This is a guest post by J. M. M. Wahl.
While this article may, at times, come across as largely theoretical and abstract, when I wrote it, the issue had never felt more fresh and relevant, as I had been struggling with the idea of forgiveness for some months, and just in the last week or two had been returning to a community I’d left on less-than-ideal terms.
The following is a poem which I performed once at an open-mic Poetry Night:
What if forgiveness consists
In learning to let go
Of that rage which insists
In letting someone know
How your wound which persists
That they did bestow –
It still festers and cysts
It’s still the weight you tow.
What if forgiveness consists
In not striking a blow,
In not thinking it assists
To dampen their glow.
But when misery enlists
On company to bestow
The misery that insists
On sharing a common low.
When you’ve made mental lists
Of what they don’t know,
Forgiveness may be clenched fists
Against harsh words you’d crow.
Is Christian salvation dependent on anything? Of course, we should all like very much to say no. And yet… if there were any type of condition upon which God’s forgiveness of our sins rested, Scripture would seem to imply that the condition was our own forgiveness against others. And is that not very hard? Indeed, when we have been badly hurt by others, sometimes we would very much prefer having to conduct toilsome penances for our salvation, rather than the indignancy of pretending “everything’s okay”.
But in the very Lord’s prayer which Christ taught us as the ideal of what prayer should look like, we are told to recite, “Forgive us our trespasses, [just] as we forgive those who trespass against us.”
And again, in the parables which Jesus often employed to teach us deeper truths than could be understood in mere dictated principles, he often repeats this theme again:
Then Peter came to Him and said, “Lord, how often shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? Up to seven times?” Jesus said to him, “I do not say to you, up to seven times, but up to seventy times seven. Therefore the kingdom of heaven is like a certain king who wanted to settle accounts with his servants. And when he had begun to settle accounts, one was brought to him who owed him ten thousand talents. But as he was not able to pay, his master commanded that he be sold, with his wife and children and all that he had, and that payment be made. The servant therefore fell down before him, saying, ‘Master, have patience with me, and I will pay you all.’ Then the master of that servant was moved with compassion, released him, and forgave him the debt. “But that servant went out and found one of his fellow servants who owed him a hundred denarii; and he laid hands on him and took him by the throat, saying, ‘Pay me what you owe!’ So his fellow servant fell down at his feet and begged him, saying, ‘Have patience with me, and I will pay you all.’ And he would not, but went and threw him into prison till he should pay the debt. So when his fellow servants saw what had been done, they were very grieved, and came and told their master all that had been done. Then his master, after he had called him, said to him, ‘You wicked servant! I forgave you all that debt because you begged me. Should you not also have had compassion on your fellow servant, just as I had pity on you?’ And his master was angry, and delivered him to the torturers until he should pay all that was due to him. “So My heavenly Father also will do to you if each of you, from his heart, does not forgive his brother his trespasses.”
- Matthew 18:21-35; NKJV translation
Nor is this the only such parable Jesus makes exemplifying the necessity of forgiveness:
He also said to His disciples: “There was a certain rich man who had a steward, and an accusation was brought to him that this man was wasting his goods. So he called him and said to him, ‘What is this I hear about you? Give an account of your stewardship, for you can no longer be steward.’ “Then the steward said within himself, ‘What shall I do? For my master is taking the stewardship away from me. I cannot dig; I am ashamed to beg. I have resolved what to do, that when I am put out of the stewardship, they may receive me into their houses.’ “So he called every one of his master’s debtors to him, and said to the first, ‘How much do you owe my master?’ And he said, ‘A hundred measures of oil.’ So he said to him, ‘Take your bill, and sit down quickly and write fifty.’ Then he said to another, ‘And how much do you owe?’ So he said, ‘A hundred measures of wheat.’ And he said to him, ‘Take your bill, and write eighty.’ So the master commended the unjust steward because he had dealt shrewdly. For the sons of this world are more shrewd in their generation than the sons of light.
