On forgiveness

Part 7: God’s forgiveness and God’s judgement go hand in hand

Do we now have a problem for the Christian? We are aiming to be the sort of people who have the grace to forgive others. Yet we seem to be in the position of passing a condemning judgement. Is this compatible with forgiveness? The logic of the situation must be that it is. Fact are facts – the other person acted badly. (Of course, we must take into account extenuating circumstances, pressures the other person was under, whether it was possible for you to have acted better). We have made a true judgement that they are in the wrong. We have genuinely tried to forgive in terms of “letting go of the hurt”. We have found freedom on our side, but if the other person rejects the truth of the situation, then reconciliation and new life is not possible – between the two of us. We do, I think, maintain our freedom, but we withhold our granting of freedom to them in terms of our relationship no longer being restrained by the harm they did us, because reconciliation is not possible with someone who is not sorry. The fact that they are not sorry does not impinge on our freedom to live in a state of not holding the offence against them. Yet our judgement against them remains.

How does this relate to the forgiveness that Christians seek from God?

Here, there is the crucial difference that we are sorry for our sins, and we are making some attempt at repentance. Therefore, reconciliation with God is possible. There is still the potentially troubling aspect that God’s judgement still stands. However, that can never be changed. Wrong actions cannot be undone, and so God’s righteous judgement against them is a true judgement that stands against us for all time. Yet we want to be free in the love of God; to have a relationship that is unsullied by our sins. This must therefore be compatible with being sinners.

Has God “written off” the offence? This is how I usually understand his forgiveness. He has the power and authority to write off the offence that I have done against him. He treats me as though nothing has ever come between us. This does seem, in fact, to be completely analogous with what we have done in terms of our attitude to those who wronged us. There was a weight of offence that we felt, but rather than hold onto that offence – and so continue to feel the pain of it – we laid it to one side, and so were set free from its power. If the person who hurt us in sorry, then reconciliation if possible. If they refuse, then we maintain the power and freedom not to be bothered by that; it is simply that our judgement against them remains. For us, in relation to God, our repentance allows the freedom that God is offering in terms of writing off the offence to be fully received by us as a gracious act of reconciliation and new life.

On forgiveness

Part 6: The essence of giving forgiveness is not letting the harm done to you have any impact in your future dealing with the person who hurt you, but true judgement is still truth

I think this is probably the essence of forgiveness. Whether you draw the incident to mind regularly, almost never, or, in practice, never, if you do think of it you have written off the offence. This means that – should you have further dealings with this person – there is no barrier (for you) in the relationship. You are not trying to get recompense or dealing any differently with this person as you would anyone else. This seems an ideal – and successful – version of forgiveness.

There is still an interesting issue which I am not sure about. It is to do with whether or not the person who harmed you needs to be sorry. I don’t think they do, for, otherwise, the “evil actor” in this situation retains power over you forever, for, as an evil actor, they may relish “getting one over on you”. You must be free to write off the offence, so that you feel free, regardless of what they do. However, there is still the issue of judgement, and I think this is crucial in forgiveness.

Suppose you meet someone who hurt you several years ago. In your own heart and mind you have let go of the hurt, found your own freedom, and found the grace to hope that they are also living free from the power of the offence – you are truly not holding it against them. However, you do not forget the incident – certainly not now you have met them again – and your judgement remains that they were the offender. This judgement can never change, for it is true. Forgiveness does not mean saying, “You did not harm me”. It means saying, “You did harm me, but I don’t hold it against you”. However, if the person is not willing to accept that, then there remains power in the offence. I don’t think you, as the innocent party, needs to feel the offence all over again, for you have used the power of forgiveness to set yourself free for your part – even though reconciliation with the other person has not (yet) been possible because they have not acknowledged their wrongdoing. If, “in the cool of the moment”, years later, they refuse to acknowledge their fault, then I think we are justified in issuing some sort of condemnation of them. Our forgiveness does not mean, “OK, now that it no longer bothers me, I will change my judgment and say that you were not at fault”. As people committed to the truth we can never say that. Therefore, the ideal completion of forgiveness is when the perpetrator of harm acknowledges their fault, and then I think it really is possible to give full forgiveness, for this is a wonderful moment of reconciliation and newness of life. If they will not acknowledge their fault, then I think, as the innocent party, we have to settle for passing judgement on them, for example, “I think your behaviour was appalling”.

On forgiveness

Part 5: The start of forgiveness is letting go of hurt – but needs to be much more than that

What about giving forgiveness?

