"If you forgive others their transgressions, your heavenly Father will also forgive you; but if you do not forgive others, neither will your Father forgive your transgressions." Matthew 6:14-15
I would like to help people to better understand and take to heart what Jesus said and what his life on earth was all about.
It is hard to understand what Jesus was talking about. You might begin by reading the Bible, but the Bible turns out to be a long and complicated book. It cannot be understood without a great deal of background information.
You might simplify things by focusing on the four Gospels that tell of Jesus's life and teachings. But these are also full of all kinds of material, and until you see what unites this material, nothing jumps out as the one essential point.
You might turn to theology, but then find that there are unresolvable conflicts among theologians and denominations about the meaning of Jesus's life and teachings.
But there is a way to genuinely understand Jesus--the way Jesus himself recommends, and that is to try seriously and persistently to do the will of God and specifically to put Jesus's own teachings into practice.
If you understand that this is the way to come to a knowledge of God, you are ahead of most Christians.
Once you try seriously to do what Jesus says, you begin to understand how his mind works. The more you try, the more your heart develops, and the more your heart develops, the more true knowledge of God arises.
Here is what I have learned so far. The heart of Jesus's message, as it has been transmitted to us through the Gospels, is mercy and forgiveness.
Jesus presents us with a God who is merciful and forgiving. Jesus also warns us of the natural limits of mercy and forgiveness. God's love has no limits, which is why mercy and forgiveness must have limits.
So what then is mercy?
Negatively speaking, mercy means renouncing all cruelty, vengeance, resentment, or rejoicing in other people's pain. It means refraining from any gratuitous punishment, harm, or harshness. It also means scrupulously avoiding heaping up unnecessary and unbearable burdens on others.
Positively speaking, mercy means being willing to accept and love and understand people just as they are by forgiving their offences and putting up with their faults.
In difficult cases, mercy means speaking critical truths to people, even when those truths are unwelcome, and doing so not to tear people down but to connect honestly with them and to help them check their destructive habits.
In more difficult cases, mercy means restraining people or using force, not out of hatred or malice, but to protect life, as Jesus did when a mob came to arrest both him and his disciples and he forced them to let his disciples go.
In the most difficult cases, when people are fully committed to a destructive course of action and nothing we can do can stop them, mercy means not controlling them, but allowing them the autonomy to experience and learn from the inevitable painful consequences of their actions.
Mercy requires us to be just. Because to commit an injustice against anyone is an unmerciful act. And so justice naturally serves mercy, or rather, justice and mercy serve one another. For Jesus, justice and mercy are one. The church has misunderstood this principle. The church has often said that justice means punishing people and mercy means not punishing people, and so the church has made justice and mercy opposites. This is a tragic mistake that makes God into a being with contradictory impulses.
The good news is that God is one, and his mercy and justice are in complete harmony. This means that while God is strong and firm in the truth--including the moral truth--there is no trace of unnecessary harshness in God.
And yet Jesus says harsh things. I believe it is important to face these hard words and, without dismissing them, try to understand them.
For example, Jesus says, "If you forgive others their transgressions, your heavenly Father will also forgive you; but if you do not forgive others, neither will your Father forgive your transgressions."
Jesus is saying that mercy is not just something that we receive from God, but also something that God demands from us. This demand is backed by the clear and certain consequence that God will withhold forgiveness from the unforgiving and mercy from the unmerciful.
That God withholds forgiveness is not, on the surface, good news. We may make ourselves miserable by refusing to forgive those who have hurt us, and God will not stop us. This may be bad news, but it is good news that God is always willing to forgive and extend mercy to us. And likewise it is good news that God is waiting patiently for us to begin to offer forgiveness to others. And it is the best news that God is always trying to find a way, in spite of the hardness of our hearts, to reach us and soften our hearts.
Today we have a diminished idea of mercy. It is a weak kind of mercy, a mercy that means not holding people accountable for their actions. That is not the mercy that Jesus speaks about or practices. Jesus saw and called out people's wrong actions, words, and beliefs. His great mercy is that he tells the truth so that truth can be aired in a world full of lies. There was no intention in him to tear people down. His only intention was to correct people so that they might know his Father and to warn them against those who were misguiding them.
God's mercy is not weak. It is not cowardly. It is not blind to injustice or to lies. It is not the kind of mercy that shoots itself in the foot. Yes, it is self-sacrificing when necessary, but its sacrifices are meaningful and courageous acts of service for the good of all.
God's mercy, according to Jesus, comes with the demand to extend mercy to others. And those who contemptuously refuse to extend mercy to others find that they are making it impossible for themselves to receive and enjoy God's mercy.
