GOING DEEPER WITH FORGIVENESS

As we approach Easter, Matthew's sermon last Sunday pointed us directly to that ultimate act of forgiveness, the Cross of Christ. In order to go a little bit deeper, maybe looking at the place of forgiveness for people who have come to faith in Christ will be helpful. Somehow it seems like we believers in this post modern culture have forgotten the necessity of forgiveness as a Christian practice.

Today when we talk about forgiveness it seems so much is focused on the therapeutic value of forgiveness – how forgiveness does great things like lower blood pressure, acts as an antidote to bitterness and resentment, or how forgiveness, along with prayer, helps us heal quicker. But all this really translates to nothing more than the drive to make us feel better about ourselves – we forgive because it benefits us – it is something we do for ourselves only.

Now I am not saying forgiveness isn’t all of those things, and that forgiveness should not be something we do because it is of personal benefit, but that seems to me to be missing the mark. This type of forgiveness can be done by the world very well thank you and if we limit ourselves to this type of forgiveness only, we really aren't being that salt and light. To go a little deeper means we have to see forgiveness through the eyes of Jesus. I have this sense that Jesus didn’t give out forgiveness because of the health benefits, whether physical, mental or spiritual, He would get. As Matthew noted in his sermon, the very first words Jesus uttered from the Cross were “forgive them Father.” Rather obvious no benefits were coming.

In my little rant (Frustration at the Intersection) I talk about what the Atonement really means. The Cross wasn’t simply about Jesus taking the wrath of the Father for the sins of humanity, though surely that was an essential part of the Cross. Rather, I see the Cross as being the only means of restoring fallen, and worsening, humanity to righteousness – or right relationship with the Trinity. So being in right relationship means we are now given the gift of participating in the divine life of the Trinity, and that includes being able to join in the mission of God in His redemption and reconciling the world to Himself, in His way and in His time. Being a people who forgive, and forgive freely as a gift to be given out, means we get to become that alternative society within society, and that we are able to empty ourselves of ourselves so that the Spirit may dwell more fully and we become receptive to the mission of God.

Pope Benedict invoked one of the most powerful images of forgiveness in the NT. In his rebuke of the Irish bishops and their terrible handling of the priest abuses, he recalled the image of Jesus writing in the sand before the woman caught in adultery. Let the one without sin cast that first stone. It struck me in that reading that the opposite of forgiveness is judgmentalism.

In the divorce support ministry, sometimes people will ask how I know I have forgiven. My sense of forgiveness is that it is real when we realize the person we are in the process of forgiving, may not only join with us in that mission of God in the here and now, but that person may very well be with us in the New Jerusalem for all eternity.