Our emotions are a tremendously important part of who we are. But forgiveness isn't simply about feelings; it's about how we live together, about how we undertake to behave toward one another, about the releasing of old wrongs, the restoration of peace, and the mending of relationships. If we tried to forgive purely by willing it or by thinking it without the involvement of our emotions, forgiveness wouldn't work. Moreover, the emotions, if unsupported by the rest of our life, are notoriously unstable. I can go right on feeling hidden resentment toward people years after performing such an emotion-laden, manipulative drama of forgiveness with them.
It may not always be others we're trying to control. Sometimes we manipulate ourselves into feeling that we have forgiven the other, and sometimes we manipulate ourselves into feeling forgiven. I think, for example, of a certain television evangelist who was caught in some embarrassing sexual peccadilloes a few years ago. Having retired from public view for a little while, he reemerged announcing that he had received assurance that God had forgiven him. Now, I firmly believe that God had indeed forgiven him—along with everybody else in the world. But my immediate reaction was, “Says who?! Why should I take your word for it?”
Alexander Campbell, a nineteenth-century preacher and reformer, used to point out that you can feel you are forgiven for some harm you may have done me, but the feeling doesn't really mean much. You only know you are forgiven if I tell you so. What made me suspicious of the television evangelist was that his announcement of his own forgiveness seemed to depend less on the word of God than on a certain feeling that he had acquired in prayer. Perhaps it was a genuine gift of grace, or perhaps it was a triumph of emotional self-manipulation. Who can say?
The problem arises when our feelings become the supreme focal point. If all we really want is to “feel right,” then once we have manipulated our feelings into the preferred state, that's all that seems necessary. But real forgiveness—forgiving or being forgiven—goes well beyond that. It is a matter of getting a new mind, of having one's whole perspective on the world transformed and the behavior based on that perspective changed and made new.
Still another common misunderstanding of forgiveness treats forgiveness as a commodity. We purchase it by means of repentance—perhaps including penances that cost us dearly. This is the notion of forgiveness as second prize. First prize goes to those who do everything right the first time around. Second prize goes to those who repent really, really well. If you can't be perfect, you can at least be thoroughly ashamed of yourself, and that will earn a lesser reward.
But in Christian faith, forgiveness isn't something we earn. It's too late to earn divine forgiveness, because God has already given it to us as a gift. We may feel very deeply the wrong that we have done. We may feel the need to do some penance as an expression of our profound regret. Fine. Penance then becomes a means of making amends where possible, and a means of rehabilitation. It becomes an educational process in which we let the changed perspective, the new mind that is repentance, permeate our very being. But the penance will not earn God's forgiveness for us, because no one can earn a gift, particularly not a gift that has already been given.
Among humans, too, forgiveness is a gift, given out of the goodness of the giver's heart. For better or worse, you can't make anybody forgive you. If you manipulate people into feeling that they have to forgive you—or even that they already have—they still may not succeed in forgiving you from the heart. When forgiveness does come, it will be because the forgiver has found the interior riches that make it possible to be generous with the offender and the new mind that makes a person desire to do so.
When all is said and done, we are apt to think of forgiveness as a kind of complicated transaction between people that usually involves a good deal of misrepresentation, emotional manipulation, denial, presumption, and even outright lying. It becomes a formula to be invoked, an obligation to be fulfilled. Then, afterward, we sometimes wonder why we haven't really succeeded in turning loose our anger about the past.
We are perplexed because we seem to have done what we were supposed to do. We should forgive, shouldn't we? We're told to forgive by Jesus himself, so we had better just get busy and work on it and get it right, hadn't we? We'll do whatever it takes, from ignoring what other people are really doing, to denying our own feelings, to engaging in the melodrama of manipulation. And we'll feel that we're doing the pious, the religious thing.
But William Temple shows us a better way. Repentance isn't primarily about remorse, it's about the joyful sharing in the mind of God. What would forgiveness look like in those terms? How is forgiveness a way of sharing joyfully in the mind of God?
What Forgiveness Is
We'll understand the meaning of forgiveness best if we start off in relation to ourselves. Jesus tells us that God has forgiven us even if we don't seem to need forgiveness. What kind of way is that for God to deal with good, decent, respectable, religious folk? No doubt we have our faults, but they aren't that gross or dangerous. It would be nice of God to forgive our minor infractions—assuming that we've been appropriately penitent—but, really, there must be better things for God to do with God's time than to forgive people who don't really need forgiveness all that much.
Does that speech sound at all familiar? We think it, perhaps; but we wouldn't say it explicitly, even inside our heads. We know it sounds a little too much like the Pharisee in Jesus' parable of the two men who prayed in the Temple (Luke 18:9–14). This man (a particularly good and religious man, for that is what the Pharisees were) went to the Temple, the holiest of all places, to pray. He prayed a prayer of gratitude for his own goodness: “I thank you, God, that I am not like the rest of humanity: rapacious people, unjust people, adulterers—or even like this tax collector.” (Tax collectors were considered very careless about religious observances.) The tax collector, by contrast, beat his breast and prayed, “God, be merciful to me, sinner that I am.” Jesus then says to his audience, “I tell you, the second man went home with God's favor rather than the first, because everyone who exalts himself will be brought low, but the one who humbles himself will be exalted.”
Jesus seems to like sayings about reversals. In another place, he says that the first will be last and the last first. Such sayings emphasize that God's favor is always a gift, not mere payment for our services. They also call attention to the dangers that lurk in self-satisfaction. Too much confidence in our own goodness can make us forget the common humanity that we share with every other person in the world. It's the kind of attitude that makes it possible for us to thank God that we are not like “those other people.”
Because we remember Jesus' parable, we avoid reproducing the good Pharisee's worst excesses openly and aloud. Yet I think this prayer of superiority does rise up in our inmost souls sometimes in our relationship with God. After all, good, religious people of today, whatever our specific religion, are the Pharisee's direct heirs. We may not embrace his precise theology and spirituality, but we are religious people—devoted, responsible, reliable, generally solid folk. We can't help noticing that, can we? It wouldn't be truthful to pretend otherwise, would it?
No, it wouldn't. I'm not advocating another sort of lie, a false humility. In fact, there's a real value to basic moral goodness that it would be foolish to deny. There are people who do really evil things in our world. They cause plenty of pain and anguish. If the whole world were made of people like us, there's a chance it would be a better place. I don't want to dismiss that. Like us, the Pharisees were not the worst people of their time, but the best. If Jesus found fault with them, it wasn't because they were bad but because they were good and they knew it; for there is a danger in that, too, as we shall see.
So why does God choose to deal with us by means of forgiveness? There are two reasons that are particularly relevant to our topic. One is that God's forgiveness undercuts the worst temptation of good people: self-righteousness. It saves us from getting stuck on ourselves in ways that can ultimately stifle our own souls and perhaps cause harm