We have to participate in God's mercy to receive it ourselves. We have to give it away to enjoy its benefits. In spiritual life, what we give, we receive, and what we refuse to give we will never receive--until we have a change of heart.
This is good news if you love other fallible human beings like yourself. It is good news if you are willing to treat others with the same unmerited kindness that you yourself need.
I say none of this to guilt people, especially those who have been hurt deeply and who have to go through a difficult process of working through pain and confusion before forgiveness emerges as a possibility.
But I do not want to lie to people. In the end, we must forgive those who hurt us if we are to get the good out of life. In the end, we must forgive even our worst enemies. Forgiveness is a process. It does not matter how fast we get to the end of the process, but it does matter that our intention is to move towards forgiveness as our goal.
In forgiveness, we acknowledge the right and the wrong of the matter, but let it go anyway. We do not let go of our own commitment to do what is right, and we do not let go of the truth, but we do let go of our refusal to accept that someone else has done wrong or violated the truth. We do not let go of our need for justice in the face of ongoing injustice, but we let go of any taint of vengeance or cruelty in our desire for justice. In forgiveness we pray for our enemies--whether they really are our enemies or whether we only think of them as enemies--and train ourselves to desire for them every genuine blessing. In forgiveness we embrace the bigger picture--the crying need in this world for truth and healing and righteousness and mercy and hope--and let go of a narrow view that fixates so exclusively on specific incidents and past injustices that the bigger picture is lost.
Again, I do not desire to lay a guilt trip on anyone. The world is already drowning in guilt. We do not need more guilt, but we do need the clarity that will motivate us to act. We need to be clear about the necessity of forgiveness, and we need to be clear that forgiveness is an action--a free, voluntary, and deliberate action. God will certainly help us forgive--we cannot forgive by our own power alone--but our cooperation and active initiative is essential.
There is grace in understanding the necessity of forgiveness. There is grace in realizing that you need to actually do something about your spiritual state. It is not enough to sit back and have opinions about things. It is not enough to wait for your mind and heart to spontaneously change themselves. You must actually do something at some specific moment in time. Until you see that you must do something about forgiveness, it seems to me, from my own experience, that you are lost.
God in his love is always giving us as much mercy and forgiveness as we are receptive to. When Jesus tells us that we must forgive to be forgiven, that itself is an expression of God's mercy and eagerness to forgive. Jesus urges us to lay claim to the fullness of God's mercy by forgiving others, and warns us that unforgiveness will always only lead to more misery.
Yes, forgiveness is hard. And it may take a long time, even a lifetime, to genuinely forgive and to learn to forgive from the heart. But our heavenly Father is immeasurably pleased as soon as we turn around and take that first small step. God is always looking out for promising beginnings. With our cooperation, he himself will see those beginnings through to perfect conclusions.
Let me tell you something I have learned about forgiveness, something I have learned both from Jesus's example and his teachings: the world and especially almost every movie we watch tells us that the way to defeat evil is by engaging in violence, by beating up or killing the bad guy. But Jesus shows us that the real way to defeat evil is by suffering violence. Those who suffer well are, along with Jesus, the saviors of the world. God's true strength is in his ability to suffer, not his ability to make others suffer. Any demon or tyrant can make others suffer, but God's strength is different. It is only God's strength that leads to a renewal of life.
If we can let the suffering of the world enter us and if we can feel it fully without sending it back into the world or transmitting it to others, then good has overcome evil. This is what God is always doing for us. It is what we need to learn to do also.
Resentment tells us that someone else deserves to feel our pain, and so resentment projects pain back into the world. This leads to a cycle of escalating violence. But God has a different strategy. Jesus did not deserve to be crucified, and we do not deserve to feel much of the pain that we feel, but whether we deserve it or not, we can accept it, and allow it to exhaust itself in our own hearts, and so drain it out of the world forever.
Forgiveness is giving up any hope that someone else will take responsibility for the pain that is already in our hearts.
When we forgive, we invite our heavenly Father to live in our hearts. There, God feels everything we feel, suffers with us, and also strengthens us and sustains us so that we can withstand any pain.
At the end of our pain, we will see with as much moral clarity as ever--in fact with so much more clarity because our judgements will not be twisted by our unprocessed pain and resentment.
Jesus's teaching is unambiguous. He taught that God is willing to be merciful to everyone, but holds back forgiveness from those who are themselves unwilling to forgive.
