Читать книгу Forgiven and Forgiving - L. William Countryman - Страница 12

Sometimes we think that we've accepted God's forgiveness of us, only to find that, deep down, we haven't. We have somehow bracketed it and treated it as interesting but irrelevant information. How can we tell? By the fact that we remain unforgiving of ourselves. It's all very well of God to forgive us, and we deign to accept the kindness, knowing that it is well meant. But we're not going to let ourselves off the hook so easily. We still reserve the right to have higher standards than God.

Sorry. It won't work. If we aren't forgiving of our own failures and errors, we aren't really taking God's forgiveness of us seriously, either. We're treating it as some bit of “spiritual” information that has no “real” effect on our lives. But this is God we're talking about—the Creator of all that is, including us. And still we're not sure that we need take God's forgiveness of us too seriously?! Do we think God didn't really mean it? Do we think what God does isn't really that important? Do we think we can take charge and do it better?

You see where we're headed here. We somehow manage to hear the good news of forgiveness without actually hearing it. It hasn't yet reshaped our worldview; we haven't accepted the change of mind that it implies. And so we're back again to where we started—at repentance, getting a new mind. It may take a long time and many encounters with God's forgiveness before we begin to take it with the seriousness it deserves and allow it to convert us.

Remember what we heard from William Temple: “Repentance…is concerned with…the mind; get a new mind. What mind?…To repent is to adopt God's viewpoint in place of your own. There need not be any sorrow about it. In itself, far from being sorrowful, it is the most joyful thing in the world.” Forgiving ourselves is a matter of adopting God's viewpoint. It does indeed turn out to be joyful, but that doesn't necessarily make it easy for us to take the leap into it. Accepting a new mind is always a risky undertaking.

Embracing forgiveness turns out, strangely enough, to be an act of repentance, because it means giving up our own way of seeing the world and accepting in its place God's rather more generous way. This is true when we forgive others, and it is true when we forgive ourselves. Every act of forgiveness turns out to be a kind of conversion or repentance. And it is the most joyful sort of repentance imaginable.

All this emphasis on God's forgiveness may sound a little shocking. Isn't God just? Doesn't God care whether people do good or evil? Of course God cares. God cares because evil destroys people, both the people who commit it and those who become its victims. But God's notion of justice, unlike that of some humans, isn't focused primarily on punishment. It's focused on new life, on the creation of a new order of life for the world. God continues to desire life both for the sinner and for the one sinned against. God seeks an end to evil in the world, and therefore God forgives.

God has recognized—perhaps from the very beginning of creation—that love draws people more effectively toward the good than admonitions and threats can. There is a beautiful statement of this idea in a poem called “Discipline” by George Herbert, who admonishes (!) God to show kindness:

Throw away thy rod,

Throw away thy wrath:

O my God,

Take the gentle path.

In the next two stanzas of the poem, Herbert points out that he is relying on the Bible itself in making such a request, because scripture tells him that God has already decided to do precisely what he asks. Then he goes on to praise the amazing power of love:

Then let wrath remove;

Love will do the deed:

For with love

Stony hearts will bleed.

Love is swift of foot;

Love's a man of war,

And can shoot,

And can hit from far.

At this point, you may already have guessed that Herbert is using the word Love as another name for God—a good biblical thing to do, since scripture tells us that “God is love” (1 John 4:8, 16). But lest the reader miss the point, Herbert gives an additional hint in the line “Love's a man of war,” which echoes the biblical claim that “the Lord is a man of war” (Exod. 15:3 AV).

Finally, Herbert proves the power of love by reminding us that it persuaded even God to take a risk—to descend and become one of us in the incarnation:

That which wrought on thee,

Brought thee low,

Needs must work on me.

If love could bring God to make the greatest of all gifts, it will ultimately lead the rest of us, too, to the kind of new life that God desires for us—a life characterized by an increasing intimacy with God and by our own fulfillment as God's human creatures. Love is all-powerful.

Forgiveness, then, is not just an end in itself; it's a means to something more. There is a story about Jesus staying in a house at Capernaum. The crowd is so thick that no one can get near him. Along come some people carrying a paralyzed man on a stretcher. Because they can't get to Jesus through the crowd, they go up onto the roof, tear part of it off, and lower the stretcher into the room where Jesus is. Jesus' first words to the paralytic are words of forgiveness: “Child, your sins are forgiven.” But that's not the last word between them. It's a prelude to Jesus' saying, “I say to you: rise, pick up your stretcher, and go home” (Mark 2:1–12).

God's forgiveness, then, is not just a matter of saying, “OK, you did something wrong, but I'll let you off this time” and it certainly isn't a matter of saying, “OK, you did something wrong, but I don't really care.” It's a matter of saying, “OK, you did something wrong. Now, where are we going to go from here?” Forgiveness doesn't wipe out the past. What it does is put the past into a new context, a new perspective. It asks, “How can this past wrong now become part of the ongoing history of redemption? How can it be taken up into a new hope and become part of a new creation?” Your sins are forgiven. Now, rise, pick up your stretcher, and go back to leading the life that you alone can live.

We need to accept God's forgiveness as something affecting our own lives. If we accept it only in the abstract, we haven't really believed it at all. And we can't really claim to have accepted God's forgiveness of us until we are willing to forgive ourselves for our past wrongs. If we hold out for higher standards than God's, we don't take God's forgiveness seriously. We think we know a better way. We are determined to earn our place in God's favor. Until then, we reserve the right to be both unforgiven and unforgiving.

How can we turn this refusal around? One important step in accepting God's forgiveness and in forgiving ourselves is owning up to what we've done wrong. In fact, as we come to believe that God has indeed forgiven us and is willing to go on forgiving us and working with us for new life, there's no further reason to hide or deny our own misdeeds. We can't move beyond the wrongs we have done until we confront them, and God has created a “safe space” where we can do exactly that. We won't be trapped in them. We won't be condemned by them forever. We can look them in the eye now.

Only by virtue of being forgiven can we afford to see ourselves as sinful people. We can even afford to see ourselves as finite, limited, sometimes stupid people. We can dare to admit that we will never get everything exactly right, since that's not how human beings are made. I'm asking us not to pretend that we're worse than we are—which is a useless and ostentatious bit of self-dramatization—but only to acknowledge that we are as we are.

Yes, I have done some things in my life that were stupid, other things that were merely unwise, other things that were careless, and even some that were downright hostile and hurtful. I have, from time to time, harmed myself and others. I don't like confronting that, but once I've accepted the new perspective of God's forgiveness, God's willingness to go on loving me and working with me and befriending me, I can take the risk. And if God is willing to forgive me and seek my friendship, why shouldn't I be willing to forgive and befriend myself?