- Luke 16:1-8; NKJV translation
Now of course, this is an incredibly difficult teaching. And at times when we are really hurt or grieved, it can actually lead to a feeling that God should “understand” our pains and our sense of indignancy. And I think it is only fair to say that, of course, He does. But this can lead us further to a false dilemma: either it can allow us to justify our grudge against those who hurt us, and think that surely God would be on our side with it, or it can lead us to an almost despair, where we feel that God must simply not care about our pains. And when you are reeling from real insults, particularly insults from people who betrayed a deep trust which you’d bestowed on them, there is no clear and easy way out of this dilemma.
After all, while Christianity is madly in favor of mercy, it is also madly in favor of justice. And there are times when we are reeling, not just from a subjective feeling of being hurt, but also from a truly noble sense of injustice. In his book Orthodoxy, G. K. Chesterton examines what he sees as the historical understanding of Christian virtue, and how it differs from Pagan virtue. In the chapter, The Paradoxes of Christianity, he writes;
Paganism declared that virtue was in a balance; Christianity declared it was in a conflict: the collision of two passions apparently opposite… It separated the two ideas and then exaggerated them both. … Here, again in short, Christianity got over the difficulty of combining furious opposites, by keeping them both, and keeping them both furious. … Take the complicated question of charity, which highly uncharitable idealists seem to think quite easy. Charity is a paradox, like modesty and courage… A sensible pagan would say that there are some people we could forgive, and some [people who] one couldn’t: a slave who stole wine could be laughed at; a slave who betrayed his benefactor could be killed, and cursed even after he was killed. In so far as the act was pardonable, the man was pardonable. That again is rational, and even refreshing; but it is a dilution. It leaves no place for a pure horror of injustice, such as that which is a great beauty in the innocent. And it leaves no place for a mere tenderness for men as men, such as is the whole fascination of the charitable. Christianity came in … with a sword, and clove one thing from another. It divided the crime from the criminal. The criminal we must forgive unto seventy times seven. The crime we must not forgive at all… We must be much more angry with theft than before, and yet much kinder to thieves than before. And the more I considered Christianity, the more I found that while it had established a rule and order, the chief aim of that order was to give room for good things to run wild.
- G. K. Chesterton, The Paradoxes of Christianity
(This work is in the public domain.)
So how can someone solve this incredibly personal struggle, of forgiving those who have deeply betrayed you? Well, clearly the answer (at least in Jesus’ words), lies somewhere, and somehow, in the mystery of your own betrayals and trespasses, and in the hope you have for forgiveness yourself. And while one way of seeing this is as simply a strict rule, it seems to me, that, given how central this reciprocity seems to be to the gospel message, it must be related to something deeper.
So the answer must somehow lie in your own trespasses. Now just think about the process through which you yourself are forgiven. And here I do think it is very helpful for our subjective understanding, that it is more of a ritualized process for Catholics then, say, for many Protestants. Particularly for a more relaxed, “low-Church” denomination of Protestantism, you might simply say “yeah, sorry ‘bout that” in a loose prayer while you are falling asleep. But not so for Catholics. I mean, really think about some sin you have committed, which you are genuinely ashamed to admit to. And think quite simply how you were forgiven for it. If you are Catholic, you showed up at your Church, maybe half an hour before Mass, maybe on a Saturday morning when you could have been watching T.V., and you waited in line. Eventually you went into the Confessional, and despite how ashamed you were of it, you told it to the priest, and he forgave you. And when he forgave you, God forgave you, and the sin was no more. It was not even dependent on you fulfilling your penance, technically. The penance serves more of an educational and forward-growth purpose – it does not contribute to the forgiveness.
