Any discussion of forgiveness must surely open with the fifth petition of the Lord’s Prayer which reads,
Forgive us our debts as we also have forgiven our debtors. (NRSV)
This prayer was crafted within the piety of first century Judaism and its famous eighteen prayers (Amidah) most of which are thought to have been in use at the time of Jesus.
One of those prayers (No. 6) is called “For forgiveness” and reads,
Forgive us, O our Father, for we have sinned; pardon us, O our King, for we have transgressed; for thou dost pardon and forgive. Blessed are thou, O Lord, who art gracious, and dost abundantly forgive.
A prayer for “repentance” (No. 5) precedes the prayer for forgiveness and the above prayer affirms both “sins/debts” and “transgressions.” Perhaps the most significant variant Jesus introduced into the piety of his time was the fact that he connected God’s forgiveness of us and our forgiveness of others.
It is a common human assumption that the violator of the rights of others must first ask for forgiveness before the wronged party can be expected to accept the apology and grant that forgiveness. When the wrong is huge, this is often thought to be impossible. The cry “Never forget and never forgive” has echoed many times down the corridors of history. But here Jesus asks the person wronged to forgive the one responsible for the wrongdoing even when there is no confession of guilt. Jesus’ own prayer on the cross is the most powerful example of this amazing aspect of his theology of forgiveness.
A further aspect of forgiveness is its connection to justice. On the popular level, it is often assumed that “to forgive” means the surrender of any struggle for justice. But such is not the case. We think of the Armenians and their genocide, or the Christians of the South Sudan and all that they have suffered over the past fifty years. Properly understood, the Gospel does not expect such communities to forget their past or to allow brutality to continue unchecked. Rather, forgiveness purifies the struggle for justice.
William Wilberforce expressed no hatred towards the slave ship captains, yet he struggled mightily to outlaw their unspeakable evil. The one who forgives is protected from seeking revenge, and forgoes any attempt to “even the score.” Once purified by forgiveness, the struggle against injustice continues with greater energy and focus.
Some sixty years ago, the South African writer, Lorens van der Post, was interred by the Japanese during the Second World War. He almost died as a result. In his book Venture To the Interior, he describes how, after the war, he discovered that the War Crimes officers, who had not suffered in the conflict, were “more revengeful and bitter” against the Japanese than he and his fellow prisoners. Van der Post writes,
“I have so often noticed that the suffering which is most difficult, if not impossible to forgive is unreal, imagined suffering. There is no power on earth like imagination, and the worst, most obstinate grievances are imagined ones. Let us recognize that there are people and nations who create, with a submerged deliberation, a sense of suffering and of grievance, which enable them to evade those aspects of reality that do not minister to their self-importance, personal pride, or convenience. These imagined ills enable them to avoid the proper burden that life lays on all of us. Persons who have really suffered at the hands of others do not find it difficult to forgive, nor even to understand the people who caused their suffering … because out of suffering and sorrow truly endured comes an instinctive sense of privilege. Recognition of the creative truth comes in a flash: forgiveness for others, as for ourselves, for we too know not what we do.
Van der Post earned the right to express such profound observations. Furthermore, he broke the cycle of violence through forgiveness. A similar case known to me is that of a young Lebanese boy, who had his home destroyed in the mountains of Lebanon during the Lebanese civil war. He was 14 years old when he wrote:
February 2, 1984, Beirut, Lebanon
I can still hear the sound of thundering guns telling me that somewhere nearby people are dying.
Ever since we fled the village, I feel as though something has been shattered inside me. We have lost everything. Our house was burned. My books were torn to pieces. Our furniture was stolen. But what is more important is that the soft night and the fresh mornings in the village are gone and with them I have lost my roots and have become, “like grass blown by the wind,” as the Psalmist put it.
Time is no longer the unending chain of hours and minutes, marked by the hands on the huge clock at the entrance of my grandfather’s house in the village. The huge clock, with its rhythmic sound, that seemed as though it kept track of every heartbeat throughout the house, is broken. And time on it is standing still. For me, time used to be the time of sleeping and of waking up, and of working in the fields, the time of life. But now time has left me. It belongs to the one who stands behind the thundering gun. It is the time of death.
One night, early in September, our village was shelled and we fled. We hid in a cave near our small brook waiting for the mad night to subside. But the guns did not stop, so we fled again through the valley until we reached Beirut.
We thought we had escaped. But the dark night caught up with us in all its madness. Am I living through a nightmare? Has time really stood still ever since the big clock was broken on the wall of my grandfather’s house in the village?
One day someone came and told us that our house in the village, that is, my grandfather’s house, was looted and burned. The young men burned it after emptying it together. My anguish grew into hatred. Hatred is strange for it takes many forms. For me it is like a boil. It took root within me and sowed the seeds of death in my heart. It grew and spread like a boil with nothing but pus inside.
I woke up at the sound of the big guns in Beirut. I asked myself, “How can a young man stand behind a gun and fire all those rockets around us?” I thought of that young man, and to me he acquired the face of that other young man who looted and burned my grandfather’s house.
And in the midst of the sound of thundering guns, from the depths of my despair and pain, I finally understood. “If I speak with the tongues of men and of angels but have not love,” I am but sounding brass, like the empty shell cases of the big guns. Love alone can bear the burden of the living, for it “bears all things.” It bears this young man who is standing behind the gun, and that other young man who burned my grandfather’s house.
We carry our dead with us like open wounds. All of us have such wounds. Life is different. Life is the realm of love which overcomes death. I pray that the living God may reign in our lives, and not our dead.
Sincerely in the name of Christ,
Hannah Haddad
Like our Lord, Hannah learned to break the cycle of violence through forgiveness, as did “The Lost Boys” of the South Sudan. The coming Great Church of the majority world can teach us many things. May we be open to hear and learn.
Kenneth E. Bailey, author and lecturer in New Testament Studies, lives in New Wilmington, Pa.
