Highlights: A Terrible Duty - Episode 28
I said in a previous chapter that chastity was the most unpopular of the Christian virtues. But I am not sure I was right. I believe the one I have to talk of today is even more unpopular: the Christian rule, “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.” Because in Christian morals “thy neighbor” includes “thy enemy,” and so we come up against this terrible duty of forgiving our enemies….They say, “That sort of talk makes them sick.” And half of you already want to ask me, “I wonder how you’d feel about forgiving the Gestapo if you were a Pole or a Jew?”
‘Forgive us our sins as we forgive those that sin agains us.’ There is no slightest suggestion that we are offered forgiveness on any other terms. It is made perfectly clear that if we do not forgive we shall not be forgiven. There are no two ways about it. What are we to do?
When you start mathematics you do not begin with calculus; you begin with simple addition. In the same way, if we really want to learn how to forgive, perhaps we had better start with something easier than the Gestapo! One might start with forgiving one’s husband or wife, or parents or children…for something they have done or said in the last week. That will probably keep us busy for the moment
Forgiveness is not an emotion
Forgiveness is not minimizing the offense.
A good many people imagine that forgiving your enemies means making out that they are really not such bad fellows after all, when it is quite plain that they are…Christianity does not want us to reduce by one atom the hatred we feel for cruelty and treachery We ought to hate them.
Forgiveness is not releasing the offender from the consequences of his actions. There are offenses where it may be best to allow the natural consequences of the offense to play out.
What is forgiveness?
Something inside us, the feeling of resentment, the feeling that wants to get one’s own back, must be simply killed…we must feel about the enemy as we feel about ourselves - to wish that he were not bad, to hope that he may…be cured; in fact, to wish his good…wishing his good, not feeling fond of him nor saying he is nice when he is not.
Forgiveness is not always instantaneous. It may take a life-time to resolve all the residual issues related to forgiveness. It’s a process.
I do not mean that anyone can decide this moment that he will never feel it any more. That is not how things happen. I mean that every time it bobs its head up, day after day, year after year, all our lives long, we must hit it on the head. Perhaps it makes it easier if we remember that that is how He loves us. Not for any nice, attractive qualities we think we have, but just because we are…For really there is nothing else in us to love; creatures like us who actually find hatred such a pleasure that to give it up is like giving up beer or tobacco.
No pit is so deep that God is not deeper still. (Corrie Ten Boom)
The biggest problem with un-forgiveness is that we “burn the bridge across which we ourselves must travel.” But when we refuse to extend forgiveness to others, we undermine the ground upon which we need to stand before God. There can be no double standard in God’s family when it comes to forgiveness.
Blessed are the merciful for they shall obtain mercy. (Jesus)
So forgive one another as God in Christ forgave us. (Paul)