When I think of insults and ‘trespasses’ which I have received from others, the importance of this sacrament of Confession becomes much more meaningful. If forgiveness and mercy are to be somehow compatible to justice, it feels very important that there is an acknowledgement of guilt – or at least an acknowledgement that, “yeah, I was in the wrong”. It really makes such a difference. And the truth is, while you can certainly forgive those who are unrepentant, their refusal to acknowledge their wrong, (and even moreso if they pride themselves in the injury they bestowed you), this makes it almost impossible to retain a relationship with them. There is always this huge thing that will be between you. And as I thought about that, suddenly the whole point of the Catholic sacrament of Confession made so much more sense to me than the more ‘Protestant’ way of just making a quick prayer from your bed as you are in the middle of praying for good grades in school, praying for your sick dog, and praying for the neighbors to stop parking in front of your driveway. There is something, even in our own human relationships, which is so crucial about making a more formal display of repentance and reconciliation.
But, of course, God asks us to forgive, and to offer a free and total forgiveness with no strings attached, even to people who are unrepentant and even while they are in the midst of intentionally causing you harm. Christ exemplifies this on the cross, as he prays for the Roman centurions who are in the midst of crucifying Him and also for the Jews who are in the midst of celebrating their betrayal of Him, “Forgive them, for they know not what they are doing!”
Again, it is helpful to think of this in terms of the forgiveness you hope to receive, even for sins you aren’t repentant of – for there are sins of yours which Christ will surely say, “Forgive him, he didn’t know what he was doing.” And we know as Catholics that the sacrament of Confession does officially wipe away sins even if you truly forgot to confess them, or if you didn’t know they were a sin – that is why one version of the Act of Contrition asks for forgiveness for the sins “of which we know, and those which we do not know, the sins we have concealed for long, and which are now hidden from our memory”. If you intentionally hide something from a priest, it may still be retained, or as the priest declares in the Byzantine Rite prayers before Confession, “your sin will be the greater”. But if you fail to confess something from authentic ignorance or forgetfulness, we are explicitly told as Catholics that these will still be forgiven.
Consider then, if there was some grave evil which you did and you were ignorant of. Suppose there was some horrendous act you’d committed, and you either never knew you had done this thing, or perhaps there is some atrocity which you’ve long been committing, and nobody ever told you it was wrong. Those sins are still forgiven. So it must be with those who have hurt us. They may not have known that they wronged us, or if they did, they never knew how hurt we were by their act. Perhaps, like the executioners of Jesus, they were in the process of perpetrating the offense still, and were likely proud, or at least defensive, of their own righteousness in what they were doing. Quite simply, they didn’t know they were in the wrong, for the simple and obvious reason that they thought they were in the right. Like Jesus showed us in a very dramatic and real instance in His own life, we are still called to forgive them.
Think too, not just of your experience going through all of this, but of the metaphysical reality of how that Confession actually occurred. Now, as an Eastern Catholic, I generally do not dwell too much on the more Western notion of “Atonement theory”, but here I can very clearly see the truth and beauty of it. For your sins were not simply, magically, wiped away and made as though they never happened. How it works: The weight of your sins was still real, it was still there, it was just no longer yours. Christ takes it up onto Himself, and carries it to the grave, where it dies with Him. So it must be with the offenses of the person you are meant to forgive: the weight of their offense is still real, it is still there, it is just no longer on that person. And it doesn’t magically disappear – Christ takes it on Himself. The offense which hurt you is now associated with Christ.
And this is a crucial part of the reason why you must forgive to be forgiven, for if it is Christ who bears the blame for the offense against you, it is also Him who bears the blame for your offense against others. To reject this – to insist on the sins being retained on the one who offended you – this simultaneously serves to take your own sins back on yourself. Or, to be offended by Christ who willingly is blamed for the offense against you, this is also to be offended by your own acts which you’ve given away. But still it is not magically wiped away – Christ accepts that guilt (if you will, He accepts that blame even), and carries it not just to the grave, but carries it into Hades – into Hell, where it belongs. And there he grasps you, he grasps the one who hurt you, together, and carries you both out into new life. And he rescues you not only from the sin and guilt which buries you in Hades, but he frees you also from the wounds which that person bestowed on you, which also can serve to bury you in Hades.
