I have been thinking a lot about forgiveness lately.  There seem to be so many awful things happening in the world, and I feel that without a great deal of forgiveness these wrongs will fester over many generations.

On the one hand, I am probably not the best person to write on this subject.  I have not suffered any egregious wrongs, and I don’t want to be seen to offer advice to those who have. On the other hand, forgiveness is central to the Christian faith, and we have all done some things we are sorry for.

In my experience, it is impossible to build good long-term relationships without a willingness to forgive from both parties.  Jesus taught (Matthew 7,2) “God will judge you in the same way you judge others and he will apply to you the same rules you apply to others.”  In secular terms, one should be as ready to make excuses for others as we are to make excuses for ourselves. Paul expressed it thus in his first letter to the Corinthian 13,5: “Love does not keep a record of wrongs”.  And if it is true that “Love does not keep a record of wrongs”, then surely a loving God is not keeping lists of our every failing.

 I hasten to stress that forgiveness in a loving relationship is not the same as forgiveness in an abusive relationship, forgiveness always requires some degree of mutuality.      

 Jesus told two parables about forgiveness.  The best known is the story of the prodigal son (Luke 15, 11-32).  This son asked his father to give him the share of the property that he would inherit.  He then sold the property, went to another country and “wasted his money in reckless living”.  When he had gone through all his money, and become destitute, he decided to return home, confess he had done wrong, and asked for a position as a servant.  His father saw his son returning, “and his heart was filled with pity”.  He welcomed his son back into the family.

The other parable is somewhat darker.  It begins with Peter asking Jesus how often he should forgive his brother.  Would seven times be enough?  Jesus replied “No, not seven times but seventy times seven” (Matthew 18, 22).  Some worthy divines have treated this number as a wild exaggeration – similar to the saying that it is easier for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven than for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle.  But I was married for 40 years, and I calculate that 490 acts of forgiveness would work out at about one a month.  This is surely not enough.  Luckily, as Paul teaches us, no-one should be counting.

This parable concerns a servant who owed his king a great deal of money.  He is unable to pay, so the king “ordered him to be sold as a slave, with his wife and his children” to settle the debt.

I read recently in a book called “The Corruption of Capitalism” by Guy Standing, that in Hebrew the words for “sin” and “debt’ have the same root.  This was not the theme of the book, which was about ways the rich exploit the poor, including by getting them into debt.  The modern reader might wonder why this king had lent a servant such an enormous amount of money.  But there is a translation of the Lord’s Prayer which says “forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors” in place of “forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us.”  In my youth I preferred the former version because although I was prepared to believe I was a sinner, I knew for sure that I didn’t owe any money.

To return to the parable, the servant begged for time to pay, and the king took pity on him and forgave the debt.  The servant then went to a fellow servant who owed him money.  “He grabbed him and started choking him.”  He demanded immediate payment.  His fellow servant begged for time to pay, but the unforgiving servant refused and had the man thrown into prison.  When the king heard about this, he was very angry and threw the unforgiving servant into jail also.  Thankfully it seems that the wife and children were spared.  This story ends with Jesus saying “That is how my Father in heaven will treat every one of you unless you forgive other people from your heart.”

In both of these parables, forgiveness requires some measure of reciprocity.  Both the prodigal son and the unforgiving servant admitted they had done wrong and asked for mercy.  I feel strongly that it is very difficult to forgive someone who does not want to be forgiven.  It is very often the case that those who have done the most appalling things feel justified in their actions.  They are not asking to be forgiven. In fact, I suspect the likelihood of a person asking to be forgiven is in inverse relationship to the seriousness of their offence.  The person who spills a drink on your carpet will almost certainly apologise and try to remedy the situation.  The person who shoots your dog will blame the dog.  Nations that invade other nations can find a thousand reasons why they were justified in the most appalling cruelties.

Being in the position of needing forgiveness is not comfortable.  One finds that one does not occupy the moral high ground.  I suspect that the failure of the Aboriginal Voice to Parliament referendum has a lot to do with people not wanting to admit that Aboriginal people had been wronged and deserved some recompense.  People talked about “practical reconciliation” such as improving education and health outcomes.  They were willing to offer charity, but not justice.

Both the parables of Jesus teach that forgiveness does not cancel the need for justice.  The father reassures his other son that “You have been always with me, and everything that I have is yours”.  The prodigal son will get no more inheritance.  The king requires that those who have received forgiveness of their debt extend the same favour to others.

What can one do if the person who has wronged you does not feel any need to be forgiven?  In this case there can be no real reconciliation.  I heard a holocaust survivor say “I refuse to hate, but I will never forgive.”  This struck me as very wise.  No one was asking for his forgiveness.  On the other hand, he needed to distance himself from the horrors of the past in order to live well in the present.  For as long as one hates one continues to replay the cause of one’s hatred in one’s mind.

I have heard people say that Jesus forgave his persecutors while on the cross.  But he did not say “I forgive you”, he asked God to forgive them.  That alone was a remarkable act of grace.  Of course, we may hope that in the long run all can be forgiven. But it is somehow grotesque to think of forgiving people while being actually tortured.  At that moment the perpetrator is in no position to receive forgiveness anyway.

How have the churches interpreted Jesus’ teaching about forgiveness?  It seems to me they have concentrated too much on the sins that need to be forgiven, and too little on the value of reconciliation.  At my Methodist boarding school we spent a lot of time repenting.  On Sundays we repented at church in the morning, at Sunday School in the afternoon, and at church again at night.  I can remember grumbling that I had not had enough time to commit any new sins since the last time I repented.  Later I attended the Church of England where the service began with very fulsome repentance: “We have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts, we have sinned against thy holy laws, and there is no health in us….have mercy upon us miserable offenders”.  The minister would then declare that as we were penitent, God had forgiven us.  All sin was sin against God, and it was God who had to be appeased.  I don’t think it was ever suggested that we should apologise to any of the people we may have hurt.

In Indonesia and some other south-east Asian countries, people mark the end of Ramadan by greeting people with the saying “Ma’af lahir batin” which is shorthand for “Forgive any wrongs I may have done you, whether intentional or unintentional”.  This could of course be merely formulaic, but I like the idea of a day when we clear out a whole lot of resentments, hard feelings and guilt. 

The teachings of Jesus are about sins against other people, not sins against the environment and other creatures (although the Old Testament law had protections for working animals, for example they were to be rested on the sabbath).  The technology to destroy the earth had yet to be invented. The following confessional prayer, from the recent FWCC world conference, contains much wisdom for our time.

God of love and grace, we are a beautiful and broken people, living in a beautiful and broken world. We confess that we have fallen short in caring for each other and for creation.

As a faith community, we ask you to forgive us for neglecting creation, and for inflicting grave injustices upon one another. Give us the courage and wisdom to move forward boldly.  Grant us the strength to seek each other’s forgiveness, and the love and courage to hold both pain and possibility in our hearts. We ask you to send us on a new journey with our fellow humans and all your creation in the spirit of Ubuntu. (Ubuntu can be translated as ‘I am because we are”.)