To forgive divine…

This is a very good, thought-provoking post on the nature and necessity of forgiveness from Mike Frizzel at

Life in Mordor. I especially appreciate his paraphrase of Bishop NT Wright, who says that our refusal to forgive is tantamount to a denial that God forgives – that’s pretty dangerous for a Christian, isn’t it? To deny God’s work in Christ? But it’s so derned counter-cultural, counter-intuitive, counter to how delicious it feels to revel in how deeply we’ve been wronged.

It’s something that’s hard to accept. Having grown up Catholic (though poorly catechized), and having hung around so many former Catholics who were in the same boat as I, it’s easy to see why we fall away from the church. Yes, we’re all sinners, sure, but can we please not focus exclusively on the BAD news? Can’t we, for God’s sake, focus on the Good News that God recognizes our faults but loves us anyway? That He not only loves us, but that He loves us so profoundly that he took on flesh, walked in our sandals, and died for our sakes at our own hands? God gets it! We often don’t.

Anyway, here’s that post.

The Scandal of Forgiveness

“I’ll forgive you, but I’m never going to forget this.”“I forgive you, but this changes our entire relationship.”“I forgive you, but I’ve lost all respect I ever had for you.”

“God might forgive you, but I surely won’t.”

Have you ever noticed how many qualifiers we put on forgiveness? There’s always a “but” lurking at the end of forgiveness. Intellectually we understand the need for it, but we’re not willing to completely follow through. We know that we’re supposed to forgive, but we want the other person(s) to know that we’ll always have that offense hanging over their heads.

And because we tend to view forgiveness in a self-centered way, our idea of God tends to be skewed. How often have you heard a sermon on God’s forgiveness of sins only to be reminded how big of a sinner you are? Is that how God sees it? Does he forgive our sins, “save” us, only to constantly remind us of what we are forgiven from? Is that grace? Is that the Gospel?

N.T. Wright, in his little book on the Lord’s Prayer, says (and I’m paraphrasing here) that if you deny forgiveness to another person, you are denying that God forgives. What a completely un-Christian way to live, to deny to others the very thing that gives you life. How can I claim to follow Jesus when I fail to follow his most basic teaching, love your neighbors?

Can you imagine what life would be like if God actually worked the way we sometimes think he does? There would be no grace, only a constant reminder of sin and death. Not that the cross doesn’t remind us of our rebellion against the Almighty, surely it does. But, more importantly, the cross points to Jesus; where we should stand accused for every little offense, God’s hand points to his Son. Where we should die, our Redeemer lives.

That’s the scandal of forgiveness, that God actually means what he says. That he forgives our sins, removes our filthy clothes and replaces them with Christ’s. There is no “but”, God forgives and that’s it, nothing added. He doesn’t conviently remember a past sin when it suits him. He really forgives. Oh, that we could live that way.