Forgiveness. What, Again?
Counter to
my judgmental prejudice, I'm starting with “so” this morning. So, what’s this about
forgiveness? Contemplate a few
minutes, then to sermon prep for Sunday.
Forgiveness.
Sins,
wrongs, may only be forgiven by the one against whom the wrong was committed. Intentional
sins do not have to be forgiven,
unintentional sins must be forgiven
in response to penitence, apology. Sins against God may be forgiven by God alone.
In our church, sins may be forgiven by God through a priest or bishop
pronouncing “absolution.” In the Law of Moses, God laid down rules of penance for
obtaining forgiveness of sins in a sacrificial system. But there is only penance unto absolution
for unintentional sins, the penance depending on the sin. For intentional sins (crimes in a society in which religious law and civil law are the same), there
is no way to go to the Altar and offer apology or sacrifice to obtain
forgiveness of intentional sin against God. For deliberate affront to a Law, there
is only punishment, you have to do your time, take your stripes, be stoned, pay
your fine. I suppose that also is “penance” unto a clean slate of sorts, but it does not yield forgiveness,
and in the Law of Moses it isn’t going to feel like forgiveness if you are
Achen being stoned. Or the woman taken in adultery and dragged out to be
stoned: the stoning is the punishment, the penance, and it doesn’t at all feel
like the road to forgiveness. Then Jesus comes along and says “Go and sin no
more.” That isn’t forgiveness, only the aggrieved spouses have that right, and in
that society the Law took over anyway and required stoning, no forgiveness.
What if Jesus had come on the scene just as Joshua and friends were picking up
rocks to stone Achan? Remember, Achan was repentant, but forgiveness was not
part of the equation (it’s become cool to say “not part of the calculus,” but I never
took calculus), Achan's sin was intentional, stealing from God and endangering the
entire community. But, WWJD, if Jesus had come on the scene, he would have said
to Achan, as he did to the woman taken in adultery, “go and sin no more.”
That’s not “forgiveness,” it’s “justification,” which is to say, "you and I both
know damn well you’re guilty as hell, but I’m declaring you 'not guilty' anyway, go on home, I saved you" where salvation, justification and forgiveness merge. See: nobody has to forgive an intentional
wrong, and nobody who has committed an
intentional wrong, sin, can demand to be forgiven.
Where am I
going with this? I don’t know, it's not a Ph.D. dissertation for
consideration by scholars, I’m wandering dizzily toward the end of a blog post.
Repeating somewhat, forgiveness of a wrong against another person, for which Lent is our season for raised consciousness, as with sin against God, may only be forgiven by the wronged one. If the wrong, or sin, is unintentional, the wronged one is, upon hearing penitence, spiritually obligated, morally bound, to forgive. Where’s the “gray” in this? If someone gets drunk or stoned and has a car crash that kills or injures someone, getting drunk in the first place was a matter of choice, which moves the offense to “intentional,” where only the harmed one can forgive, but is not obligated to do so even in response to penitence. If someone owns a dog that kills or mauls a child, the fact of choosing to own a dangerous beast moves the offense to “intentional” and the owner is not entitled to forgiveness, it’s the sole discretion of the wronged one.
Wandering on and on. A generation ago President Reagan made a visit honoring the war dead in a European cemetery in which several Nazi SS soldiers were buried, and quite a lot of folks were upset, angry. The following Sunday, in an Episcopal church I heard (heard did not preach) a sermon in which the preacher said it’s time to forgive the Holocaust and move on. The preacher’s very words were an offense against heaven and earth if for no other reason than that he’s an uncircumcised gentile with not a drop of Jewish blood in his veins. Only the Jews can forgive the Holocaust. Every individual Jew as a person, and the worldwide body of Jewish people as a community. In like manner, only those who have a friend or loved one interred in USS ARIZONA can forgive December 7, 1941. And only those who lost a loved one on 9/11 can forgive. Only the victims can forgive those intentional acts. The survivors. Or the dead. Or those who will never get to be born.
Get it? Well then, WTH, I'm done, I give up.
TW
Forgiveness.
Forgiveness
has two directions, giving and receiving, coming and going. That is, are we talking
about forgiving someone for their offense against us (which wanders off into guilt
about our inability to forgive), or are we talking about our being forgiven for our
offense against someone else? So, let’s go deeper into my personal prejudice by
beginning a sentence with “well” as well. Well, come to think of it,
forgiveness may have four sides, not just two; there's not just coming and going, there's also up and down:
as well as giving and receiving,
there’s the vertical plane of wrongs between us and God, which is what we call sin. And there’s the horizontal plane of
wrongs between us and other people, which may be personal and/or legal wrongs, from not
illegal thence sliding down the path unto criminal, which we may also define in terms of “sin”.
(It doesn’t bother me who is disturbed by whether I put my periods and commas
inside or outside my quotation marks, the English do it one way, Americans do
it both ridiculous and ambiguous. Another blog for another lifetime.)
It gets a
little wider, not much: at first it was two-sided, coming and going; then it became
three-dimensional, a vertical or horizontal line on a plane, now it’s becoming
polygonal like a dice, with six sides, or eight. Some sins and wrongs are intentional, some
unintentional. This isn’t really what I was thinking to blog about when I sat
down here this morning, in fact I wasn’t thinking about blogging at all, I was
thinking about starting in on my sermon preparation for Sunday: will it be Ezekiel and the Dry Bones, or Jesus Raising Lazarus from the Dead.
But (see how the mind starts dumping out stream of consciousness) a question
from yesterday makes me think I’ve either caused confusion about forgiveness (not good) or
generated thinking and discussion (very good). So, more on “forgiveness.” Here are my rules
of understanding. That's neither “here are my rules”, which would be insufferably arrogant;
nor “here is my understanding,” which would be insipidly dismissible. It's here are
my rules of understanding for discussing forgiveness at this moment. I’m not preaching about
forgiveness again for a third time this Lent, God help us, this is just blog post postulating,
eh? More nonsense.
Repeating somewhat, forgiveness of a wrong against another person, for which Lent is our season for raised consciousness, as with sin against God, may only be forgiven by the wronged one. If the wrong, or sin, is unintentional, the wronged one is, upon hearing penitence, spiritually obligated, morally bound, to forgive. Where’s the “gray” in this? If someone gets drunk or stoned and has a car crash that kills or injures someone, getting drunk in the first place was a matter of choice, which moves the offense to “intentional,” where only the harmed one can forgive, but is not obligated to do so even in response to penitence. If someone owns a dog that kills or mauls a child, the fact of choosing to own a dangerous beast moves the offense to “intentional” and the owner is not entitled to forgiveness, it’s the sole discretion of the wronged one.
Wandering on and on. A generation ago President Reagan made a visit honoring the war dead in a European cemetery in which several Nazi SS soldiers were buried, and quite a lot of folks were upset, angry. The following Sunday, in an Episcopal church I heard (heard did not preach) a sermon in which the preacher said it’s time to forgive the Holocaust and move on. The preacher’s very words were an offense against heaven and earth if for no other reason than that he’s an uncircumcised gentile with not a drop of Jewish blood in his veins. Only the Jews can forgive the Holocaust. Every individual Jew as a person, and the worldwide body of Jewish people as a community. In like manner, only those who have a friend or loved one interred in USS ARIZONA can forgive December 7, 1941. And only those who lost a loved one on 9/11 can forgive. Only the victims can forgive those intentional acts. The survivors. Or the dead. Or those who will never get to be born.
Get it? Well then, WTH, I'm done, I give up.
TW