Working with God

"I forgive you." Are there any more difficult words to pronounce? Here is a woman who has been the victim of domestic violence. Her husband has made her life miserable, betrayed their marriage vows with his violence toward her. Is she expected to forgive, to as we sometimes say, "forgive and forget"? Every day most of us are the victims, not of something so terrible as domestic violence, but rather of the thoughtless, cruel, and uncaring acts of others. Their effect is cumulative, leading some of us to great resentment and bitterness. Should we be more forgiving?

Think for a moment of the worst thing that someone has done to you. Now picture yourself extended the hand of forgiveness, saying the words, "I forgive." Will you not agree with me that forgiveness may be the toughest act we Christians are asked to do? Why should we forgive? Whenever we pray the Lord's Prayer, we ask God to "forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us." Thus it appears that, if we have been forgiven for our sin by Christ, we should want to forgive others for their sins against us. Or perhaps we ought to forgive because we yearn for a broken relationship to be restored.

Most of the time, we just let the conflict fester. We would rather lose a brother or sister, we would rather be disobedient to the very prayer we pray, than to venture forgiveness. Forgiveness is tough. Theologian Gregory Jones says that we need to think of forgiveness, not as some isolated, occasional heroic act, but rather as a way of life, a constant practice for Christians.

Most of us know that some of the most frequent and difficult occasions for forgiveness are related to friendship. If you are friends with someone, you have lots of opportunity to need to be forgiven by that person, or to forgive that person, if the friendship is to endure. Jones says that we ought to think of forgiveness as related to the practice of friendship with God and with other people. The central goal of forgiveness is not to get over guilt; it is to reconcile, to restore communion with God, with one another, and with the whole creation. Jones says,

The practice of forgiveness calls us willingly to do things with and for one another so that communion can be restored. Forgiveness works through our ongoing willingness to give up certain claims against one another, to give the truth when we assess our relationships with one another, and to give gifts of ourselves by making innovative gestures that offer a future not bound by the past. Being forgiven requires an ongoing willingness to honor a new claim that has been made upon us, to speak with a new truthfulness, and to live in a new way with one another.

We believe that our God is always making all things new. When we reach out to heal brokenness through forgiveness, we are participating in some of the same creative action as God. Specific words or gestures are demanded. Words like, "I'm sorry, please forgive me" and "I forgive you, let's work this out." Perhaps it takes a gesture such as a handshake or writing a letter to someone. I once knew a woman who was forever, unintentionally, but truly hurting people with her words. She made up with them by first depositing her homemade pie on their doorstep. She made lots of pies, but it was her way of walking down that long, risky road toward reconciliation.

Sometimes forgiveness is easier if we put ourselves in the other person's place, attempt to imagine life as they must live it. Forgiveness takes time and involves hard work.

Forgiveness is dependent upon a host of other Christian practices like prayer and Bible study. In my experience as a pastor, I have found that a major source of some of our most anguished and heart-felt prayers is the prayer for God to give us the grace to forgive. Gregory Jones lists some steps toward forgiveness which I find helpful:

(1) We are willing to speak truthfully and patiently about the conflicts that have arisen. I find this to be one of the most difficult steps in the hard steps toward forgiveness - telling the truth to ourselves and to one another.

(2) We acknowledge both the propriety of anger and bitterness and a desire to overcome them. It doesn't do any good to deny our hurt and anger. Anger can be a sign of passion for right to be done in the world, a passionate acknowledgement that wrong really has been done and ought to be set right. Yet left to fester within, anger can eat us from the inside out.

(3) We have concern for the well-being of the other as a child of God. The one who has wronged us is not doomed to be forever an enemy. He or she is a potential friend in God. It was this ability to see enemies as potential friends that enabled Abraham Lincoln to speak a kind word about the South during the Civil War, at a moment when feelings were most bitter. Asked by a shocked bystander how he could to this, Lincoln said, "Madam, do I not destroy my enemies when I make them my friends?"

(4) We recognize our own complicity in conflict, remembering that we have been forgiven in the past and we are ready to repent. This does not mean a cowardly unwillingness to be held accountable for their actions. The proverbial "There are two sides to every question" ought not to paper over the truth that there are often real victims and real villains in a situation. But we also need to recognize and resist our temptation to blame others while exonerating ourselves. As Jesus elsewhere stated, we tend to see the specks in other people's eyes while not noticing the log in our own (Mt 7:1-5).

(5) We make a commitment to struggle to change whatever caused and continues to perpetuate our conflicts. Forgiveness does not merely refer backward to the past event that caused the breach; it also looks forward to the restoration of friendship. Forgiveness is the practice of justice, working with God for a more just and loving world.

(6) We confess our yearning for the possibility of reconciliation. Sometimes forgiveness seems like "hoping against hope" for reconciliation in this life. Yet in our difficulty to forgive, let us remind ourselves that this is but a glimpse of the kind of yearning which must fill the heart of God all the time. Paul reminds us, "In Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting the message of reconciliation to us" (2 Cor 5:16-21).

Our forgiveness begins in the heart of God, with God's relentless determination to have a family, to make us friends. Forgiveness is not forgetfulness. Our everyday slogan, "forgive and forget," has it wrong. We don't forget the wrong, or sweep it under the table; rather, we remember the wrong, focus upon it, so that it might be forgiven, so that the wrong no longer exercises power over our future. Forgiveness is the exercise of imagination, imagining our world as the sort of place where we are not forever enslaved to our misdeeds but where God works with us to make all things new.

Today's gospel speaks of forgiveness as something that goes on in the church. And if we are to be the church, a community that risks bold deeds in the cause of God's justice, that speaks the truth to power, that lives together as the body of Christ, then we will need lots of forgiveness. The church, as the place where we learn those disciplines of friendship with God and with one another, has got to be a place where there is much forgiveness.

We need one another in order to learn to tell the truth about our lives. We also need to unlearn those ways of talking with one another that confuse, and hurt, and to learn patterns of redemptive word and deed that build up the church as a place where people learn to practice forgiveness. Ephesians urges us to "speak the truth" with one another, but only within a passage that closes with instructions to forgive one another as Christ forgives us (4:25 - 5:2).

But even a forgiving community has boundaries. In today's gospel there is a parable: a servant who has been forgiven by his master shows no mercy to a fellow servant, and as a result is punished (Mt 18:23-35). Such severe exclusion comes only after a long process of attempts at reconciliation. Exclusion ought to be seen as only temporary; it can be approved only within the context of hope that fellowship will be restored. Even when people have made themselves "enemies" by their unwillingness to repent, we are not allowed to demonize them; rather, we are called to love them (Mt 5:44). Just as Jesus reached out to Gentiles and tax collectors, seeking to bring them back into the fold of God's covenant of grace, so also are we called to continue to reach out to and love even our enemies.

Forgiveness is one way we are obedient to Christ's vision for us and for the world. In forgiveness, we help God recreate the world, to redeem the mess that we've made of creation, to make that move whereby we cease being enemies to God and to one another and become friends