Christian Living

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Love is composed of a great many properties such as mercy, charity, justice, grace, kindness, and self-sacrifice. Inherently, all that we classify as goodness emanates from and is contained under the umbrella of love. Love of course has its origins and its being in God--love exists not apart from God as a separate entity, but is God, as noted by the apostle John in the 4th chapter of his first epistle. Love is often described as the most immutable, most spectacularly powerful force in existence, and this is so because God is that force. When a person understands love it is my contention that they will then understand God.

If I were asked to cite what I believed was the most important component of the nature of love, I would have to say it is forgiveness. Of course this is arguable, but I ground this view in the perception that of all the elements love contains, forgiveness is the by far the most challenging of them all. It is difficult for people nowadays to be charitable, kind, just, or self-giving given the nature of man as it is, and people really have to work at it. But I submit to you that the act of forgiving others, for most people, is comparable to trying to extinguish a forest fire with a water pistol. With enough coercion, it is seemingly possible to convince people to be kind, generous, and fair in their judgments; but forgiveness rests on a higher plateau--the thought of forgiving another for their crimes against them seems to be as desirable for them, as chewing on metal.

When people are wronged or violated, instantaneously the first thoughts are those of retaliation, and revenge fantasies begin to take their place. The initial reactions are never to contemplate forgiveness. The person or persons that have hurt us become to us objects of wrath as our emotions assume dominance over our thinking. Unfortunately, sometimes revenge is enacted very quickly, and we “ get even” with our oppressors. More often than not however, retaliation is slow in coming, or even more often than that, never at all. When revenge is not satisfied, it morphs into a grudge, a disposition of hate and steady rage that can persist for years.

Forgiveness is seen by our culture not as virtue, but as vice; not as strength, but as weakness. The person who forgives in this society is regarded as having no courage, while the one who retaliates is heralded as tenacious and iron-willed. This, in my humble perception, is just about completely backwards, born from a perverse spirit of self-satisfaction which characterizes the distorted conceptions of justice this culture holds.

I see three reasons why we ought to forgive our wrongdoers, and the first of these is my thesis that forgiveness is not weakness, but strength. Permit me to relate a fantastic story I stumbled across some time ago concerning a woman named Betty Ferguson. In 1975 Betty’s 16 year old daughter Debbie was kidnapped by her English teacher, a man named Ray Payne, and subsequently murdered. He was convicted and received a life sentence. Ferguson’s life however, wrought with grief and anger, became miserable. In her own words, she says she “ was consumed with hate” and her physical health began to deteriorate, compounded by her growing reliance on alcohol. While attending her sister’s funeral five years later, she recalled a portion of the Lord’s prayer that seemed to strike her: “ Forgive those who trespass against us”. She says she began researching the notion of forgiveness, and after five painful years of this, remarkably decided she was going to forgive her daughter’s killer. Even more astonishing, she traveled to visit Payne in prison to tell him so in person. In her own words she said “ "I told him what Debbie had meant to me and how lost and broken-hearted I'd been. He listened, and we both cried. I left a different person: My heart felt soft and light and warm."

You call that weakness? You call that vice? I call it strength and resilience of the very highest magnitude. Unless a person has lost a child because of murder, no one, even with the deepest of imaginations could conceive of how difficult Ferguson’s decision really was. Scaling Mount Everest in the nude a hundred times over would seem easy by comparison.

Retaining hate and the hope for vindication is easy. It demands little effort. The weakest of people can easily and comfortably hold a grudge. But to forgive someone a transgression requires fortitude and stamina of profound immensity--it forces a person to do the very last thing they are naturally inclined to do, to rebel against their own powerful desires. To do that which one wants to do is easy. To do that which one despises, is difficult, very difficult. No perseverance or strong will is ever necessary to hold a grudge or harbour hatred for years on end--anybody can do that. But to let go; to forgive and also forget, to permit your enemies grace--that’s an attribute held by only the few in our time.

Secondly, to not forgive is self-destructive. Unforgiveness rarely ever harms your oppressor, but renders severe emotional, and in the case of Ferguson, physical distress upon you. While they have most likely forgotten what they did to you the very next day, you remember it for a long time. It persistently occupies your thoughts, inflicting more trauma each and every time you relive and re-enact their crime against you. It begins to anchor itself permanently into your thoughts, which thus begins to detrimentally affect your life and a whole. Thought that could be allocated to more pertinent and more important matters is absorbed by this unforgiveness, and it escalates as time goes on.

Moreover, bitterness over the wrong done to you begins to expand into a bitterness of things in general. What was once bitterness towards your oppressor alone, turns into a bitterness towards the world, and this is where unforgiveness really destroys a person from the inside out. It becomes cancerous--it spreads quickly and destructively, and if allowed to continue for too long will eventually erode into oblivion a person’s capacity to enjoy happiness, and turn them into an accomplished pessimist.

Lastly, and definitely most importantly, we ought to forgive others because God has offered to forgive us. This was the reality that confronted Betty Ferguson and I believe God, seeing her condition, opened her heart and introduced her to a concept that would lead her to inevitable healing. Theologians have long debated over the real meaning of the cross with some declaring it signifies justice, while others say redemption. I think the cross contains multiple meanings, but for me forgiveness leaps out at you. Jesus Christ hung on that cross because God was perfectly, and lovingly willing to forgive us of our sins. Who among us can say with confidence that we’ve never done anything that would warrant our being forgiven by someone else? Who can assert that no sin they ever committed has not grieved the heart of God? God can and will forgive your wrongdoing, no matter the severity.

However, Jesus uttered one statement that I think many of us secretly wish he hadn’t of, found in Matthew 6:14-15: “ For if you forgive others for their transgressions, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive others, then your Father will not forgive your transgressions.” God’s forgiveness, while patient, is nonetheless conditional. The condition being that we are to forgive others, otherwise, His forgiveness will not be forthcoming. He doesn’t ask you to live an impeccable life, but He does want us to forgive. It would be very hypocritical for any of us to commission Him for forgiveness of our sins if we refuse to extend that forgiveness to those who wrong us. What the consequences of that are is another topic.

I would love to champion the notion that God demands us to forgive because our well being and sense of peace is His most pressing concern. While those ends are indeed worthy of pursuit, that is not God’s primary objective. It is a matter of righteousness, or morality, of a standard of goodness that for whatever reason known only to God, He wishes for us to maintain. I don’t really take issue with fluffy, feel-good modern interpretations of the nature of God all that much, but in this department regarding forgiveness, Jesus is acutely blunt that God just isn‘t going to bend on this. The one who spoke the very words of the aforementioned passages is the same one who petitioned His Father to forgive the people who nailed Him to the cross; who forgave the thief hanging next to Him; who forgave the woman caught in infidelity; who forgave Peter for denying Him; who forgave Paul for killing scores of His people; and who bled to death in front of His own mother for the remission and forgiveness of all of our sins. No request He ever made of us was anything He wasn’t willing to do Himself. We are to forgive, even if the endeavour seems to us to be impossible.

If I were a preacher and I had but one sermon and one sermon only that I could preach, forgiveness would be the subject matter. If you could persuade even a tenth of the populations of the world to prioritize forgiveness as their noblest quest, I believe it would transform societies. So much love would find its place in human interaction, and innumerable hearts could be healed. I can hardly perceive the goodness that would proceed forth if every person in the world forgave their oppressors; if all discarded their grudges, hatred, and rage against those who have wronged them.

That is however, the sort of world God is interested in, and that process began at the cross. And that’s where everyone needs to begin.

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