Thoughts On Forgiveness To Look Back On

I’ve been thinking about forgiveness and how the human spirit gets bruised through interactions with other humans. How do we truly forgive? The Bible says to forgive “seventy times seven.” It’s not just a one-time deal that is done and over. Forgiveness has to happen countless numbers of times. Focusing on God’s grace loosens me up to forgive as i’ve been forgiven.

I decided to gather a few different writings on forgiveness here so i can come back and read them in one spot. The first is by Timothy Keller from his book, The Reason For God. Which also covers, The Reason For Forgiveness. I didn’t know what to cut out, I liked the part about when evil is done, you spread it by thinking someone has to pay.

“Most of the wrongs done to us cannot be assessed in purely economic terms. Someone may have robbed you of some happiness, reputation, opportunity, or certain aspects of your freedom. No price tag can be put on such things, yet we still have a sense of violated justice that does not go away when the other person says, “I’m really sorry.” When we are seriously wronged we have an indelible sense that the perpetrators have incurred a debt that must be dealt with. Once you have been wronged and you realize there is a just debt that can’t simply be dismissed— there are only two things to do. The first option is to seek ways to make the perpetrators suffer for what they have done. You can withhold relationship and actively initiate or passively wish for some kind of pain in their lives commensurate to what you experienced. There are many ways to do this. You can viciously confront them, saying things that hurt. You can go around to others to tarnish their reputation. If the perpetrators suffer, you may begin to feel a certain satisfaction, feeling that they are now paying off their debt. There are some serious problems with this option, however. You may become harder and colder, more self-pitying, and therefore more self-absorbed. If the wrongdoer was a person of wealth or authority you may instinctively dislike and resist that sort of person for the rest of your life. If it was a person of the opposite sex or another race you might become permanently cynical and prejudiced against whole classes of people. In addition, the perpetrator and his friends and family often feel they have the right to respond to your payback in kind. Cycles of reaction and retaliation can go on for years. Evil has been done to you— yes. But when you try to get payment through revenge the evil does not disappear. Instead it spreads, and it spreads most tragically of all into you and your own character. There is another option, however. You can forgive. Forgiveness means refusing to make them pay for what they did. However, to refrain from lashing out at someone when you want to do so with all your being is agony. It is a form of suffering. You not only suffer the original loss of happiness, reputation, and opportunity, but now you forgo the consolation of inflicting the same on them. You are absorbing the debt, taking the cost of it completely on yourself instead of taking it out of the other person. It hurts terribly. Many people would say it feels like a kind of death. Yes, but it is a death that leads to resurrection instead of the lifelong living death of bitterness and cynicism. As a pastor I have counseled many people about forgiveness, and I have found that if they do this— if they simply refuse to take vengeance on the wrongdoer in action and even in their inner fantasies— the anger slowly begins to subside. You are not giving it any fuel and so the resentment burns lower and lower.

C. S. Lewis wrote in one of his Letters to Malcolm that “last week, while at prayer, I suddenly discovered— or felt as if I did— that I had really forgiven someone I had been trying to forgive for over thirty years. Trying, and praying that I might.” 1 I remember once counseling a sixteen-year-old girl about the anger she felt toward her father. We weren’t getting anywhere until I said to her, “Your father has defeated you, as long as you hate him. You will stay trapped in your anger unless you forgive him thoroughly from the heart and begin to love him.” Something thawed in her when she realized that. She went through the suffering of costly forgiveness, which at first always feels far worse than bitterness, into eventual freedom.

