Forgiveness - Hal French

You've been wronged. Seriously wronged: betrayal, an act of violence against you, a breach of trust. What are your capacities for forgiveness? Most religious traditions provide resources to enhance our ability to forgive. In Christianity, these are largely drawn from the example and the teachings of Jesus.

Forgiveness is an extension of love. If a relationship is damaged, we assume that it can be restored, though it may be costly. Love extends itself, recognizes personal shortcomings in its willingness to forgive another. The little slights may not require much adjustment, but Jesus didn't ask in the Lord's Prayer, “Forgive us our foibles.” The word translated trespasses, debts, or simply sins refers to major transgressions, not to the current “My bad”, confession, which implies a slight failure, an oversight, that the confessor assumes will be instantly accepted, just by the voicing of the awareness.

Jesus' prayer, however - “Forgive us our sins, as we forgive those who sin against us” - clearly refers to our common tendency to depart, in serious measure, from moral norms. A Greek word for sin, hamartia, literally means “missing the mark”. Standards of conduct are established, departure from them means that our aim has been faulty, we have intentionally or thoughtlessly deviated from norms of behavior. In the process, someone, usually someone close to us, has been wronged. Deep self-examination is required before forgiveness is extended. Forgiveness is contractual, covenantal.

Early in the Gospel record a woman has been found taken in adultery. We have no record of what happens to the man in the case, but the woman is about to be stoned. Jesus intercedes, indicting each person present with his words, “Let him who is without sin cast the first stone.” The stones drop, and the woman is pardoned by Jesus, with the words, “Go and sin no more.”

Forgiveness, then, is given on the basis of the sincerity of the person's request for it. If a man, in a fit of anger, strikes his wife, and appears remorseful, she may forgive him. If it becomes a pattern, she will question whether he genuinely wants to change his behavior. When Jesus was asked by Peter in Matthew's Gospel, “Lord, how often shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? Till seven times?” Jesus' response was, “Not until seven times, but until seventy times seven.” Does this test the limits of our human capacity to forgive? The wife may indeed forgive, but at some point, for her own integrity and safety, she may have to leave the relationship.

Still, our own ability to forgive in Christianity is always measured by the model of the divine forgiveness. Jesus' parable of the Prodigal Son illustrates this, as does Jesus himself, in the extremity of his suffering on the cross, when he asks forgiveness for those who have demanded his death, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” Ignorance, in this case, is the crippling factor, not sheer malevolence. And ignorance, by Jesus' request, is forgivable.

But what are we to do with the most vicious crimes of our age, the Holocausts of the Nazis, the Killing Fields of Cambodia? Is Dante right, in his classic Divine Comedy, that some souls, by the magnitude of their offenses, are beyond the pale, having earned their right to dwell in perpetuity in the Inferno? Others, however, residing in the realm which he terms Purgatorio, may still be redeemed. In one passage Dante states, “By their curses one is not condemned beyond the refuge of the love of God, which can return, so long as hope stays green.”