Forgiveness Is A Gift

Matthew 6: 5-14

One unusually bright moment in the long history of the troubles in Northern Ireland came in 1987. It followed a particularly black moment, the bombing of a peaceful Remembrance Day service in Enniskillen, in which ten innocent people died and many more were injured. Gordon Wilson held his daughter Marie’s hand as they lay trapped under the mountain of rubble. He was brought out alive, she died. Only hours later, interviewed by the BBC, he refused to express any bitterness towards the murderers of his daughter, saying that angry words could neither restore his daughter nor bring peace to Northern Ireland: ‘I have lost my daughter and we shall miss her. But I bear no ill will. I bear no grudge. That will not bring her back.’ These were spontaneous words, spoken from the heart, and remarkable for that. Some people might think them superficial: could real forgiveness in such circumstances be so immediate and apparently easy? I am almost sure that I could not be as easily forgiving if someone did something dreadful to my daughter, I obviously don’t know for sure, and God forbid that I ever have to find out, but I am convinced that I could not let go of my grief long enough to forgive, well certainly not with such immediacy. For others, there would be no desire to forgive, preferring instead to hold on to their bitterness as a way of keeping their loved one alive. These are perfectly normal reactions; after all we are only human.

 

In the weeks that followed the death of his daughter, Gordon Wilson had to struggle to be true to his words. It helped to have said them; he knew they were right and he could hold onto them as he tried to come to terms with his daughter’s death. He was misunderstood, even ridiculed for not wanting revenge. That it seemed beyond comprehension to many highlights how alien forgiveness is to many people faced with such loss.

 

Most people, of course, believe in forgiveness up to a point. If the offence is fairly trivial, if there are excuses for such behaviour, and if the offender really regrets it, says sorry and means it. But for most of us forgiveness quickly runs out. Some things are just too serious for forgiveness: I can never forgive him for that, people say. I wonder why some people feel they have to forgive and others can’t? Perhaps it is because the forgivers can’t face bearing a grudge for the rest of their lives, for a grudge is, of all life’s burdens, one of the heaviest to carry.  Would you believe that scientists have found this to be true of gorillas too?  Those in the field of forgiveness research (yes, it does exist!), have watched apes and seen them going through very specific “forgiveness rituals” after one has injured another, apparently because, without this, the tribe would break up.  So the need to forgive is hard wired into their brains as part of evolution.

As human beings, we too need our reconciliation rituals; they are fundamental to our social stability.  Cooperation is a key element in the success of Team Human.

The reason for this, not surprisingly, lies in the brain.  When someone hurts us deeply it arouses all sorts of emotions – anger of course, but also fear that our customary pattern of life will be destroyed forever.  These emotions come from the most primitive part of our brain, the amygdala, which are responsible for the “fight or flight” reaction to a crisis.  Every time we go over the ways in which we have been hurt, the brain secretes the chemicals which bring these emotions up again, which is physically and emotionally damaging.  Whereas forgiveness is associated with reductions in blood pressure, and improves cardiovascular reactions to stress – in other words, we are less likely to die of a heart attack if we forgive our enemies.

But forgiving somebody is very difficult, nigh on impossible in some cases. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa showed that it is no use telling anyone they must forgive; they have to feel ready to forgive.

 

Right down through human history, right through the Bible, there have been laws to stem the spirals of injuries and retaliation, laws which limit vengeance to proportionate retaliation, criminal justice systems which take the matter out of the sphere of personal revenge and into that of impartial justice. Human societies couldn’t survive without such strategies of law and justice and punishment. But Jesus is in the business of proposing a more radical strategy, one which halts the spiral of evil entirely and puts in its place a spiral of healing and reconciliation. In N Ireland in 1987 one particular advance of hatred and evil stopped with Gordon Wilson, with a man who refused to continue it, refused to add hatred to hatred. The same can be said of Tariq Jahan, when he called for an end to the rioting and bloodshed following the death of his son, Haroon, during the Birmingham riots.  We can’t trace the spiral of healing that started with these acts of forgiveness, but we can be sure there was one, less obvious and less newsworthy than the continuing violence.  Gordon’s forgiveness may not have affected his daughter’s killers in the least (though of course we cannot know that), and in that case we might say it failed – at least to attain its most desirable end. But it wasn’t by any means wasted. Violence isn’t deterred by failure, nor should forgiveness be. Forgiveness needs to be as determined as hatred. But for many of us, forgiveness often seems quite out of reach – not just for monstrous evils but even for the relatively trivial things we hold against each other.

However, God has forgiven us everything, the whole of the vast debt of sin that we owe. We are the recipients of God’s mercy and generosity on a mind-blowing scale. But if that’s the case, ought it not to change our whole lives? God has torn up the pages of our debts. So for us now not to forgive those who wrong us is quite outrageous. To insist, as it were, on our rights not to be generous, our right to feel hurt and resentful, our right to seek redress – all that is to live as though the extraordinary fact of God’s forgiveness of us had never happened.

