Sorry, so the song tells us, seems to be the hardest word. But is it really? At one level, ‘sorry’ is not at all hard to say. Turn a corner and bump into someone and the word ‘sorry’ is out of our mouths in an instant. But there is so much more to sorry than that.
You might think we Christians would be good at sorry. We have lots of practice. Saying sorry in the words of a confession is a regular feature of Sunday worship. The Anglican Book of Common Prayer is really big on it – having worshippers declare that they are ‘heartily sorry’. But, despite all that, sorry really is a hard word to say. Because we struggle to say it from the heart.
According to 2 Corinthians 7:11 sorrow can be either godly or worldly. One leads to salvation, the other to death. What Paul has in mind is not feeling sad but feeling sorry. And it suggests getting sorry right is a bigger issue than we might have thought.
