The Faces of Forgiveness

Scripture: Acts 7:54-60

Our faith assigns a high value to the virtue of forgiveness.

Jesus emphasized its importance several times in the Sermon on the Mount. He gave it a central place in the prayer that he taught us. He displayed it, and asked the Father for it on our behalf, in the very throes of death. Indeed, I do not believe that in the history of the world a more tragic or more beautiful sentence was ever uttered than this: “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.”

Our faith similarly reveres stories in which someone demonstrates an extraordinary capacity to forgive. We encounter one in this scripture: Stephen, suffering under the blows of the stones that will kill him, pleads for mercy on behalf of his assailants. Under the circumstances described here, we might expect Stephen to call out in anger with cries of condemnation or warnings of divine vengeance. Instead, his dying words echo those of the Messiah he had chosen to follow.

I recently had a powerful experience that involved a story of remarkable forgiveness. For reasons with which I will not bore you, on May 1st of this year I found myself in the magnificent St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Fifth Avenue in New York. That happened to be the day on which the Catholic Church celebrated the beatification of Pope John Paul II—an important step in the process of declaring him a saint. Cardinal Egan, who was leading the mass, knew John Paul II and had many stories to tell about him. But he focused his remarks on a story of forgiveness.

As you will recall, in 1981 an assassination attempt was made on the Pope and he was seriously wounded. As soon as he was well enough to do so, he made a public statement declaring his forgiveness for the man who had shot him. And then—to give life to his words—John Paul II went to visit the man in prison. For more than twenty minutes, he spoke quietly to this declared terrorist, at one point softly wrapping his hands around the hands that had pumped four bullets into his body.

Such stories and scriptural passages provide us with a specific image of what forgiveness looks like. It is instantaneous, complete, and unconditional. It absolves the offender of wrongdoing, almost as though the offense never occurred. In the same vein, the great preacher and abolitionist Henry Ward Beecher once declared that “Forgiveness ought to be like a canceled note—torn in two, and burned up, so that it can never be shown against one.”

I am going to call that kind of forgiveness “absolute forgiveness” and I am going to start with an obvious point about it. We ordinary human beings—who are not Stephen or a saint or the Savior of Mankind—have a hard time getting there. We struggle to forgive and forget. As the old saying goes, we want to “bury the hatchet … but mark the spot.”

That great Texas theologian, Lyle Lovett, has some fun with our human reluctance to forgive in a song called “God Will.” It goes like this:

Who keeps on trusting you when you’ve been cheating and spending your nights on the town?

And who keeps on saying that he still wants you when you’re through running around?
And who keeps on loving you when you’ve been lying, saying things ain’t what they seem?

Well, God does.

But I don’t.

And God will.

But I won’t.

And that’s the difference between God and me.

Not the only difference, certainly, but a common and conspicuous one.

Unfortunately, this way of thinking leaves us with a dilemma. It tells us that only absolute forgiveness matters. It tells us that, if we offer those who have injured us anything less or different, then we must count ourselves among the unforgiving wretches of the earth. It tells us that forgiveness is all or nothing.

I want to invite you to consider whether the gospels actually endorse this all-or-nothing perspective. Now, please don’t get me wrong. I am not questioning whether the gospels recognize absolute forgiveness as sacred, beautiful, and ideal; obviously, they do. Rather, I am questioning whether the gospels say that absolute forgiveness is the only kind that Jesus recognized or that makes a difference in the world.

In my opinion, this question is terribly important to our spiritual well-being, to our psychological health, and, in fact, to the very institution of forgiveness. I believe that some (perhaps many) people despair over their ability to forgive because—in their effort to be good Christians—they conclude that nothing short of absolute forgiveness counts. At the same time, they do not, and feel they cannot, experience the kind of instantaneous, complete, and unconditional forgiveness that our faith celebrates. As a result, they cannot figure out what to do next; they grow increasingly despondent over the issue; and, at some point, they simply give up and declare forgiveness impossible.

I think this is bad for the heart, the mind, and the soul. I also think it reflects a misunderstanding of what Jesus asks of us.

