On forgiveness
Part 3: Forgiveness is an action of immense weight
The key “trump card” (if that isn’t too mundane a term) that Christians can play is to appeal to what was done in order to open up the possibility of forgiveness – and much more than forgiveness, to create the avenue for redemption, salvation and new life. The concept of “the price paid” for our forgiveness is a difficult one – certainly for me. I have always been so impressed by the overwhelming love of God that traditional Christian ideas about God having to pay the price to atone for the penalty of sin seem to me to limit God’s power to sweep away all evil with one free, compassionate action. Talk of appeasing “the wrath of God”, or of him being tied to paying a price – and that price being Jesus as a sacrificial victim – have never sat easily with me.
In latter years, I can see the value in the concept. There is nothing casual about God’s forgiveness – it cost him dearly. And once we take on board the divinity of Jesus, we lose any sense of God being cruel to Jesus before he can let go of his hurt for our sins and declare us forgiven. As Jesus is God, then Jesus’ death on the cross is God’s self-giving in order to set us free. In this respect, Jesus’ death – though still, of course, horrific in itself, and horrific as part of human history – does achieve what Christians have always said that his death achieves. Jesus takes our place, and takes our sins on himself. God uses the wickedness of humankind, and turns our evil actions into the means of releasing into the world an unstoppable wave of forgiving love. In this way, a human act in history – Jesus’ crucifixion – became a spiritual action of universal and absolute power to release us from the bonds of sin. Thus, our forgiveness is the weightiest event of all, for, in order for us to be forgiven, God in Jesus died. So, when we seek forgiveness – truly, in a way that is holy – what we are doing is calling upon ourselves the grace that God has made available to the world in the death of Jesus, who -according to God’s will and action – has become our means of forgiveness. Thus we are able to reclothe ourselves with the righteousness that is not our righteousness, but Christ’s, a righteousness which we “let slip” when we lost our poise and gave ourselves to actions that are not in keeping with God’s character, but which contradict it.
Spiritual Devotion 