So now think of this person who hurt and betrayed you. And especially if they themselves are Catholic, or even Christian, dwell on the fact that they likely have brought this to Confession, or at least to Jesus, just in the same way that you did. Even if they aren’t Christian, firmly remember the fact, that Christ died for all. Not all may accept Him, but His forgiveness is open to all (to deny this is to embrace the condemned heresy of Calvinism) – also remember you can’t know the final fate of anyone, and even that non-Christian person may come to know Him and convert in years to come. Even if the person has since died, you can’t know that they don’t find Christ in the end.
So just consider the weight of the sins that Christ forgave in you, and remember it was probably much heavier than you are willing to believe. And then, even if you don’t desire forgiveness for that person in your heart, just remember that Christ’s mercy is just as open to them as it is to you, and remember that it was just as unmerited and undeserved in yourself, as it is in them. If you refuse to believe in their forgiveness, what grounds do you have for believing in your own forgiveness?
Fine, you may say, I accept that Jesus forgives that person. Isn’t that enough? I accept the fact that forgiveness is open to them. But surely Jesus understands that I still have this grudge against them in my heart, right? It surely doesn’t matter if I forgive them, so long as I acknowledge that Jesus will forgive them for me.
Before I address this, I want to make clear what the Christian doctrine is on love. Love is not a feeling or an emotion. Love is a choice. This is true in the family, where you are called to love your spouse or your children, even when, and most especially when, you don’t even like them. That is when love is a virtue, and that is the hidden reality which is made audible when couples recite marriage vows. This is true as well in friendships and even among neighbors. Again, you must bear with me as I return to the wise words of Chesterton, “The Bible tells us to love our neighbors. It also tells us to love our enemies. This is probably because they are frequently the same people.” So this just goes to say, you do not need to pretend to feel as though everything is “just fine” with the person who offended you. Your forgiveness and your love is more of a virtue when it is more of a choice, and it is more of a choice when it goes against your natural emotional tendency.
But why is it so important that you personally forgive others who offend you? Why can’t you just leave the hard work up to God? I can think of at least a couple highly practical reasons.
First of all, consider just the fact that one day, you will (hopefully) be in Heaven with them. How could the whole “system” possibly work, if you were allowed to hold on to your resentments of people God had forgiven? If you held your grudges against someone who was in Heaven with you, wouldn’t that “give the lie” to God’s forgiveness of that person? And wouldn’t there almost inevitably be someone who held a grudge against you? For that matter, couldn’t you conceivably shun that person, and thus self-isolate yourself from communion with them, and by extension, voluntarily expel yourself from Heaven? In fact, couldn’t you transfer your indignancy towards God, and thus blame Him for the forgiveness he bestowed that person, and by extension, blame Him for the forgiveness he showed even to you?
Now, that can sometimes sound so far away and so distant, and it might be easy to think, “well, by the time it gets to that point, I’m sure it will be so distant in the past that it won’t seem to matter at all.” And this can be a very appealing argument. It makes sense logically, at least thinking about this one offense. But there is reason to pause and even doubt that logical impulse.
In the philosophy of C. S. Lewis, we may often come across a vision of eternity and the afterlife, which is of the person continuing along the same trajectory of personal progression which they have been going along in their whole life. In fact this is how he gives a merely rational idea of what might even be called damnation. To paraphrase his idea, let’s say that over the course of one man’s whole life, he is very slowly growing more and more quarrelsome, or more indulgent, or angry, or progressing along any other “bad habit”. And perhaps this progression is so slow that over the course of 70 years, he is only a bit more noticeably angry or gluttonous than he was in his youth. But what if this progression were allowed to continue for 700 years? What if it continued for 7,000 years? By the end of that time, the man might be an absolute tyrant or something we might almost call a wrathful demon; he might have worse impulse control than a dog who never left its kennel.