God is serious about mercy. God knows that we need not only to receive it but to give it away. If we do not give it away, we will never be like him--good and loving and generous and blessed. God wants to give us everything he himself has, because it is the very best that can be given, and he knows that nothing else will satisfy us because we were created by God to become like God. That is what it means to be a child of God and to have God as our Father.
God will not give us what we refuse to receive. That would be a contradiction. And there are no contradictions in God. However, there are many possibilities in God, and God can find a way even in the most hopeless cases.
God's unconditional love for us is that he will never stop desiring for us to be sharers in his perfect goodness. God's love is unconditional, but his forgiveness is not unconditional. It is because God's love is unconditional that his forgiveness is not. If God could somehow give us the fullness of his mercy while we refused to extend it to others, we would only be hurt by God's gift and confirmed in our rebellion against his goodness.
Once you have come to know something of God's goodness, you see the beauty of it, and you want more and more of it, and the whole package of what Jesus taught is recognized as good news, even the sayings that sound harsh. That is because we are not what we are meant to be if we receive all good things and give nothing back. We need real moral demands to be placed on us in order to be ourselves.
It is hard to say this because the church and society have placed so many unnecessary, unnatural, and unbearable burdens on people. And yet the fact that someone has twisted the truth does not make the truth less true. Jesus's demand that we forgive is a necessary demand. And it is a light burden as far as burdens go.
To attain the full dignity of our humanity, we to need to know that something is legitimately expected of us, and we need to respond to that expectation not only in our intellectual assent, but in our actual willingness to act.
We particularly need to be told about the necessity of forgiving others, because if no one tells us about this, we may never know, and the path to freedom, love, and delight may be closed to us.
God condemns what is evil. God punishes. Jesus is clear about that, and so is the testimony of the whole Bible. The question is not whether God punishes, but who is the God who punishes? Is he a God who has ill-will in his heart toward his creatures for not meeting the standard he has set them? Or is he a loving and generous Father who, seeing his children's failures, still wants them to receive every good thing he has to offer, who wants them to be as merciful toward their brothers and sisters as he is toward them, and who therefore sets out consequences as guard rails to guide them in the right direction?
How can we believe in a God who has legitimate authority over us? In this world, we have so much experience of irresponsible authority and exploitative power. But God's wisdom is perfect, and his intention is to lead us to freedom and empowerment. God does not use his power to subjugate us, but to obtain our active consent as he rescues us from everything in us that harms us and harms others.
At the deepest level, God made us the way we are and the world the way it is. There is law at the heart of things. When we violate this law, we harm ourselves. When we make others suffer without just cause, we are calling down punishment on ourselves. We do not need to be surprised or shocked when harming others leads to our own suffering or when unforgiveness leads to being unforgiven. We can look around and see the way things work, and we can act accordingly. It is perfect wisdom that has laid down the foundations of things.
It is foundational to the moral order of reality that those who forgive nurture lightness and ease in their hearts, and those who do not forgive nurture misery and resentment. But that is not to say that all those who are at ease have done the work of forgiveness, or that all those who are unhappy are refusing to forgive. The world is too filled with injustice to come to those kinds of conclusions. We are to help God bring justice into this world, knowing that we cannot always expect justice from this world.
In this world, people are cruel; people take pleasure in the pain of others and are indifferent to their struggles; people refuse to open their minds and try to understand those who differ from them; people seek out their own interests and refuse to be fair. All of these many evils are expressions of the one evil of unforgiveness. It seems to me that social media and the deluge of negative news makes it supremely easy to develop unforgiving habits of mind.
But God does everything he can to rescue us from the hell of our misery and the deeper hell of our unforgiveness.
Jesus was kind and self-giving, and he was never harsh to anyone on account of their simply being sinful or breaking rules. Jesus was only harsh to people on account of their being unmerciful. As a consequence, he was immeasurably harder on those who enforced the rules without compassion than those who broke them. Unmercifulness is the one thing that in itself logically requires condemnation and punishment because it is the one thing that is hardened against the healing power of mercy.
And yet in a deeper sense, God is merciful even to the unmerciful, only such mercy will always look like chastisement, because God chastises those he loves.
God will hold us accountable for our words and actions and, if necessary, impose hard consequences on us, but only out of love--only out of a desire to make us loving, merciful, and forgiving like himself so that we may share his blessedness.
And when we choose mercy, God will bless us by giving us ways to serve others such that God's mercies multiply and abound in the world. There is no other way to make the world a better place.
This is what I understand to be Jesus's message, in both its comfortable reassurance and its bracing demands. And I think it is especially important today to present the whole of what Jesus said, and not leave out parts that some may find hard to speak or hard to hear.
