Forgiven and Forgiving. L. William Countryman

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СКАЧАТЬ 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?

      Forgiveness or Perfection?

      Someone may be thinking, “Wait a minute. This is that New Age I'm-OK-you're-OK stuff. Doesn't Jesus say that we're supposed to be perfect in the way God is perfect?” Yes, Jesus does tell us to be perfect. Let's think a bit about what that means. What is your idea of perfection—the kind of perfection that Jesus might be summoning us to? Is your picture of perfection a kind of sculptured or crystalline beauty, with every molecule locked permanently in place? Or is it the more haphazard and fleeting perfection of a handsome tree or dog or deer or flower?

      Human perfection has to be more like the latter—the organic perfection that grows over time and is never absolutely without flaw. Human beings aren't born full-grown. Even Jesus had to grow “in wisdom and stature and favor with God and with human beings” (Luke 2:52). As we've already said, that kind of growth doesn't happen without mistakes and missteps along the way. In fact, that's how much of our learning takes place. Human perfection is messy perfection; it's trial-and-error perfection.

      Our standard of perfection needs to be appropriate to our human reality. It's pointless to expect human beings to exhibit the regularity of a perfect quartz crystal. We couldn't do it, no matter how much effort we poured into it. It's unnatural to us from the ground up. And even if we could achieve it by some incredible feat of will, it would be an odd and unsatisfactory sort of perfection, wouldn't it, if it had to be maintained at such a cost? You don't imagine that it's an effort for God to be perfect, do you? If it were, God wouldn't be perfect.

      Our perfection must be something natural to us. Even if it is an effort for us to attain, it must not ultimately be an effort to maintain. Our perfection should ultimately fit us like an old shoe. It will be a state of perfect humanness, not a state of stressed-out, pseudoangelic overachievement. Our human perfection is something we grow into. It's our true maturity. In fact, in the New Testament, the Greek word that we translate as “perfect” (teleios) really means something more like “mature.”

      If we look more closely at Jesus' call to perfection, we find that it actually focuses on something that may not have been central to our previous ideas of perfection—divine or human. It focuses not on being meticulously good or always in the right or unfailingly correct. There's not a word in it about inerrancy or infallibility. It focuses, rather, on love and generosity, even toward our enemies:

      “You've heard that it was said, ‘You are to love your neighbor—and hate your enemy!’ But I tell you: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may become children of your father in the heavens, because he makes his sun come up over evil people and good and sends rain on righteous people and on unrighteous. For if you love those who love you, what reward have you earned? Don't even the tax collectors do the same thing? And if you welcome only your kinsfolk, what are you doing that's special? Don't even the Gentiles do the same thing? So, you are to be perfect the way your heavenly father is perfect.” (Matt. 5:43-48)

      That's the perfection Jesus calls us to—an overflowing of human feeling, of human generosity toward one another. And that generosity isn't even something we produce on our own. We get it from God—from the ultimate, transcendent generosity that created us in the first place and keeps befriending us even when we don't particularly deserve it and goes on forgiving us time after time. Human perfection, according to Jesus, means sharing in God's extraordinary, forgiving generosity.

      Forgiving the Wrongs We Have Done to Ourselves

      Don't be afraid to apply God's lavish forgiveness to yourself. Jesus, citing the words of the Torah, commanded us to “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Now, if you do a bad job of loving yourself, your neighbor is not going to benefit much from that formula. That applies to forgiveness, too. If we are to have the resources to forgive others, we get them from God's forgiveness of us—and we do that by forgiving ourselves.

      Extending forgiveness to ourselves is not a simple matter. Some of what we need to forgive is wrongs we have done to ourselves, and some of it is wrongs done to others. Some of the harm we have done was intentional and some of it was simply the awkwardness of a limited and blundering self that learns as it goes. Some of what we have done is easy to understand and forgive, some difficult.

      Let's begin with the wrongs we do to ourselves. Part of our sinfulness consists in the fact that we forget to be loving toward ourselves. Sometimes that takes the form of deliberately denying ourselves what we most need: rest, friends, freedom to enjoy, to create, to be what God is calling us to be. We get the strange notion that God is somehow pleased by the sight of people rejecting the good gifts of the world around them—gifts that God created to be enjoyed. For a long time (since around the second century), Christians have tended to treat the created order as if it were primarily a problem or a temptation rather than a gift. There is something wrong with that. Self-denial shouldn't be the ordinary, everyday stance of a religion that affirms the goodness of the creation.

      Sometimes, of course, we deny ourselves for some larger, overarching purpose. Jesus even encourages that: “If anyone wants to follow after me, let him deny himself and pick up his cross and follow me.” But he goes right on to say, “Whoever will lose his life for my sake and the sake of the good news will be saving it” (Mark 8:34–35). The larger purpose must be a life-giving one. Mere self-denial for the purpose of punishing or depriving the self is wrong.

      Sometimes we use high-sounding excuses when in fact we are denying ourselves merely out of indifference or because we have no real sense of how wonderful is this creature of God that bears СКАЧАТЬ