Now let’s say the same thing of the “bad habit” you were cultivating; but apply it to the habit of begrudging offenses that others committed against you. Let’s say it started when you were a young person, full of emotions, and there were people who very truly hurt and betrayed you in a serious matter. But in my experience of life and the way the world works, impulsive and unquestioned habits very often can spring out of a desperate action you took one time out of sheer desperation. I can think of a few minor examples in my own life – in keeping your home tidy and organized, I can’t tell you how often I’ve seen this ruined by a busy week when I got back from vacation and had to go straight to work, so I left several chores undone. Before you know it, three weeks have gone by and your coffee table is filled with the stuff you brought back from vacation, and your armchair is filled with jackets and ballcaps, and in your mind this is just normally where you should put stuff. Several months later, you find that you are still throwing your jacket on a pile sitting in your armchair – even after having cleaned up that pile countless times, it always begins again because it is an enforced habit. I find the same thing with cursing. Occasionally, some event will occur in life which I find completely baffling and unprecedented and unbearable. I will come up with some creative expression or mixture of words which I had never used before, just to try and distinguish my sheer astonishment and frustration. When this happens, I can’t tell you how many times I find myself a week or two later, using this same “drastic” expression, simply to refer to normal rush hour traffic.
So it could easily happen that there is a major transgression you find impossible to forgive, and that sets you on a decades-long journey of refusing to forgive more minor and simple offenses. And this could even continue after your death. Of course, the point of the Christian life, is that Jesus rescues you from not just your sin and your guilt, but even from your corruption and decay. This is why in Eastern theology, it is common to refer to God as “our Divine Physician” – it is because sin is generally not seen as a “crime”, but is rather seen as a “sickness” in Eastern theology. And God is the one who cures us of these “sicknesses”. However, as I heard described once on the Eastern Catholic podcast, What God is Not, we can very often choose to be in sickness, or to remain in sickness. An example that they described on the podcast is binge drinking to the point of being sick, or at least not feeling well the next morning – this is us voluntarily (and sometimes knowingly) choosing physical illness, or at least un-healthiness. And very often with sin, we can choose to reject God’s healing which he offers us. I have definitely experienced this with holding onto grudges, to the point of dwelling so much on old hurts and wounds, to the point where you don’t enjoy new relationships that enter your life, and I have even experienced it to the point where you don’t actually want to move on from the hurt, because, as Elder Zosima describes in the Brother Karamazov, it can sometimes be a pleasure to be offended.
Returning to C. S. Lewis, it is ironic that he never believed in Purgatory, because his writings are a major part of what convinced me of the necessity of something akin to “Purgatory”. In The Great Divorce, it seems to me that he seems in line with the tradition of his own Anglican Church. I heard of an Anglican priest once saying, “We don’t believe in a physical place of Purgatory, which is separate from Heaven and Hell. What we do believe in is a process of Purgation.” And in this work, Lewis clearly demonstrates the idea that “the gates of Hell are locked from the inside”. Time and time again, we see “damned” souls, who encounter Paradise, and choose to turn away and go back to Hell, for the sake, ultimately, of finding Heaven doesn’t really “suit their tastes”. Even the souls who do choose Salvation, are faced with a long, arduous, even painful process, of “adjusting” or “acclimatizing” to the harsh nature of Heaven, for they are so used to dwelling in a world that caters to their own worst impulses (Hell), while Heaven obeys an external Law. And in this story, one of the more common reasons why these damned souls turn back to Hell, is because they refuse to forgive someone whom is among the Saved in Heaven – very often in the story, we even see them being so scandalized that God would save “that sort of person”, so they reject Paradise in protest.
But we don’t even always have to appeal to something so (seemingly, and often deceptively so) distant and abstract. Because it might not just be in Heaven that God confronts us with this person as listed among the Saved. It may very often happen, that this person who caused so much pain and scandal to us, is still a part of our broader Christian community. Even if the nature of their betrayal to you means you can no longer be friends, they may still be unavoidable in the Christian community God has called you to. And this may cause a huge and blatant scandal, if this person is a member of the Church, for you may associate their offenses with being a part of the Church.
