Fourth Day of Christmas: Born to Be Our Forgiveness

“She will give birth to a son, and you are to give him the name Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins.” Matthew 1:21

When I was twenty-years-old, there was a woman I hated. I hated her for the most basic of reasons: she was mean to my mother. My mother was the pastor’s wife, and this woman (I’ll call her Bernice) was married to a prominent deacon. Bernice snipped at my mother, gossiped about my mother, and insulted my mother. It may be a sign of an easy life that the biggest reason I had to hate anyone was nastiness to my mother, but I knew I had to forgive this woman I hated.

Forgiveness is at the heart of what it means to be a Christian. We believe that our relationship with God rests on forgiveness. We stand before God as people who desperately need forgiveness, and God gives us his perfect forgiveness through Jesus Christ.

Only God has perfect knowledge of good and evil. Only the infinitely loving God can offer forgiveness, and his reason for forgiving is for his own character as revealed in Jesus. Now that might not sound so great at first. It might sound like God’s being a little selfish. But consider — if forgiveness were based on our unreliable, imperfect character, then forgiveness would be just as unreliable and imperfect. Instead, forgiveness flows from the unchangable, perfect holiness of God, and God’s forgiveness is as mighty, as life-changing, as complete, as everything else about God’s nature.

Jesus is the means of our forgiveness. Jesus has stood in the way of God’s just anger at evil. Because our forgiveness has cost such a great price, forgiveness must characterize our relationships with all others.

And so I knew I had to forgive the woman that I hated for mistreating my mother. I knew that every Sunday I prayed a dangerous prayer. Every Sunday, we pray: “Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors.” What a terrifying prayer! My sister has for years, when they recite the Lord’s Prayer in her church, been sneaking in the words “better than.” Forgive us our debts “better than” we forgive our debtors. She understands the enormity of what we ask. She understands the danger. The health of our souls depends on the forgiveness of God, and we recognize and ask what Jesus has taught us: that if we deny forgiveness to others, God will deny forgiveness to us.

I can tell you with gladness that after several days of desperate, pleading prayer, God began to teach me how to forgive Bernice. Gradually, God surprised me with a new love for her, and eventually she became very dear to me. In fact, she was one of the first people back home with whom I shared the news that Az had proposed and we were to be married. I still think of her every time I use her wedding present. Our almighty, redemptive God turns even our sin into good, and the hatred I held in my heart became an opportunity for love and learning that I would not have had otherwise.

And so it can be for all of us. When we learn to forgive, we are drawn deeper into the heart of God. When we learn to forgive, we honor and imitate the God who has forgiven us through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Forgiveness is a central Christian act. We can always refuse to forgive, but we cannot refuse to forgive and still be followers of Jesus.

But our ideas of forgiveness need two clarifications. First, remember forgiving does not really mean forgetting. God can choose to forget sin, but choosing to forget is not something typically within human ability. Forgiveness does not mean denying that someone has done you wrong, or pretending it doesn’t matter. That’s excusing. Forgiveness means letting go of hate. Forgiveness is the change from clinging tightly to your resentment to releasing it, with both hands open. You know you have forgiven when you remember what happened, but feel only joy or compassion or sorrow or gratitude.

Second, remember that forgiveness ultimately benefits you most, and refusing to forgive harms you most. Anne LaMott says that refusing to forgive is like drinking rat poison and waiting for the rat to die. When you refuse to forgive, you are chained to the wrong that was done to you. The forgiveness Christ teaches is the key that unlocks you and sets you free. You forgive not only because God requires it, but because it is the only certain path to joy.

Beck pointed out that Dec 28th is the Feast of the Holy Innocents, the day on which many churches remember the children who were slaughtered by Herod in his effort to kill the newly born “King of the Jews.” Perhaps it does not make sense to talk about forgivness on a day commemorating horrible evil. Forgiveness starts small. C.S. Lewis once said that if we want to learn to forgive, we should probably start with something easier than the Gestapo.

Sometime this week, you will probably come across someone you resent. Maybe it’s that woman who’s always rude to you, or that guy who takes up two parking spaces at work, or that mom who’s always bragging about how much better her kids are than yours. How do we learn to forgive?

First, pray. God loves us and wants us to know him, and often waits to give us what we need only so that we will learn to ask. God loves a prayer from a person longing to learn how to forgive. Remember the words from our assurance of pardon in 1 John 1:9: if we confess our sin — even the sin of hate — God is faithful and just to forgive it, and cleanse us from all unrighteousness. The prayer “Teach me how to forgive” is a prayer God loves to answer.

Second, act. Even if you don’t feel forgiveness in your heart yet, do forgiving things. I don’t mean put on an act or pretend to be something you’re not. But our life in Christ is sacramental, and sometimes we receive grace not only through believing but also through doing. Do something nice for the person you resent. Show them some new courtesy or unexpected kindness. Go out of your way. You don’t need to explain why you’re doing it. You may be surprised how this begins to change your heart.

But realize when we follow the Christ who was born to be our forgiveness, we may not necessarily earn friends. When I was in seminary, the local paper published an astounding story. The son of a local pastor had been murdered. The pastor, after much soul-searching and agonizing, had forgiven the murderer. The pastor visited the murderer in prison. He continued to meet with him after he was released from prison. I will be quite honest with you: I cannot imagine learning this kind of forgiveness. This pastor understood something that most of us see only glimmers of: he understood the heart of Christ, and he imitated it. To many people this kind of forgiveness is an offense, a cheapening of the life of his son. In fact, the forgiveness was so alien and impossible to the pastor’s wife, that she divorced him. She could not forgive her husband for forgiving the murderer of her son.

Corrie ten Boom, a Dutch woman who hid Jews from the Nazis during World War II, tells a similar story. She was imprisoned in a concentration camp called Ravensbruck, but survived. After the war, she traveled the world, telling people that she had been to hell, and Christ had been there with her. After a sermon she once preached on forgiveness, a man came up to her and reached out to shake her hand. She recognized him as one of the guards at the concentration camp, and he asked for her forgiveness. Corrie gave it to him.

I cannot presume to tell you how to forgive such enormous things. I have never been faced with them. But when I am completely unable to forgive, I know this. When we are confronted with evil, God is still in charge. When we are confronted with an evil so terrible that we do not know how to forgive it, we remember that God punishes sin. Within the will of God, there will be justice. I struggle with great anger in my heart against men who commit violent acts against women. When I am confronted with knowledge of such an act, I find great release in reading aloud one of the “impreccatory Psalms,” like Psalm 69 which prays, “Pour out thy indignation upon them, and let thy burning anger overtake them.” Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a man imprisoned and executed for resisting the Nazis, comforted himself with these Psalms of anger. When you cannot let go of your anger, put all your anger into that Psalm, and read it aloud to God. Release your anger to God.

When our anger against evil is just, but threatens to overwhelm us and embitter us, we can bring that anger to God. Knowing God will act on God’s own anger against evil, frees us from the anger that has enslaved us. The Christian doctrine of hell is a belief that embarrasses many Christians today. In the past it has often been used in the service of Christian self-satisfaction, a religious way of saying “My stuff is better than your stuff.” But the purpose of this doctrine is not self-satisfaction, but the vindication of God’s justice and comfort for the afflicted. There is an ultimate reckoning. Our anger can be transformed to pity for the person whose evil acts make him or her an object of God’s wrath, when we have learned humility and gratitude and joy for our salvation from it through Christ.

So let us celebrate the salvation from sin we have through Christ, through whom God offers forgiveness to all. Let us also share that forgiveness.