Forgiveness must be granted before it can be felt, but it does come eventually. It leads to a new peace, a resurrection. It is the only way to stop the spread of the evil. When I counsel forgiveness to people who have been harmed, they often ask about the wrongdoers, “Shouldn’t they be held accountable?” I usually respond, “Yes, but only if you forgive them.” There are many good reasons that we should want to confront wrongdoers. Wrongdoers have inflicted damage and, as in the example of the gate I presented earlier, it costs something to fix the damage. We should confront wrongdoers— to wake them up to their real character, to move them to repair their relationships, or to at least constrain them and protect others from being harmed by them in the future. Notice, however, that all those reasons for confrontation are reasons of love. The best way to love them and the other potential victims around them is to confront them in the hope that they will repent, change, and make things right. The desire for vengeance, however, is motivated not by goodwill but by ill will. You may say, “I just want to hold them accountable,” but your real motivation may be simply to see them hurt. If you are not confronting them for their sake or for society’s sake but for your own sake, just for payback, the chance of the wrongdoer ever coming to repentance is virtually nil. In such a case you, the confronter, will overreach, seeking not justice but revenge, not their change but their pain. Your demands will be excessive and your attitude abusive. He or she will rightly see the confrontation as intended simply to cause hurt. A cycle of retaliation will begin. Only if you first seek inner forgiveness will your confrontation be temperate, wise, and gracious. Only when you have lost the need to see the other person hurt will you have any chance of actually bringing about change, reconciliation, and healing. You have to submit to the costly suffering and death of forgiveness if there is going to be any resurrection.”

- Keller, Timothy. The Reason for God (pp. 185-188).

Forgiveness hurts. It is a way we lose all control of the circumstances and release the other person to be who they are, however they are. We choose to forgive. Brant Hanson wrote a book called Unoffendable. He says righteous anger is a myth and giving up our Christian right to get offended is one of the most simplifying freeing and happy things we can do.

Being unoffendable helps us love in risky unexpected ways. Here’s a bit from the chapter, Bert and Ernie and Satan:

Jesus knows the human heart and so should we. We can quit being shocked and adjust our expectations accordingly.

Perhaps you’ve noticed: Jesus encountered one moral mess after another and He was never taken aback by anyone’s morality. Ever. I can’t find any stories where Jesus sees an immoral person and says anything like, “Ok. Wow! Well, that really is disgusting. That’s just too much. “

My wife, Carolyn, and I had a discussion regarding someone we have both known for many years. She says something like, “I can’t believe she just did that!” and I agreed. We were just amazed by this person’s refusal to be honest, and-Whoa! Wait a second. We can’t believe she did that?

She has done exactly that for thirty years.

Now that i’ve noticed it, I hear this so often from our radio callers. “I can’t believe my Mom did this.” or “I can’t believe my sister would….”

And i ask, “Really? You can’t believe it?”

I’m not the smartest guy in the world , but i propose that we wouldn’t be shocked and amazed if someone who does that type of thing…you know…does it again. So how about taking this idea to all our experiences? Are we going to live in perpetual shock at the nature of man?

So, humans are judgemental? Okay, established. There are self-righteous people who self-describe as Christians and there are self-righteous people who self describe as atheists. They’re self-righteous about different things, sure, but it’s a very human thing to the core.

That caustic email? I had to let it go. People are messed up. I know this because i talk to millions of them and I’m messed up. This should not be daily news. “I can’t believe how crazy people are…” I’ve had to adjust my expectations and stop being offended.

This is not cynicism. This is living with realistic expectations -the very same understanding of our nature that Jesus has.

-Brant Hanson from Unoffendable

I’ve been reading another author who writes about church trauma and i think it can be forgiven the same way as anything else. It all comes from differing viewpoints of right and wrong. Sometimes i tell myself, “I’d rather be wrong with a right attitude than be right with a wrong attitude.”

Here is what Brenna Blaine from Can I Say That writes about church struggles:

When we synthesize the teachings of Paul to the early gatherings of believers, we walk away with a different emphasis on what the church is supposed to be- an assembly of ordinary individuals dedicated to a mostly individual purpose, to grow up in the person of Christ and tell others about Him. Or, as our church says, to make more and better disciples. That’s it.

To partake in the practices of the early church, we must start with community, with church.

She talks about church hurt they’ve experienced through leader’s immorality and realizing it was about the group of believers coming together and worshiping and confessing. The blueprint of the church was never meant to be about a pastor or his fan club as she calls it. It was meant to be about a group of believers coming together to worship Jesus.