But really, that is part of why it is so important to forgive them. And it really is the bizarre paradox of which Chesterton spoke earlier – for it is really very important that you acknowledge their wrongs and offenses. It is important that you acknowledge that what they did was very “un-Christian”, because the alternative is the tragic scandal of associating their offenses with the Church. And yet, you also need to forgive them if you are still in community with them – because otherwise, how can you remain in that community to which God has called you?
And again the previous argument we made for forgiveness in Heaven, is still true for forgiveness in this earthly context. For undoubtedly, if you are in community with others, you will eventually give offense to someone else. And the more intimate your community is with them, the more likely it is that they will see you on your worst day, and thus the more likely that they will eventually have a large enough grievance with you. And so intimate community isn’t even possible without this spirit of forgiveness. Perhaps that is a reason why today, intimate community is so rare – it is almost exclusively found among Christian communities. And the practical reason for the decline of community, is that (especially young people today) are fearful of intimacy. They are fearful of intimacy because they distrust vulnerability. And it does seem often like a major reason they distrust vulnerability, is because they know they will eventually rub people the wrong way and lose all trust with those people. And their response is far too often, that they never want anyone to see them when they are having a “bad day”. They put on a face – the face they want the world to see – and they hide their uglier selves. And of course in hiding their ugliness, they allow it to fester and decay within their hearts, and it grows unchecked. So how could you ever expect your neighbors and friends to forgive you on your worst day, if you can’t forgive the others in your community when they were on their worst day? Because very likely, the people who gave offense to you were not “on their best behavior” when the offense took place. And when you make a huge mistake, you can probably think of countless excuses, from a lack of sleep and stresses about career and money, to psychological wounds stemming back to your childhood. Why should it not be the same for that person?
And here again, I must return to the Eastern analogy of sin as being like disease. For truly, the people who do give you offense, probably did not do so in perfect rationality and soberness of mind. They very likely were going through so many things you may or may not have known about. And going back to the analogy of disease, sin can spread. It will inevitably grow in yourself if it goes unchecked and untreated. And very tellingly, much like disease, sin can very easily spread through a close, tightly-woven community. There are kinds of sin that you can infect other people in your community with, and there are other types of sin which can even be hereditary, passing on from parents to children. This is likely what the Bible means, when it tells us “I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children to the third and fourth generations of those who hate Me.” It may be describing less the idea of an incomprehensible wrath, and more be trying to warn us, that the sins of the fathers have an inevitable effect on their children, and that at least in the world according to our experience, children will be to some degree incapable of fully escaping from walking in the faults of their parents.
Even in popular culture today, there are several songs which demonstrate this truth. In John Mayer’s song, In the Blood, he meditates on his own fraught family history and how it will affect him:
“How much of my mother has my mother left in me? How much of my love will be insane to some degree? … Could I change it if I wanted? … Does a broken home become another broken family? … Will it wash out in the water, or is it always in the blood?”
Likewise in the song, Growing Sideways, which seems largely to be about the experience of going to therapy, Noah Kahan sings, “I’m still angry at my parents, for what their parents did to them.”
Another haunting exposition of this topic of perpetuating a familial curse, is Manchester Orchestra’s The Silence. The lead singer wrote this song immediately after the birth of his daughter, and it is about how he hopes he can “break the chain” of a broken family, and give her something new.
“Everybody know it’s something you had to live with, darling … You can go anywhere, but you are where you came from; Little girl, you are cursed by my ancestry, there is nothing but darkness and agony … Let me hold you above all the misery.”
Here’s the mystery of community – especially community in adulthood, where you have friends and neighbors who grew up in different circumstances and different cultures (for every family is a microscopic culture all of their own). And everyone comes from some sort of brokenness, for nobody in our world is above the corruption and decay which we all inherit from our earliest ancestors – from Adam and Eve, this cycle of corruption and brokenness has been passed down in unending chains. But it plays out differently in every family, and every child grows up and takes something of that brokenness with them into the world. And here is where it can get especially messy, is in adulthood, especially in our modern society, when people live far away from family and live in far away states from where they grew up, and many families in our churches don’t even have other relatives who were Catholic or even Christian. Today in particular, even our Christian communities sometimes don’t even have other people who share any family bonds with us. And this has the peculiar practical impact, that people in our fellow communities have no way of knowing or understanding the brokenness which you inherited from your youth and which you barely even are aware of in yourself. And when we have no other family members in your communities, there is also nobody to help you understand your own difficulties, when your own brokenness rubs up against the micro-culture in these communities.
