Forgiveness

From the LOCH A TUATH NEWS March 2000

The John Templeton Foundation was established several years ago in order to explore questions and issues at the interface between religion and science. In 1998 it awarded research grants for the study of forgiveness. Since that time, some 30 scholars have been looking at the personal benefits of forgiveness, forgiveness in family relationships, forgiveness in marriage and such like.

The studies were commissioned when it was realised that social scientists, who have long been studying patterns of behaviour in society, had not laid sufficient emphasis on the benefits of forgiveness. We are living in a world where traumatic things happen, and people suffer psychological damage and hurt day after day. The effects of post-traumatic stress are obvious, and have long been recognised. Counselling, self-help groups and a range of helps are available. Yet few people, either personally or professionally, have until now recognised the healing value of forgiveness.

Forgiveness is one of those words which supplies the vocabulary of our Bible and our religion. We preach that God has forgiven our sins in Christ, and that by having a personal relationship with Christ through faith, we can have personal assurance that our offences before God have been definitively dealt with. Christ offended the sensibilities of many by claiming the power to forgive sins. And one of the defining moments of human history was when the crucified One said of the world which had rejected him, "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do".

The Gospel emphasis on the forgiveness of our sins is a powerful anti-depressant. God has dealt fully and finally with every wrong we have ever committed. "Look on my pain", said David in Psalm 25, "and forgive my sins". The link between depression and guilt is obvious; so too ought to be the fact that to deal with the guilt ought to lift the cloud of depression.

Yet that is only one side of the issue. Christ made it abundantly clear that we are to forgive. He taught us to say "forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us". He made it clear that unless we forgive those who wrong us, we cannot expect to be treated favourably by God (Matthew 6:15, 18:35). Yet knowing this, we still find it easier to bear a grudge, to expose sin and to fuel guilt feelings than to do the Christian thing and forgive.

Perhaps it is easier to say what forgiveness is not, than to say what it is. One author says that forgiveness is not forgetting (because deep hurts can rarely be forgotten); it is not reconciling (because you can forgive without reconciliation); it is not condoning (because forgiveness does not excuse the action); it is not dismissing (because forgiveness takes the offence seriously). He also says that to forgive is not the same as to pardon, because a pardon releases the offender from the offence; whereas forgiveness releases the one offended.

That last one gave me pause. When someone offends me, whether I deserve it or not, I am immediately bound up in the offence. I can pardon my offender, but until I forgive him (or her), I shall never be released from it myself. It is in forgiving that I liberate my own spirit from the bondage into which I have been brought through no fault of my own.

The early church was counselled to be "kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, even as God for Christ's sake has forgiven you" (Ephesians 4:32). There is no doubt but that to forgive is a sign of health. When we fail to forgive, we allow another person's sin to become a sin of our own. We have seen in the Free Church of Scotland in recent months what happens to a church when people are not prepared to forgive and leave the final and ultimate arbitration to God. To build wholesome churches, healthy congregations, and healthy lives, we need to rid ourselves of the interminable desire to nurture our grudges. Sometimes the mark of real greatness is to be able to forgive, biblically.