There’s a story i love about a small church group; it’s called Babette’s Feast. Brant Hanson introduced it to me, he summarized it as a feast of grace for people who didn’t deserve it. But the feast was so amazing it softened their hearts and drew them together. I’ll summarize it here but if you want to read the whole story, here is the pdf link; https://www1.villanova.edu/content/dam/villanova/mission/faith/CFL_Fall2019DinnerReading/Babettes-Feast.pdf

Babette’s Feast

Two beautiful young ladies grew up with their father, the joyless pastor of his own religious group. The group had chosen to put away from themselves all pleasures and live a spartan severe life. The ladies each had opportunities to marry good men but both were deemed too worldly and chased away.

The girls grew up, still devoted to their father and after he died they kept leading the dying little group of uptight, ageing true believers. Sadly, though they kept the faith, they had turned back to old spites against each other, one was an unpaid debt of cheated money. They nit-picked at each others faults.

One rainy night, a woman shows up at the elderly ladies door. Her name is Babette. She’s a refugee from war torn Paris and the ladies take her in. She offers to cook for them to pay her way and they tell her how they eat simply and show her how to make the simple broth they eat, She watches and learns with an expressionless face. Soon they rely on her and she eases their burden. She even saves them money by getting the best deals at the market on food ingredients.

But then a letter arrives for Babette. Her name has come up and won ten thousand francs in the lottery. She ask the ladies if she can use her lottery money and make a meal for them and the whole congregation. They reluctantly agree, not sure if that will be okay with everyone.

Shipments begin to arrive from all over the world. Mysterious packages that mystify the ladies but as agreed they stay out of the kitchen. Until one day, one of the elderly sisters happens to glimpse a large black turtle on the kitchen floor with a serpent like head moving.

The sisters go together to visit all the congregants and they apologize but they feel like they can’t refuse Babette’s request for this meal. They ask that each person not say anything hurtful or appreciative about the food. They will all just discuss the weather and crops. All the congregants agree.

A guest gets added last minute to the meal, he is a previous suitor to one of the ladies. Now he is an acclaimed general and has travelled the world. He realizes he misses the simplicity and beauty of this village life .

The night of the feast arrives. Tables are set with fine linens and candlight flickers on the fine china and crystal goblets that Babette ordered in. Babette serves buckwheat cakes with caviar, turtle soup, her signature Caille en Sarcophage avec Sauce Perigourdine-quail in pastry with foie gras and truffle sauce- and an endless list of other specialties. Of course, she also serves the most rare and delicious wines and sparkling drinks.

Her entire lottery winnings, gone-for one meal. For one delicious, mind-blowing , magnificent blessing.

The congregation sees what’s happening and they’re uncomfortable. They sit. They eat. Slowly, suspiciously. They eye one another, being careful in their speech. They check to make sure no one is enjoying this too much.

But, it’s all too good. It’s just all too good. They have to talk about the food. The suitor guest talks first and mentions the delicious wine of old vintage. He knows good wine and he knows this is the best. He realizes this meal is made by a talented chef that people would pay thousand to eat at her table. He talks . They try to get him to be quiet. Soon they talk too. And the flood gates of joy are opened. one congregant even slaps his bysitter on the shoulder and says, “You cheated me back then on that load of wood.” The other congregant laughs and says, “Yes! Yes, I did.” They laugh together.

The suitor guest has a long speech about mercy and grace and they sing together.

The evening ends in laughter and the next morning it snows and they’re all stuck in their houses enjoying the memory of that meal.

The story is fun to read and has many points to think about. The lasting thought is the feast of God’s grace.

None of us deserve grace. Not after a lifetime of carefully measuring and observing each other. I work all my life for my salvation and the thief on the cross gets to steal all his life and get promised a home in Heaven? Grace is scandalously unfair.

It is unfair but yet completely fair. Equal to all. We can try to figure it out or we can just eat freely of it and offer it to others.

You don’t have to worry about how you measure up or how you fit in, God offers you his complete grace.

Once you breathe in grace, then you can focus on serving and loving others. Forgiving others and walking beside them. Faces turned toward the same goal.

We humans can’t save ourselves but Jesus can save us all. We can be humble when we accept the unfairness of grace and extend the same grace to others. All that measuring and comparing? All that requiring of others and others requiring of me? All the hurt? It goes away when we realize the greatness of our God. He is in control and we can let go.

Grace is a feast, come and eat.