 

So must we forgive others – however often, to any extent? Yes, because God has forgiven us to an unimaginable extent. God has forgiven us and he means his forgiveness to overflow into our dealings with each other; he forgives us so that forgiveness should become the principle by which we live our lives.

 

But can we forgive? Can we get over all the hurt and resentment? Can we bring ourselves to forgive? Again the answer is that it’s God’s forgiveness that makes us forgiving. It’s the experience of being forgiven that enables us to treat other people generously, compassionately, forgivingly.

What happens if instead we refuse to forgive? It’s one thing to want to forgive but to find it hard; another thing not to want to forgive, to set our face in hatred against the possibility of forgiveness. We can do it with the most minor hurts and injuries. We nurse grudges. That word nurse that we sometimes use in that way is very apt. We tend and nurture our resentments; we deliberately help them to take root and to grow. We don’t want to give them up because we find them in an odd sort of way comforting or pleasing. Of course, for some, particularly in the face of great loss, their grudge is a way of keeping someone alive.

 

But here then comes the hardest and most insightful element of what Jesus says about forgiveness. People who can’t forgive others are people who can’t accept God’s forgiveness themselves. If being forgiven enables you to forgive, conversely also refusing to forgive inhibits you from receiving forgiveness. Forgiving and being forgiven belong inseparably together. You can’t have one without the other,.

 

In Matthew’s version of the Lord’s Prayer – “Forgive us our debts as we also have forgiven our debtors.” – Forgiving and being forgiven belong together. But what precisely is the force of that ‘as’: Forgive us as we forgive others? Does God really make his forgiveness conditional? Only if we forgive others will God forgive us? It seems to be what Jesus is saying: “if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you; but if you do not forgive others, neither will your Father forgive you. I don’t think it means God waits for us to be forgiving before he forgives us. God forgives us and our forgiveness of others follows, as the result. But God’s forgiveness of us can’t take effect unless we actually accept it. And accepting it makes us forgiving. By refusing to forgive others we also refuse God’s forgiveness. The connection goes both ways.

 

To forgive, however, is emphatically not the same as to excuse. Forgiveness implies wrongdoing and guilt. Otherwise there would be nothing to forgive. So forgiveness isn’t pretending that no wrong has been done. And forgiveness can’t be properly accepted without acknowledging that one has done wrong. So forgiveness isn’t at all a matter of taking evil lightly. When fully effective, it is God’s surest way of destroying evil.  So being forgiving does not meant to treat wrongdoing as only a matter of personal preference. The truly forgiving person is hurt by evil, outraged by evil, angry at injustice and cruelty, but chooses not to play evil’s game, not to let evil provoke evil.

 

When I say that to forgive is not the same as to excuse, I don’t mean there aren’t ever excuses. When we think about the everyday wrongs we all feel others do us, we very often should consider that others may not be as culpable as we think. We mistake people’s motives, we ignore the pressures they’re under, and so on. If we understand, often we can forgive more easily. But, still, it is not true that to understand all is to forgive all. I’m not sure who said that, but I don’t believe it!  There are serious evils that forgiveness certainly does not condone, serious evils that forgiveness fully recognizes in the act of forgiving those who do them.

 

I find it helpful to think of forgiveness as gift. It’s the gift God gives us to pass on to others. It’s gift because it doesn’t arise out of or follow from what has happened. It’s not the natural response. It’s something fresh from outside, and so it’s the new element that can change situations. It interrupts the otherwise endless spiral of evil and starts something new and transformative. It even interrupts the ordinary course of justice. It admits the claims of justice but brings something more than justice into the situation. It’s the miracle cure we should never have thought there could be had not God given it to us.

Forgiveness liberates. Forgiveness is the one thing that truly frees us from the entail of the past. It’s very noticeable if you think about people who’ve suffered some serious injury or injustice, especially if it’s involved losing a loved one – such people feel very strongly the need for some kind of closure to the experience. To see justice done in the outcome of a court case, a government enquiry, an inquest – people look in various ways for some way of letting go of the matter, allowing the dead to rest; a closure so that their lives are not forever burdened with the wrongs of the past. They know that bitterness left to linger and to fester can poison a whole life. They long for revenge, or for justice, or for some definitive verdict on the matter … as though these things close the whole chapter. Experience shows they do not. Forgiveness is the one form of closure that leaves no unfinished business to go on nagging at our lives. Full and complete forgiveness, that is. That may take time; it may take a long time; it may even take a lifetime. Not everyone is a Gordon Wilson, for many different reasons, all of which are valid in the light of our humanity. But forgiveness is the process of true and full healing.

 

So, whatever stage we are at with our forgiveness – whether we make excuses but don’t forgive, whether we want to forgive but are too hurt or wounded to do so, or whether we hold onto our grudges and do not want to forgive, it is vital that we pray to God to ask him for help – help to forgive, and even help to want to forgive; for even a small piece of God’s grace that we receive daily.