I recognise that this is said rather too glibly –  certainly, I do. I suppose that means that I approve of the idea of forgiveness, but, in practice, I find it rather difficult.

If it is a minor matter that I need to forgive, I do find that easy. I am an easy-going, considerate, understanding person, keen to keep the peace, and with a good understanding of the weaknesses of human nature. I do not get angry easily, and am willing to consider how things might look like from another person’s point of view. However, if this sort of forgiveness is easy, then it hardly counts as forgiveness. It is forgiveness – and people with different personalities to mine, and who, perhaps, have fewer advantages than me, and so are not so comfortably inclined to let other people off, may find forgiveness even in “minor” circumstances to be very difficult indeed.

Nevertheless, I think the key issues are to do with forgiveness on a substantial matter, where significant hurt has been done on a matter of importance to me.

Let’s deal with the issue of “forgive and forget” first. I don’t think it is actually possible to forget a serious hurt. You will always be able to call it to mind if you wish, or if some event prompts a memory. However, this is still very different from holding a grievance actively in your heart and mind, and dwelling on it continuously. This is clearly very harmful to yourself – and is often done by sensitive people who are the injured party, while the perpetrator of harm has truly forgotten all about it. So, if you don’t “forgive” in terms of “letting go” you are simply allowing the unjust person who hurt you to hurt you more. In this case, forgiveness is certainly important – though the focus is on protecting yourself rather than on bestowing the gift of forgiveness on the other person. I think this is important to do, but may well be falling short of the Christian ideal of forgiveness. I think it is a good outcome when – although you have not genuinely forgotten – in practice you just don’t bring a hurt to mind. It has lost its power over you – perhaps if the memory of it does come back to mind, you do get a surge of the former negative feelings, but this can often be dealt with as “just a memory of hurt” rather than an ongoing, active hurt. You may well be able to go further than easing your own hurt over the matter by coming to a settled judgement that you will not hold the offence against the person.

On forgiveness

Part 4: Only God can mend the damage done when we do wrong

Thus, the forgiveness we seek is a restoration of our relationship with God. I think that, from God’s point of view, our relationship with him can never be broken, but from our point of view, we experience our sins as a gulf opening up between us and him – and this gulf can become, to us, an unbridgeable chasm – though never to God. As we mentioned, when we do something wrong, it cannot be undone. How then can things ever be “put right”? It is this most wonderful ability to put things right that is one of God’s qualities that makes him to be God. We can use images of a sullied or spoilt or damaged prized possession. Or a relationship that has been broken. Or an experience ruined. What is done cannot be undone. But with God, he has the ability to restore and heal, to reconcile and redeem, to purify and to bless. This is what we are seeking when we seek forgiveness. It is not simply the undoing of a wrong action, a futile desire to turn the clock back, or to pretend that nothing has gone wrong. Instead, the wrongness somehow gets built into a stronger, more vibrant, more expansive, more resilient, more joyful future life, rather than being a sin like a weight around your neck, or a heavy regret in your heart that can never be let go of. (This is why Paul had to give guidance that we mustn’t think that this wonderful restorative power of God means that we should sin more so that we can enjoy more forgiveness.) Nevertheless, the forgiveness that God offers is like setting off on a wonderful new journey without a care in the world. And it is this joyful freedom that makes forgiveness so precious. We desire it so that we may return to following God’s way, untroubled by our weaknesses and failures, because we our recipients of God’s grace – and we rely on his grace, paying attention to that, rather than to our failures.

I realise that my preoccupation with my relationship with God may have led me into a new error. It is clear from how I am writing about forgiveness (and this was not crystal clear till after I wrote it) that my focus in forgiveness is on restoring my relationship with God. Is this a selfish preoccupation? Wouldn’t a cleverer – or more spiritually deep – person have focussed on forgiveness as reconciliation with the person whom I have harmed, so that they are the one who is elevated by my act of seeking forgiveness? This would certainly have made me look better. Hmn… I believe I have emphasized the importance of reconciliation and of making amends with and to the person I have harmed. I do not belittle that. However, my primary relationship in my life is the one that I have with God. It is a peculiarity (but one which I think expresses a deep truth) of seeking forgiveness that it involves a devotional declaration along the lines of, “Against you only Lord have I sinned!”. This seems rather unfair when there is a particular person or persons who can present themselves, “Actually, it was me that he was cruel or uncaring to!”. However, I think it is true that in every situation of sinning against a person, we are also sinning against God, and it is not unfair to give this priority. Until the relationship with God is restored, there is no grace to repair the relationship with the persons whom we have harmed.

