Forgiven and Forgiving. L. William Countryman

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      There's another important reason that God chooses to deal with us by forgiving us rather than by rewarding our virtues. Forgiveness gives us the breathing room we need to live and grow. If God's goodness to us is based on forgiveness, that leaves us room to make some mistakes in life—room actually to be human. I'm not advocating the making of mistakes; I don't need to, in any case. I'm simply recognizing them as inevitable. They are part of the way human beings grow and mature.

      Which of us has been able to accomplish whatever is good in our lives without making some mistakes along the way? Often we have learned things from our mistakes and false starts in life that we could have learned in no other way. Human life seems to be constitutionally messy. It's part of the way we've been created. We are finite beings, without full, perfect comprehension. We feel our way through space and time as we learn and grow. There is no highway from infancy to maturity. It's all country roads with detours, dead ends, even places where we have to scout our own trail across untrodden country. The journey of human life and growth is an adventure, not an easy and predictable commute.

      And there are places, of course, where we wander quite off the trail because we aren't paying attention or even run off in pursuit of something that, deep down, we already know is a mistake. The amazing thing is that even those mistakes become part of our path. As we emerge from our floundering in the brush, our wandering in the forest, and find a new sense of direction, we discover that we have not merely left our off-road misadventure behind. Instead, it has become part of us in unexpected ways. It has given us new insight, new courage, new humility, new life.

      Perhaps it would be comforting, in a way, to imagine a human life that moved more nearly in a straight line, where we could see the goal from the starting point and where the road led directly from the one to the other. It doesn't sound too exciting, but it does sound more secure. We would be born knowing what it means to be a grown-up human being, and we would just keep practicing until we had it by rote.

      But—for reasons best known to God—human life doesn't work that way. We acquire the sense of what human adulthood might mean only gradually—sometimes only in retrospect. We don't even begin with a perfect understanding of good and evil. If we did, all we would have to do is make up our mind to do one or the other. But in practice, we find that we have to keep thinking about good and evil all our lives, refining our understanding of them and recommitting ourselves to the good. God created us to lead precisely this kind of messy, adventurous, educational existence.

      It might sound, in Genesis 2 and 3, as if we had found a way out. Wasn't the tree of the knowledge of good and evil the ultimate educational pill? Eat its fruit and you'll know everything. But human knowledge—at least our knowledge of ourselves and of similarly important things—doesn't work that way. All that the tree gave the human race was the ability to learn. In the ancient Greek version of the passage, the tree is actually called something closer to “the tree of knowing what can be known of good and evil.” What can be known changes as we grow. We can discern some things in advance, but not everything.

      Forgiveness, then, gives us space to live and to learn, and it frees us from the temptation to credit our own goodness for too much. God forgives us because that was and is the most liberating thing God could do for us. It is the starting place for everything else.

      Forgiveness and the Basic Structure of Reality

      For the most part, we religious people tend to assume that the basic thing in life is commandments and rules: be good; do the right thing; love one another. We tend to assume that the world, or at least its moral side, is built on rules like these. And the rules are very important. They are worth taking seriously, both for our own sakes and for those of others. They teach us a certain beautiful order for life, one that respects the rights of others and seeks the well-being of the whole human race.

      As I've already said, we'd all be better off in a world where everyone followed the basic commandments. Yet the commandments aren't central, either to God's inner life or to the world God has made. There's something more basic that under girds reality, something that even the commandments depend on for their existence: God's love. God didn't create us because we were so good. We hadn't had a chance to be good. God created us out of love, the love that floods God's inner life and spills over into the work of creation. This love that began by creating us now goes on to reclaim us by taking the form of forgiveness. Like the father of the prodigal son, God constantly welcomes us home.

      The message isn't a matter of “Be good! Oh, and by the way, God forgives you, too.” It's a matter of “God has loved you and forgiven you. Now, what else needs to be said? How are you going to respond to that?” The only useful response, of course, is conversion—to take in this surprising reality and let it assume its rightful place at the center of your world. Jesus is calling us, through the message of forgiveness, to change our minds. If we do, we'll have a different notion of God and a different notion of ourselves as a result.

      We may not necessarily welcome this idea at first. God says, “I love you right now, the person you are as well as the person you can become.” We say, “That's all very well for you, but I have higher standards.” Or God says, “I forgive you everything.” And we say, “Go forgive somebody who needs it. I could give you a list.” We resist forgiveness because we fear it will demean us. It will make too light of our hard work and our difficult virtues. Or it will treat our real faults too lightly. But God is not making light of us, God is making light of what bars us from living fully in God's love.

      The message of forgiveness says to us, “Get over yourself!” Get over your goodness and your righteousness, if they threaten to keep you from full participation in your humanity. Get over your faults, your inadequacy, if they're what hold you back. Get over whatever it is that makes you self-obsessed, whatever makes you reject God's wooing of you, whatever makes you feel that you would rather not go in to the party, whatever makes you feel like you belong to some separate and superior race of beings, whatever makes you feel like an eternal victim, whatever keeps you from living a real human life, whatever makes you imagine that there's something in this world more important and more fundamental than love.

      Instead, be loved. Why would you refuse it? Perhaps you do it out of pique because you think God isn't taking you seriously enough. Perhaps you do it out of shame and embarrassment because God is being kinder to you than you think you deserve. Either way, get over yourself. You are forgiven. Start there. In the whole universe, it is the only starting point there is, anyway. There is no reality deeper than God's overflowing love.

      Here's a story about accepting forgiveness:

      THE TWO DEBTORS

      Two accountants worked for the same, very rich employer, and each of them independently used some of their employer's funds to speculate in securities. They didn't intend to steal the money, they just believed that they were very good at investments, and they expected to present their employer with a handsome profit by and by and to get praised for their good work. Instead, in the same market crash they both lost everything they had staked.

      Both of them ran away. But they were people of principle, and they were very distressed by the way things had turned out. Each of them separately resolved to devote his life to replacing what he had wasted.

      Through austerity, self-denial, and better investing, each of them finally succeeded in accumulating the needed amount. By chance, they returned on the same day, which happened to be their employer's birthday.

      The first came in, made himself known, and explained that he was there to repay the money he had lost all those years before. But when the employer recognized him, he exclaimed, “Oh, that's right! That's who you are. But I can't accept the money. I forgave the debt years СКАЧАТЬ