Forgiveness - Feel the Pain and Do It Anyway

In his article in last week’s Saturday edition of the Guardian, (Guardian April 12^th, 2014) Giles Fraser tells us that forgiveness isn’t something that you feel. It is something you do. To anyone who has had to do a significant amount of forgiving in their lives, and most of us have, this smacks of a rather stiff upper lip approach to life, pain and God. It probably derives from what has come to be known as the Pelagian heresy. Pelagius believed that human beings were perfectly capable of being good if only they would try hard enough. It was a matter of pulling yourself together and getting on with it without letting your feelings get in the way.

 The problem with this kind of thinking, in regard to forgiveness, is that it involves deception. The person trying to act in a forgiving way deceives themselves since, in many cases, they must deny their pain, and the feelings which accompany it, in order to get to a place in their own heads where they can make themselves behave in a forgiving way to the one who has wronged them. In doing this, they allow the person who has wronged them to carry on deceiving themselves.  In other words, they give the wrongdoer permission to remain in denial. When this happens the forgiveness which they so badly want to offer to the one who has wronged them gets blocked because the person who is in denial about the hurt they have caused is also denying themselves forgiveness. Forgiveness is two-way traffic or it is not forgiveness.

Jesus gave his disciples the authority to forgive sins, but he also told them that they could ‘retain’ those sins. He was not saying that they could decide whether or not the person deserved to be forgiven. He was telling them that forgiveness involves healing and that healing can only take place where all parties to the hurt engage with the pain. In his article, Giles Fraser writes that ‘the stories of the Bible .. are mostly uninterested in a person’s inner life’. He also implies that Jesus was a man of action rather than feelings. This is odd, given the number of times Jesus makes his feelings about injustice and pain (including his own) heard in the strongest of terms. Jesus is concerned with feelings because feelings dictate actions. It follows that inaction is the result of the denial of feelings which pertain to guilt or pain, or both.

Productive feelings are often painful because they necessarily involve speaking and hearing the kind of truth which requires that we own pain – our own and that which we may have caused to others.  A gesture, a moment of genuine unselfishness, or of attentiveness, will often speak this kind of truth far more effectively than words. Where truth is not spoken and heard in word or gesture forgiveness lacks substance, so it is not really forgiveness.  Similarly, where a person denies the pain they have caused to others, the forgiveness that is being offered will return to the one trying to do the forgiving. Both the pain and the forgiveness will be ‘retained’ because there is nowhere for either to go.

To prevent this, the one who has offended needs to bear the weight of the pain by owning to themselves what it feels like to be the other person, or the innocent third party who so often figures as ‘collateral damage’ in family disputes or marital breakdown. Real forgiveness, and the healing which comes with it, takes us out of ourselves. If the offender does not allow this to happen, he or she will eventually be consumed by remorse. They will be consumed by their own despair, because remorse leads to moral and spiritual despair. The person who is filled with this kind of destructive remorse will often turn to alcohol or drugs to relieve the pain, so that where addiction is a form of escape from pain, it is also a denial of who we really are. 

There is a moment during the three hours which Jesus spends on the Cross in which he asks that his tormentors be forgiven because they do not know what they are doing. They are ignorant of who Jesus is but they are also in denial about themselves. Their denial of the real significance of their words and actions is echoed in our own manifold moments of denial and self delusion. In such moments we deny what we are really feeling to ourselves, as well as the pain we may have inflicted on others. Jesus does not let us off the hook by simply absorbing our feelings and smothering them in sacrificial love. He enters into them with us, in his knowing of us as we are and in his invitation to allow him to heal us by accepting his forgiveness. The judgment and the verdict come from the Cross where healing and forgiveness begin, provided we allow them to.