Is it possible to say sorry anymore?

Sydney shock jock (or “political commentator”), Alan Jones, recently got himself into a whole world of trouble because of an attempted apology that only enraged the Twitterati and gave further impetus to a campaign to turn his sponsors against him.

He was apologising for making some frankly disturbing comments about the Prime Minister’s deceased father—that John Gillard had “died of shame”.

In the judgment of many observers, Jones’s apology fell a mile short of being adequate and went no distance towards making amends. Partly this was because he spent his “apology” press conference restating his vehement opposition to the Prime Minister in.

Former Speaker of the House of Representatives Peter Slipper attempted to apologise for his behaviour. He referred to the contents of some extraordinarily gross text messages that had been made public: “I understand why people, particularly women, would be offended by these statements and I unreservedly apologise for them.’’

He still had to resign.

Then one of Sydney heart surgeon Dr Victor Chang’s killers was let out of prison after serving 21 years of his 26-year sentence. The man, Chiew Seng Liew, was reported as saying, “I made a mistake. I did the wrong thing and made the family suffer … I want to apologise for the family.’’ Liew’s own family also apologised for their father’s actions.

With this spate of “mea culpas” going around, it is worth asking: what makes an apology work as an apology? Quite clearly, in the Jones case, many people felt he undermined his apology by his attitude of defiance. Some felt he had not made a sufficient promise not to re-offend, and that this instance was simply part of an ongoing pattern of unacceptable behaviour.

The Chang case is on another level, of course. What could the most sincere apology possibly achieve in the case where a person has been killed? It is simply not possible for there to be a making of amends, humanly speaking.

In a good apology, we are looking for the right words, the right attitudes and the right actions. The best apologies contain no self-justifications and no explanations. There is an acknowledgement of responsibility for the actions involved. There is no demand placed on the victim or victims, and no expectation of forgiveness.

There is no avoidance of consequences: an apology is not an attempt to avoid the justice that may come as a result of your actions.

And ultimately an apology is a thing we do with words that needs to be made meaningful by a new way of living; so an apology might take a long time to make good.
But a good apology is not enough on its own. Even if he fulfils all the criteria needed for a good apology, Chiew Seng Liew can ultimately only throw himself on the mercy of those he has wronged. And if they are not ready to accept his apology, then his apology won’t achieve the aim of releasing him from the burden of his crime.

My school teacher friends tell me that they teach this stuff to kids under the age of ten. So why are adults having such a hard time of it?

I think part of the answer is that our culture is such a dog-eat-dog culture. We have lost contact or are in the midst of losing contact with the notions of grace and forgiveness. We don’t cut anyone a break. We want to see justice done. We live in a world where, to quote Savage Garden, “what you give is what you get returned”.
This lack of grace is especially shown to public figures. In the cases of Jones and Slipper, there is a feeling that as public figures they have betrayed a trust placed in them and that they ought to pay for it. In the case of Jones in particular, he’s been dishing it out for years. Can’t he now take a bit of his own medicine?

And these figures have apologised not just to an individual or to a family but to something much vaguer: the public, or the nation. That means that their apologies are up for public evaluation. It’s basically trial by the savagery of the internet.

I am not blaming the public for the inadequacies of Jones’s apology for a second. If anything, he has contributed to the climate of savage unforgiveness that he was judged by. But that’s the point: his defensiveness and his attempt to reassert his point of view even while apologising shows that really in his mind no quarter should be given, ever.

He wasn’t allowing space for grace. He assumed that he had to cover himself, to get on the offensive as soon as possible. And so, it was no surprise when he wasn’t shown much grace.

Where does that leave us, then? Christians of all people should especially be people who are aware of their need to apologise for the hurts we cause. But what is the right way to go about it?

My friend Tim Patrick put it this way: “For an apology to succeed in being an apology, it must be a real apology, that is, a humble admission of guilt, request for forgiveness and commitment to living differently.”

The basis for an honest and open apology to God is the knowledge of his grace in Jesus Christ. When Christians confess, they ought to do so openly and without reserve. The Christian comes before God knowing that God is the God “whose nature is always to have mercy”. He is “slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love”.

God’s costly forgiveness is the reason we are given to forgive one another, for we have been forgiven. Not that this leads to simply letting one another off the hook. Grace is free, but it is not cheap (as Dietrich Bonhoeffer might say).

But our learning to say sorry to one another is made possible by the knowledge of God’s justice as he works it out on the cross and at the final judgment. Our confidence in God’s justice enables us to be vulnerable—as those who own up honestly for our wrongdoing and as those who are wronged.

Is it possible to forgive an apologising killer? As far as human thinking goes, it hardly seems possible. But with the God of Jesus Christ, perhaps there is a different possibility on the table.

 

Image: flickr_Wiertz Sébastien