Saints and Sinners: The path to gaining forgiveness
This incident happened quite a few years ago. I was a young clergyman driving down the streets of Boston. I made a left-hand turn at a light where it was clearly marked, “No left turn.” A policeman spotted me and pulled me over to the curb.
I was wearing a clerical collar and after I rolled down the window to talk to the officer I said with a smile, “Forgive us our trespasses.” It was a bad joke and he didn’t laugh. Instead he gave me a ticket.
Jesus said we should forgive our brother “seventy times seven.” I wasn’t asking the arresting officer to be anywhere near that magnanimous. One act of forgiveness on his part would do it.
I was of course being facetious. We know Jesus wasn’t asking that judges and the police forgive those who violate the law. Few of us — at least until we run afoul of the law ourselves — would want it that way.
What Jesus had in mind was more like the late Pope John Paul II’s public act of forgiving the man who once tried to assassinate him. That forgiveness did not, however, take the form of getting the man released from prison.
There was a story in the paper about two parents who said they had forgiven the drunken teenage driver who killed their 3-year-old daughter. That must be one of the most difficult kinds of forgiveness.
It is the rare person who doesn’t carry some grievance against somebody else whom he is unwilling to forgive. Or maybe feeling a sense of religious obligation he will say, “I forgive him — but I can never forget what he did.”
To forgive but not to forget usually means not to forgive. Author Dorothy Sayers once wrote, “Forgiving means to act as if it had never happened.”
Some medical studies show that a personality profile of cancer victims can includes bitterness, resentment and holding a grudge.
Ministers remind their congregations that Jesus warned that, if we don’t forgive our fellow men and women, God won’t forgive us. But if we do, God will.
Sometimes we are waiting, we say, for the other party to say he’s sorry. Jesus, we ought to be reminded, forgave those who killed him without their giving any hint that they were sorry. When he forgave the adulteress he said only, “Go and sin no more.” He demanded no promise from her that her evil life was behind her. Sometimes, as Jesus of course knew, it is the act of forgiveness that moves the wrongdoer to repentance.
Some of us who find it relatively easy to forgive injustices done to us sympathize with those who don’t forgive.
“I can never forgive incompetence,” says the employer who fires the incompetent worker. Do we really want him to forgive incompetence and retain the worker? Maybe once or twice — but 490 times (70 times 7)? Jesus would never make it in the business world where to show forgiveness would be unforgivable.
A magazine report on the 10 toughest corporate executives in the country showed that the characteristics that distinguished them are arrogance, gratuitous cruelty, self-centeredness and lack of consideration for others. Yet they are high among the role models for American corporate executives.
One woman I know does this each Lent. She makes a list of people in her life from whom she has become estranged for one reason or another and she gets in touch with them. If the estrangement is because of something they have done, she doesn’t say, “I want you to know I forgive you.” (“Never do that,” she says, “it puts you in a superior position”).
She says something like, “We haven’t seen each other in a long time. How are you?” or “How about having lunch next week?”
Whatever brought on the breach between them, she “acts as if it had never happened.” That, as Dorothy Sayers said, is the only true forgiveness.
George Plagenz is an ordained minister and veteran newsman based in Columbus, Ohio.