is an incredibly powerful moment. Mendoza recognizes that he has just been forgiven for his past and breaks down in tears. Pastor Ron effectively used that example of how we tend to carry around our hurts, and we are not fully released from them without the act of forgiveness.

The movie is a marvelous retelling of the Jesuit states that were formed in South America to protect the Indian tribes from slavers. It also tells the tragedy of the perfidy of politics when Portugal and Spain agreed to eliminate the free states.

Forgiveness was also the subject of our discussion at church last Sunday. Our focus was the parable of the wicked servant, Matthew 18:21-35. Jesus told the parable in response to two questions from his disciples. Who will be the greatest in the Kingdom of Heaven? How many times shall I forgive my brother who sins against me?

A king calls for a servant who owed the king 10,000 talents. (Jesus was a great jokester. The amount was worth about 200,000 years wages.) The king threatened prison; the servant begged for mercy. And received it. Full forgiveness of his debt.

That same servant immediately encountered a fellow servant who owed him 1/600,000th of the debt the first servant owed the king. When the second servant asked for time to repay, the first servant commanded the first servant, his wife, his children, and all he owned to be sold to settle the debt.

When the king heard of the first servant's malfeasance, he turned the first servant over to the torturers until what he owed would be repaid.

The parable is a great launching pad to discuss one of the central tenets of Christianity -- forgiveness. In an hour, we were only able to scratch the surface. But we all agreed we are far better at receiving forgiveness than we are about giving it. That we tend to be far more like the first servant than we would like to admit.

And that is too bad. I know this from personal experience. If I do not forgive, I find myself carrying around the same kind of burden that Mendoza struggled with on his journey of penance.

Worst of all, I allow what someone else did to me to control my life. I worry my scars. I ruminate on the unfairness. Sometimes, I even plot revenge. In the end, the person I dislike starts controlling my life.

I know I am not alone in that failure. A quick perusal of social media is proof positive that hurt feelings are no longer a private matter.

For some reason, I have watched the two seasons of The Crown. I have no idea why I started in the first place. I am not fond of costume soap operas. Especially, when I know most of the dialog is pure conjecture. Who can honestly claim we know what Betty and Phil say in the privacy of their cozy little apartment?

But there was one episode that has pleasantly haunted me since I first saw it. It is entitled "Vergangenheit."

The plot centers on Nazi documents that were discovered at the end of World War II describing the treasonous activities of the Duke of Windsor. (I am not a fan of the Duke, but everyone admits that the interpretation of the documents was exaggerated for dramatic purposes.)

The contents of the papers (and related intelligence) was disclosed to the Queen when the Duke of Windsor sought forgiveness for other past activities in order to obtain a position with the British government. She finds it impossible to do so.

Billy Graham was on crusade in Britain while these events unfolded. The Queen invited him twice to Windsor to discuss her faith. On the second visit, the topic of conversation was forgiveness. And what to do when we find it impossible to forgive.

I will let you watch the scene as it was written. It is one of the most powerful explanations I have ever seen on the topic. And surprisingly it was on my least favorite medium -- television

I have been faced with exactly the same choice this week. Those palm fronds dumped in front of my house hit one of my raw nerves (everything dies). I had all sorts of revenge scenarios running through my head -- as if I had been raised in rural Corsica.

But I spiked them all. A Mexican friend once told me not to start a round of revenge here unless I was willing to take the matter to its logical conclusion. It was wise advice. None of us are inclined to be that foolhardy.

Instead, I will try the forgiveness route. Of course, the other person does not know he has been forgiven. But I do not think that is necessary. It is my heart that needs the healing.

And because I am the person who prefers tidiness, I will slice and bag the palm fronds, and then hope the garbage men haul them away.

If someone else will not use a knife to cut my Mendoza baggage, I will. That just may have been Jesus's point.


Note -- If you do not see the movie, at least sample is outstanding soundtrack.