Let’s start with a fairly straightforward observation: we do not ordinarily think of Christian virtues in all-or-nothing terms. Take, for example, the virtue of self-sacrificial charity. It is true that when the rich young man asked what he needed to do to inherit eternal life Jesus answered by saying “Sell all that you have and distribute the money to the poor.” And it is true that charity of this magnitude has a special purity and sanctity to it. But it is also true that when members of my church donate food to Faith in Action, give clothes to the Salvation Army, visit the sick, offer their blood to the Red Cross, sing in the choir, and volunteer their time at the Jackson Interfaith Shelter I do not view them as uncharitable Philistines because they failed to give away everything they own.

Similarly, we do not ordinarily limit the category of valuable faith experiences to those that occur dramatically and suddenly. So it is true that some conversions happen at a single, miraculous, attention-grabbing instant—like the voice and flash that threw Saul of Tarsus to the ground. And it is true that such amazing transformations have an honored place in our religion. But it is also true most of us experience our faith as a slow-going marathon rather than as a sprinting leap across the finish line.

Of course, that does not render the way we run our race spiritually unworthy. Many years ago, I ran a marathon as a fundraiser for the Leukemia Society. The Society sponsored a dinner the night before at which a former Olympic runner gave an inspirational speech. He said something like this: “I know some of you will complete this race in just a few hours. But the runners I respect the most are those of you who will take five or six hours or more to finish. You will have to show patience, determination, and grit that a faster guy like me could probably never muster. I can run toward the finish line. But you will have to stay pointed in the right direction, keep putting one foot in front of the other, and believe.”

Since so many dimensions of our faith work this way, it is little wonder that forgiveness sometimes only comes to us as the result of a journey, a process, rather than by way of a total and immediate shift in consciousness. Indeed, there are a number of passages in the gospels in which Jesus describes or exhibits forgiveness as a process—often a process that emphasizes the repentance of the one who seeks forgiveness. For example, in the seventeenth chapter of Luke, Jesus says: “If your brother sins against you, rebuke him, and if he repents, forgive him. And if he sins against you seven times in a day, and seven times in a day turns again to you saying, ‘I repent,’ you shall forgive him.” You will note that Jesus does not shrug off such forgiveness as unworthy of the name simply because it anticipates a show of regret and reformation on the part of the offender.

This connection between forgiveness and repentance was a favorite theme of the great Lutheran theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Bonhoeffer warned against a state of mind where forgiveness is gleefully received without any apparent cost to the beneficiary. He cautioned that such behavior can so “cheapen” forgiveness that it becomes trivial. That is the point of a wonderful joke told by the comedian Emo Phillips: “When I was a kid I used to pray every night for a new bicycle. Then I realized the Lord doesn’t work that way. So I stole one and asked Him to forgive me.”

Over and over again, Jesus implored us to have forgiving hearts. He displayed the spirit of absolute forgiveness for all of us to see. But he also recognized that forgiveness sometimes comes through the passage of time and as the result of a process—a process that includes remorse and repentance on the part of the one who inflicted the injury.

Because that process gets worked out between human beings it will often prove harder and sloppier than we might wish. But that should not surprise us. Indeed, I am aware of very little within the realm of human relationships that qualifies as neat, tidy, and wholly rational. This is one of the many reasons that forgiveness offers us such a rich occasion for prayer.

Let me return to where I started and put it even more bluntly. As Jesus declared from the cross, we do not know what we are doing. We do not know what we are doing. Who could possibly argue with that?

We blunder our way through childhood and youth and we do not know what we are doing. We fall in love and we do not know what we are doing. We go to work and we do not know what we are doing. We raise children and we do not know what we are doing. We vote and argue and dream and falter and buy and sell and applaud and condemn and we do not know what we are doing—particularly when we condemn. Funny, isn’t it, that Jesus tells us that we must not judge and that we must forgive and we spend most of our lives getting that job description exactly backwards.

But of course we do. We’re human. So we need forgiveness. And we need to forgive.

Praise the one who sees us for who we are. Praise the one who knows us for what we are. Praise the one who gives us the capacity to forgive and the resolve to try to be forgivable. Praise the one who forgives us as we would be forgiven.

Say alleluia.

Say amen.