Charting A New Reformation, Part XVIII - The Fifth Thesis, Miracles (continued)

Column by Bishop John Shelby Spong on 21 April 2016 20 Comments
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Question

I would appreciate it if you could provide me with your views on Christian forgiveness.

It seems to me on this issue that Christians are all over the map. Some are quick to offer forgiveness as shown to us recently over closed circuit TV by the relatives of the nine victims of Charleston’s Emmanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church to the shooter, who specifically expressed no remorse during his court hearing; to the author, Roxanne Gay, who wrote in a New York Times Op-Ed (June 23, 2015) that her Catholic upbringing had taught her that “forgiveness requires reconciliation by way of confession and penance.” I think the almost instantaneous expression of forgiveness by the relatives of the church shooter’s victims perplexed many of us as sincere, yet somehow contrived because of its suddenness.”

Complicating matters further, Kristin Neff, out of the University of Texas, has written extensively about self-compassion and to forgive is to lay down the burden of anger toward the offender and thereby changing your role as “victim” to finding compassion for yourself and possibly even for the offender.

Finally, we seem to be taught the essentials of forgiveness through the parable of “The Prodigal Son” contained in the gospel of Luke, in which the father forgives the wayward son only after the son acknowledges his wrongdoings and begs for forgiveness. Would forgiveness have been proffered by the father without contrition on the part of the son?

Does forgiveness require acknowledgement of the wrong doing by the offender? Does forgiveness require the offender to ask for it in order that it be effective? Psychologists are quick to describe the benefits of forgiveness, but they fail to describe the requirements, if any.

Answer

Dear Albert,

Thank you for your questions and for posing the issue so powerfully with your very contemporary examples. Let me try to separate the wheat from the chaff. First forgiveness is in my opinion, ultimately a godlike response. As such it is freely given, always available and requires nothing. Our ability to receive or to access this ever-present forgiveness may require repentance and an attempt at restitution, but that is a requirement of our receptiveness, it is not a requirement located in forgiveness itself. So it seems to me that the families of the victims of the shooting in the Charleston, S.C. African Methodist Episcopal Church acted out of a profound understanding of what the forgiveness of God is like. It was that very powerful witness to this ultimate meaning of forgiveness that moved the people of South Carolina to look at their own behavior vis-à-vis people of African descent and to bring to the ground the long-flying flags of the Confederacy. The forgiveness of God, which they articulated, does not require confession from the guilty one in order for it to be given; but it may require confession in order for that forgiveness to be received by the guilty one to whom it was so freely offered.

That is the picture of forgiveness I find in the New Testament. In the episode of the woman taken in the act of adultery, forgiveness is offered long before she was told, “go and sin no more.” Jesus is portrayed in Luke as offering forgiveness to the soldiers who crucified him. There is no indication that he required them to repent first. Forgiveness is a gift of God. It is grace; no prerequisites are required.

The life of Jesus reveals this to me quite powerfully. He was betrayed and he loved his betrayer. He was denied and he loved his denier. He was forsaken and he loved those who forsook him. He was tortured and he loved his torturers. He was murdered and he loved his murderers. That is a portrait of the forgiveness of God being lived out in a human life. What the God presence in Jesus says to each of us is this: “There is nothing you can do and nothing you can be that will place you outside the boundaries of God’s love.” We are loved as the hymn says: “Just as I am without one plea.”

It is not your business or mine to judge whether forgiveness is deserved. It is not your business or mine to determine whether repentance is adequate. Those are the results of the rules of religion that often appear to have been elevated to a status they have never merited.

Even in the parable of the Prodigal Son, which you cite, the wayward son “comes to himself,” that is, he turns toward the forgiveness that was always there even when he could not see it.

It is human to judge, but judging is finally an act of idolatry. It assumes that you have the right to judge. It assumes that you can place limits on the forgiveness of God. It assumes that your righteousness is greater than God’s righteousness. The response of religion is never to be identified with the response of God. Religion gave us anti-Semitism, the Muslim-hating Crusades, the moralistic Puritans, the justification of slavery, segregation and Apartheid, the diminution of women and the repression of homosexual persons. Judgment arises out of the human tendency to place onto God the limits that you yourself cannot transcend.

“How often shall my brother sin against me and I forgive him?” asked the disciples. Then trying to answer their own question, they said, “until seven times?” Jesus’ response was “Until seventy times seven.” Did he mean that we must forgive 490 times, but not 491? No, he was calling his disciples beyond any limits because forgiveness with limits is never forgiveness.

There are no requirements in the forgiveness of God. That is the truth that calls you and me beyond our own limits and beyond the perilous suggestion that you or I have the right to judge anyone.

~John Shelby Spong

 

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