And how many tensions and feuds are likely to blame on the fact that my hidden and unknown brokenness, has a particularly explosive reaction when it rubs up against your particular inherited brokenness? Now there are good reasons why many people might want to escape their broken family. But the more sober and clear-thinking members of your family will be able to give you insights which nobody else has, on the negative legacy everyone keeps from their family. And so there might be particularly sad cases in your community, where there is a certain individual who comes from a very broken and upsetting family history, and this person may not keep up any regular contact with their family. And it is very good and necessary for that person to make themself at home in a tight-knit community. But it is very likely that this person holds a lot of habits and struggles and demons from their childhood, which are unexamined in their own heart, and which nobody else in the community has any way of knowing about or understanding. And this can sometimes have very dramatic outcomes.
But even outside of family, when you just examine a normal friend group or parish community, there are still ways in which sin can fester and spread like an epidemic of sickness. There is no such thing as a truly private sin. Sin always affects those around you. Even sins which are personal in nature and nobody knows about, have a spiritual effect on you, as well as likely a physical, emotional, and physiological effect on you, which you can still pass on to others.
First, let’s look at a more clear example of how sin can spread like an epidemic in a community. An obvious example would be gossiping. First of all, you have individual rumors which are spread through the community or through the friend group. As the rumors spread, they come to affect not only the person they were about, but the people spreading them as well. And as the people all begin the habit of spreading rumors, more and more of the people are willing to spread future rumors about other people which are unrelated to the first one. A similar occurrence could happen with impatience or ingratitude – as the friends or community members begin snapping at each other or taking each other’s favors for granted, it impacts the culture of the group, and more and more people start to do this, until the group begins to feel more and more uncharitable and insincere.
But I would imagine a similar outcome could happen even with faults or sins which aren’t nearly as visible or blatant to other people. Let’s take, for example road rage. Even though it’s not something we are doing to each other, the people who have road rage are still arriving to group activities feeling incredibly disgruntled. And even if they try hard to hide this, it will still have an effect on the other members of the group. And while the other people in the group may not have witnessed that person’s road rage, they still may pick up on the emotional state which lead that individual to losing their temper in the car. And so other people in the group may carry that home, and have a shorter fuse and become quicker to anger in their own lives.
Another example might be if there is a tight-knit group, where two or three people cultivate a habit of using alcohol to deal with difficult emotions. Now those two or three people might never have a noticeable issue which arises from this unhealthy coping mechanism. But they might create a group cultural dynamic which tolerates drinking as a clear coping mechanism, and this may lead to issues, not even for those individuals who started drinking, but for others in the group who start going along with this new cultural attitude towards alcohol.
In fact, even if an unhealthy culture in a tight-knit group doesn’t lead to any actual problems, it can still cause a scandal if somebody thinks that these negative behaviors are more prevalent than they actually are, and this may lead to a feud within the group simply over misunderstandings and differing attitudes towards the behaviors which some people in the group tolerated and others didn’t.
And while I didn’t want to write an essay that was overly graphic in nature, don’t assume that none of this applies even to sins which are most personal and least visible, such as lust. For the evils of lust may really be more similar to the example I gave about road rage than many people would like to admit.
In the end, this article was not supposed to be a long discussion about sin, but rather about forgiveness. I have been laying out all of the ways in which sin is comparable to disease. But I have found that, in this sense, forgiveness is really very useful as a medicine.
