Can We Forgive?
I found myself resonating with an article by Gregory Jones, the Dean of Duke Divinity School in the latest issue of The Christian Century. He says that when he was a young man, a mentor of his said, “I have resigned myself to the fact that there are some people in this life with whom I will never be reconciled.”
Dr. Jones said he was shocked and believed that his older friend had gone to far in accommodating his Christian ideals to the way the world is.
Twenty years later, however, he has moderated his view. He described a younger friend who kept hammering at the task of trying to rebuild a broken relationship and who just wasn’t getting anywhere. Jones says that one of the problems is that we can’t be in control of the other person’s response – so some relationships aren’t going to be mended. We can pray and wait for a miracle – and he points to the amazing examples of reconciliation following the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the end of apartheid in South Africa to say that miracles do happen.
He’s right.
But I am going to go one step further. It’s not just the other person who has difficulty reconciling some broken relationships and needs some kind of miracle to forgive. It’s also me.
I don’t know what it is about me, but I have a hard time forgiving and forgetting. There are some people I never really want to see again. I don’t particularly like that about myself. I realize that, in a way, I wish some people were dead – or certainly so far out of my life that I will never have to cross their path again. That may be why, in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus says that whoever curses another is guilty of murder.
I realize that going around holding grudges is no small thing. Yet, I hold grudges.
I like what Gregory Jones says about that. He points out that in the fifth chapter of his letter late in the New Testament, James describes a congregation that engages in truth telling, singing, praying, anointing, and healing; but forgiveness “is something to be discovered rather than willed.”
He says that our religious practices, both personal and communal, create space in which the gift of forgiveness can be given to us.
If I pray, if I obey the command to not just not kill my neighbor, but not even say (or think) bad things about my neighbor. If I even obey the command to do good to those who have misused me, I may, in the end, be given a heart that can forgive – and be forgiven myself. .
