WHAT IT MEANS TO FORGIVE

If you do not forgive men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses. —Mt. 6:15

The German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was executed by the Nazis as a Christian who stood up against Hitler, warned his fellow Christians against “cheap grace,” a term that has come to be associated with his theology. Grace is cheap, he held, when it lacks commitment. Thus “the cost of discipleship” was not only the title of one of Bonhoeffer’s books but the theme of his theology. Grace is God’s free gift, he granted, but grace is also costly. The price to God was dear. The price to us is that we too must suffer. While grace is never of course earned, it nonetheless has its demands. The purpose of this essay is to point to forgiveness as Christ’s unconditional demand for discipleship.

What our Lord taught about forgiveness is nothing less than astounding. It is the one subject he dealt with in absolute terms, with no exceptions: Unless you forgive God will not forgive you. It is so calculating and unequivocal that it strikes us with deadly force. Nothing is made clearer than that forgiveness is essential to discipleship, or, in Bonhoeffer’s terms, the cost of grace is a forgiving heart.

Equally remarkable is that this is the one area where we are all vulnerable in that it is difficult for us to forgive. Even the most dedicated Christians carry grudges—“If you only knew what they did to me . . .”—and they are often unforgiving to the end. And of course they are right, from the human point of view, for those who do them wrong do not deserve to be forgiven. Forgiveness is illogical, even absurd. It makes no sense to forgive one who has done you a grave injustice. He doesn’t deserve it. But that is what grace is about. It makes no sense for God to forgive us, for we don’t deserve it either, but grace is not a matter of logic. Grace defies logic, for logic says to get even.

This is grace’s demand: we receive grace from God, so we show grace to others. If we don’t, we’re not forgiven. It is that brutally simple and that brutally profound. Jesus is saying that it costs to be a Christian. It costs you your pride; it costs you yourself. You must forget yourself, forget your pride and forgive your brother.

It is my personal experience in talking to folk all across the country and around the world that the inability to forgive is a very common problem. When it comes to the bad things that are done to them, people have memories like an elephant. They can reach into the distant past and recall every slight and insult in detail. It is a hard way to live, for the “score of wrongs” keeps multiplying. It all contributes to depression and anxiety. While forgiveness is wonderfully liberating, it is a freedom enjoyed by too few.

Sometimes it is children that cannot forgive their parents, even after they are dead and gone, for either real or imaginary offenses. The tragedy of divorce is often compounded by the unforgiving bitterness that festers for years afterward. We all suffer injustices and we all know they are difficult to forgive. Sometimes we can’t forgive God for what he allows to happen to us, and, oddly enough, we can’t even forgive ourselves for all those wasted years. One thing is sure: allowing old hurts to fester will do us in.

I recall a dear sister in the Lord in Missouri who took issue with what I had said at her church about that petition in the Lord’s Prayer that says, “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.” She was disturbed by the idea that we are expected to forgive the really bad things that people do to us. She recounted the things that “they” had done to her husband, cruel things done by church people that had put him in his grave. She told of how he died of a broken heart after serving as a leader in the church all his life, and how he was driven out of the church he had helped build by longtime friends only because in his latter years he had become more liberal in his thinking. “All those mean things they said about him and did to him!,” she moaned, “and you say I should forgive them!”

Already acquainted with the story, I knew she was telling the facts as they were. It was a sad story. She was right. “They,” the brethren in the other church, had been cruel to her husband, and it probably contributed to his untimely death. She was adamant that in their case there was no way to forgive them, it was impossible for her. I was sympathetic. I knew where she was coming from, and I knew how it hurt. I agreed that it was probably beyond her power to forgive them, but that she could allow Christ to forgive them through her. She should “work at it” I told her, looking to the the Holy Spirit for the power to forgive. First, she must want to forgive, I told her, and ask Christ to come into her heart and forgive them through her. It may come slowly, bit by bit, but in time you will overcome the way you feel, I assured her.

In the meantime, I told her, she should not pray the Lord’s Prayer when it says, “Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us,” for she would actually be asking God not to forgive her. If God forgives us as we forgive, when we refuse to forgive, then he will not forgive!

This is one area where Jesus’ teaching appears to be extravagant. Forgiveness seems to have no limits. It was impetuous Peter, who probably had a lot of forgiving to do, who put this question to Jesus, “Lord, how often shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? Up to seven times?” (Mt. 18:21) The Lord’s answer was, “Not up to seven times, but seventy times seven.” We are to forgive abundantly and extravagantly. It indicates that we are to forgive with abandon, whether the offender asks for forgiveness or not, which one might conclude from what Jesus says in Lk. 17:3, “If your brother repents, forgive him.”

I have heard it argued that since God does not forgive us until we repent we are not to forgive others until they repent and say that they are sorry. If that is the case, we would hardly ever forgive, and if that is the case we would be winning and our pride would be protected, for the offender has yielded to us and asked for forgiveness. In forgiving an offender we must be willing to lose. Forgiveness is not to be dependent on what he does but what we do.

It is not true that God forgives only as we repent and confess. There is no way for us to be “up to the minute” on asking for forgiveness. At any given moment there may be sins that we have not prayed about and may not be fully aware of. The wrongs that we do sometimes come home to us only after something else liappens that causes us to realize how thoughtless or selfish we were, such as the way we responded to our mate or one of the children. But God forgives the sin as we commit it. If that is not the case, then we are all under condemnation, for there is no way for us to maintain a running checklist on all our sins. Forgiveness is a matter of God’s grace, not our works.

Such is the promise of I Jn. 1:7 that assures us that “the blood of Jesus Christ cleanses us (keeps on, continually cleansing us) of our sins.” That is grace, and if we are gracious we, like our heavenly Father, will forgive people for what they do to us even while they do it. That is the ideal, but since we are not God and cannot forgive as readily as he does, we are to forgive as nearly like God as possible. As we grow in grace, God will increase our power to forgive more and more abundantly.

Jesus puts all this in a parable in Mt. 18 that we have a way of neglecting. There was this king that forgave one of his servants of an immense debt of millions of dollars (Note how the Lord continues to make it extravagant) only because he had compassion on him. But the same servant is harsh and demanding on a fellow servant who owed him only about a dollar (the extravagant again), throwing him into prison until he paid. When the king heard how unforgiving and unmerciful his servant was over so little after being forgiven of so much, he called him a wicked man and turned him over to his torturers.

Jesus concluded the parable with, “So My heavenly Father also will do to you if each of you “from his heart, does not forgive his brother his trespasses (Mt. 18:39).

This is sufficent to show that forgiveness is the essence of being a Christian. It gets to the heart of the matter. It may be a grim truth for many of us, but truth it is that if we are “from the heart” an unforgiving people we are not Christians. But I should think that if such teaching disturbs you there is hope. It is those in the church who hold grudges and are unforgiving and who pridefully wait for the other person to take the first step that bother me the most.—the Editor

He that cannot forgive others, breaks the bridge over which he himself must pass if he would ever reach heaven; for every one has need to be forgiven—George Herbert