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“SORRY” SEEMS TO BE THE HARDEST WORD TO SAY

Someone once suggested that these may be the hardest – and yet the most powerful – five words in the English language. Got a pencil? Here they are: I was wrong. I’m sorry.

We’re studying the Bible topic of pride – not apologies – but isn’t it true that blind pride keeps us from seeing when we ARE wrong and need to apologize? There’s a blunt little piece of counsel found in the Old Testament book of Proverbs, chapter 13. See if this rings any bells:

“Pride only breeds quarrels,” writes King Solomon, “but wisdom is found in those who take advice.”

We’ve been giving you double doses of Scripture sometimes by adding the 21st-century rendering we find in the Message paraphrase from Eugene Peterson and NavPress. Here’s how they have it:

“Arrogant know-it-alls stir up discord, but wise men and women listen to each other’s counsel.”

Some of you old-timers like me out there, who have enjoyed watching Presidential debates over the years, might remember a tension-filled evening back in the year 1976 when incumbent President Gerald Ford was defending his crown against a newcomer governor from Georgia with a big, peanut-y smile. Jimmy Carter was hitting the President hard on foreign policy that October night, and then moderator Max Frankel of the New York Times gave the commander-in-chief a chance to defend his overseas record. “Let’s explore a little more deeply our relationship with the Russians,” he challenged. He wanted Ford to explain something called the Helsinki Agreement, which many Americans thought was giving the Soviet Union permanent dominance over Eastern Europe.

Well, President Ford took a deep breath and began to respond on behalf of his administration. And then, all of a sudden, he waded into the proverbial deep weeds. Instead of stopping when he should have, he made this amazing statement:

“There is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe, and there never will be under a Ford Administration.”

What?! Jimmy Carter gulped. The moderator gulped. The guys running the TV cameras gulped. And when Frankel tried to give Ford a chance to backtrack, he instead dug himself in deeper. “Yugoslavians don’t consider themselves dominated; Romanians don’t. I don’t think citizens of Poland do either.” And challenger Jimmy Carter took that fat pitch right over the plate and hit it out of the park for a home run.

“No way,” he said.

“I would like to see Mr. Ford convince the Polish-Americans and the Czech-Americans and the Hungarian-Americans in THIS country that those countries don’t live under the domination and supervision of the Soviet Union behind the Iron Curtain.”

Remember, now, this was in 1976 . . . and there was indeed an Iron Curtain and a Berlin Wall and all the rest. Some of you have seen the machine-gun towers and the goose-stepping soldiers and I have too. And after the debate was over, even though Ford felt like he had won, the fallout was already starting. People were saying that the President had blown it, that he was out of touch. Ford had a very young, dynamic chief of staff who happened to be named Dick Cheney, and 35,000 feet in the air on Air Force One, he plainly told his boss that the remark was a goof. It had to be fixed.

Well, President Ford – who in reality is a true gentleman and a good statesman – wasn’t willing to confess, “I was wrong.” All he had meant to say, he protested, was that those brave Hungarians and Poles had in their own hearts a spirit of independence. They didn’t consider themselves dominated by Russia; they clung to freedom. So when Ford spoke again later that day at USC, he tried to say it that way, spin his story a little bit better . . . but it didn’t work. The turmoil grew. A day after that, talking to businesspeople in the San Fernando Valley, he tried to nudge his answer a bit closer yet to the truth. He called the current situation “an allegation of domination.”

Well, Cheney and others really let the President have it now. “What was I trying to do, self-destruct my own campaign?” is how Ford puts it in his own candid autobiography, entitled A Time to Heal. And finally, down at Glendale City Hall, President Ford, leader of the free world had to do like it says in the Bible, and “take advice.” He had to plainly say: “I was wrong. There ARE Soviet divisions in Poland . . . and I regret it. There ARE hammer-and-sickle military forces in some of these countries . . . and it’s a tragedy.” He said “sorry” as plainly as he could, and then got back to work. And you know, friend, it takes a humble man or woman to listen to the counsel of another person. It takes even more humility to stand up in front of TV cameras and take that counsel.

In his classic old book, How to Win Friends and Influence People, Dale Carnegie writes:

“There’s magic, positive magic, in such phrases as: ‘I may be wrong. I frequently am. Let’s examine the facts.’ Nobody in the heavens above or on the earth beneath or in the waters under the earth” – which sounds rather biblical, doesn’t it? – “will ever object to your saying: ‘I may be wrong. Let’s examine the facts.’”

And the Bible itself testifies that a person who is willing to admit the possibility of error will go a long way in life. Here’s Proverbs 29:23:

“A man’s pride brings him low, but a man of LOWLY spirit gains honor.”

This is a hard one, isn’t it? I know that we all realize we’re not perfect. We have our college transcripts and the board minutes from last month’s church business meeting to prove it. We make mistakes. The Bible clearly teaches that all of us are sinners; we’re all fallen. We make errors in judgment due to inexperience or personal “blind spots.” But how often have we been mad at someone else for something, and then realized with a painful jolt that we really do the exact same thing, only in chocolate instead of vanilla? But it’s still ice cream?

The Word of God gently reminds us of this, doesn’t it? We all come short of God’s glory. And if I think, “Yeah, but Fred falls WAY short of His glory, and me only a little bit” . . . then maybe I don’t really understand just how glorious God’s glory is, and how I should pray for humility.

The New Testament has just page after page of testimony about how twelve men – named Peter, James, John, Bartholomew, Judas, etc. – were fixated on this business of comparing. Who was ahead in the Santa Anita horse race of discipleship glory? Who among them had healed the most sick people? They had a casting-out-demons tote board and every day they checked the latest numbers. Who was winning in the political sweepstakes of the upcoming Jesus Kingdom? They simply could not, would not, dare not admit a fault; not one. And Jesus had to often pull a little kid into the mix and say, “You guys are behind this boy right here. All twelve of you. Adulterers and liars are going to get into the kingdom first.” Pride was such a blinding thing to them that 24 hours before Jesus was going to die on the Cross – and He’d frankly said so time and time again – they had no clue of it all.

It really appears that the disciples were slow on two counts. First of all, they just didn’t sense – for the longest time – that Jesus truly WAS the Son of God, that He was divine, that there was the infinitude of God right within Him. And maybe because they shared the same dinner table as this bearded Carpenter, as they slept out under the trees and heard John snore, and James snore – and Jesus snore – it took a while to confess: “What we have here, next to us in the dust, is the King of the universe.”

And then secondly, even when whispers of divinity penetrated their minds, they never did sense – until Calvary and the Resurrection, maybe – just how HIGH Jesus was, and how HIGH His eternal throne was going to be. And so their own efforts, their little good deeds, seemed worth tabulating and crowing about.

In the essay we’ve been reading through, entitled “The Great Sin,” C. S. Lewis advises readers to focus on really knowing the grand-ness, the divine “infinity” that is God and His Son.

“In God you come up against something,” he writes, “which is in every respect immeasurably superior to yourself. Unless you know God as that – and therefore, know yourself as nothing in comparison – you do not know God at all. As long as you are proud you cannot know God.”

Eleven disciples finally saw it. Jesus the resurrected King came out from the tomb, and they understand that He was God. That compared to Him, they were nothing. That stacked up against His sacrifice at Calvary, they were sinners who had something to confess. I was wrong. I’m sorry.

In the quiet shadow of the cross, really, what else is there to say?