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.

On forgiveness

Part 2: The heart of forgiveness is restoring our relationship with God – not seeking to be “let-off” for our mistakes

What is it, then, that we are doing when we forgive – and, indeed, when we seek forgiveness? Let’s deal with seeking forgiveness first, as I think that is easier.

As with just about everything, there is a good version and a bad version of it. When we seek forgiveness, it could simply be a desire to escape from the consequences of our actions. We have done wrong, and perhaps we even knew we were doing wrong at the time, but we went ahead and did it anyway, because it suited our interests at the time. On reflection, we recognise that we wish we had made better decisions. Therefore, can the negative effects of our wrong actions – now classified as “a mistake” – be written off, as though we had never made the wrong choice? This desire to “wipe the slate clean” is, I think, a perfectly good desire. The danger is when we think that this can be done glibly, as though we feel we are free to engage in any bad action because we have a “get out of jail free” card, which we play as casually as we sinned. (The root definition of “sin” is, of course, “to fall short” in our aim at goodness.) There is also the huge danger that our main desire in seeking forgiveness is to make ourselves feel better, restoring our sense of righteousness, rather than having our main focus on eliminating the harm that our sin has put into the world.

How then do we do justice to our very genuine desire to put right a wrong, when the very essence of doing wrong is that it cannot be undone? One clear answer is that repentance is not done casually, but sincerely and with genuine sorrow. This is not simply a matter of “crying enough tears” to show that “you really are sorry this time”, but it’s more about taking the measure of your actions, to feel the weight, both of what you got wrong, and of what you now want to get right. We need to be very careful that this doesn’t descend into emotionalism, whereby we “prove our sorrow” and make ever more extravagant promises that “this time it will be different” and we will not make that mistake again. What it does need to be is an intense focus on goodness, to reconnect ourselves with our primary aim in life of living in tune with God – and I think this is the core content of “righteousness”. Even more than a measure of our own actions, it is a relationship with God, who is perfect righteousness – but with God, his righteousness does not veer towards a focus on legality, in terms of who is in the right, for God’s righteousness intrinsically includes qualities of love, compassion, mercy and forgiveness. These are not in competition with, but complementary with, God’s justice, purity and ability to do what is good and right. If forgiveness is focussed on restoring our relationship with the God of love, then that will launch us into a life of living in tune with that love, so that new harm is not done, and old harms are mended.

(A theological reflection in 9 (rather long) parts)

On forgiveness

Part 1: True righteousness is complementary with forgiveness; self-righteousness is the opposite of forgiveness

In my recent thoughts on the inadequacies of secularism, particularly in comparison to religion, I touched on the importance of forgiveness, and I would like to now explore this more.

Firstly, we must face the reality of religion’s failure to offer forgiveness throughout much of history. This seems to be because of the conflict between forgiveness and righteousness. (There is no conflict really, but we get even this wrong.) Human beings have a deep desire to be righteous, and this must be reckoned to us as a remarkable achievement. Given our immense ability at self-serving lies and injustice, it is a truly wonderful thing that we appear to have an innate desire to be righteous. This is largely the same as a desire to “be in the right”, but I think there is more to it than even that. Wanting to “be in the right” is, of course, also a good thing, but we can see that it can easily tip over into an arrogant, aggressive and self-centred attitude. In other words, our natural human nature keeps reasserting itself, even when we are trying hard to do the right thing. And yet, we must not be too hard on ourselves, because we truly do want to do the right thing.

However, for me, “righteousness” has all the good connotations of “being in the right”, but with none of the negatives. Righteousness can tip over into “self-righteousness”, and this is the negative version of the desire, but the very terminology has separated itself from true righteousness by indicating that your desire is to “show yourself” as righteous, whereas true righteousness is a self-effacing quality of surrender to what is true and right and good, regardless of whether it serves your own interests or not. Righteousness has a clean, fresh, purity to it, whereby you put yourself to one side because in the goodness of God you have discovered a wonderful life-giving quality of living life well, in tune with God’s own spirit of goodness, truth and love. When we are caught up into this spirit, righteousness goes hand in hand with forgiveness, for our desire – in righteousness – is to make all things whole, and forgiveness is an absolutely fundamental means of achieving that. However, when our righteousness has tipped over into self-righteousness, then that is in direct conflict with forgiveness, for the aim of the self-righteous person is to assert themselves, and their own goodness, and there is no better way to do this than by condemning others- the exact opposite of forgiveness.