One of the most profound reasons I have found for forgiveness, is because of what it does to you. The ancient Jews had a saying about the 600+ laws found in the Old Testament: “We will do, and we will understand.” The idea was that the laws only made sense, after one started obeying all of them. And truly, I found this to be very much the case with forgiveness. I tried to practice forgiveness because it was prescribed in Scripture; and I found, surprisingly, that it healed very many of the wounds I still found festering in myself.
“And why do you look at the speck in your brother’s eye, but do not consider the plank in your own eye? Or how can you say to your brother, ‘Let me remove the speck from your eye’; and look, a plank is in your own eye? Hypocrite! First remove the plank from your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.”
- Matthew 7:3-5; NKJV translation
Now in my meditations over the last several months, it is possible I have dwelt too long on the wrongs that others have done to me, and not nearly enough on my own faults. For here is another way that sin can be perpetuated and passed on like an illness: Everyone who has ever been wronged has somehow reacted to it, and the vast majority of most people’s reactions have probably been wrong or improper. And this doesn’t even refer to something you might have said or done to that person in the moment. It might be the way you carried those hurts around for months after, and allowed yourself liberties and indulgences, allowed yourself pettiness and impatience and short-temperedness, all owing to the fact that you suffered from the people who betrayed you. And it is probably not at all helpful to try and “weigh” your pettiness or impatience against an egregious insult done to you, but even if you were to weigh them; with regards to that one-time injury which was likely done impulsively and in a state of mental unrest; don’t be so sure that it was truly worse than going on for months in an ill-temper, constantly complaining and gossiping about what happened. Your fault may yet be the worse, even in the unlikely event that you truly didn’t do anything to warrant whatever insult your aggressor showed you.
There is a very concrete way in which holding on to grudges and old wounds, makes you indebted and enslaved by the very people who you supposedly want to be free from. And when you can finally forgive them, it really can take that enormous weight off of your shoulders. Most especially if you forgive them as a Christian, and forgive simply because you obey the rule of forgiveness when you don’t want to – this can make forgiveness so much more difficult to grant, but once you do, it can come as such a relief. And I do think to some extent, this relief comes because Jesus will help you to carry the heavy load, if only you can let go of your grip on the weight of pain and suffering – let go enough for him to take it off your shoulders.
And going back to our earlier analogy of Confession; there is a question of whether to just forgive that person in your heart, or whether to make a more formal display of telling the person you forgive them. It is a question of prudence, which largely depends on the exact circumstances of the original offence and the forgiveness you hope to give. But if the injury was great enough, it can be so incredibly refreshing to verbally give your forgiveness. It is so simple – all you need to say is, “I forgive you.” And this will serve two turns – first, as we saw Chesterton state earlier, there is a natural and wholesome instinct to call a sin a Sin. And in verbally giving forgiveness to someone, you are not just implying, but even stating officially, “I hold you to be in the wrong.” But on the contrary, you are not condemning that person in any sense, for the statement, “I hold you to be in the wrong”, it has already come after the conciliatory olive branch is extended. This is an unbending way of saying, “Live unbruised, we are friends,” (Much Ado about Nothing) and also, “That was pretty messed up, man.”
Now it should be noted, that forgiving someone does not necessarily mean you have to trust them again or allow them to be in your life in the same way they were previously. That is a question for prudence with regards to the circumstances of the person and the incident. But forgiveness does necessarily mean that you open back up to them in some degree at least, no matter how small that may have to be – you certainly need to allow there to be some real difference which is effected by your forgiveness. That could be very small, but make sure you don’t “give the lie” to your forgiveness. You cannot forgive them, and go on gossiping and begrudging them as before.
And if you can manage all of this, you will surely find that you are freer for all of it. It will be a huge weight off of your shoulders, as you are no longer trying to mend a broken situation – instead, you have, in a sense “washed your hands of the whole affair.” You can’t undo whatever had happened, but you no longer need to let it affect you. Once you have forgiven the person, the ball is no longer in your court, waiting for a return. And you don’t need to keep “playing ball” with them – it could just be “the end of the game”. But it is no longer on you to respond. Your response was the refusal to play by the game of insulting and taking offense. You have risen above it. Congratulations.