Sunday Evening Talk February 1965
Forgiveness
Sunday Evening Talk February 1965
by Kenneth Barnes
Readings:
The parable of the Prodigal Son
The story of the prostitute with the alabaster
box of ointment. Luke VII 47-56
The Cure of the Paralysed Man Matthew II 2-8
Werner Pelz: God is No More
Paul Tillich: The New Being
Forgiveness S.E.T. Feb 65
I’m going to deal with a subject that is, I think, important in the life of everyone of you. You may be at a rought (sic), tough stage when you don’t think much about forgiving and being forgiven; but all of you at some time or another have desperately wanted to be forgiven, and all of you at many times in your adult life will want someone to forgive you for what you have done or will find a friend or a husband or a wife asking for forgiveness. It is one of the most important things in life to understand what forgiveness is, but it is not easy, especially if you think in conventional terms. The answer I shall give you may be unexpected.
What is the ordinary pattern of forgiveness? You have a friendship with someone; you hurt that friend in some way and you show you want to put it right. Your friend says: “Oh, forget it”! Is that forgiveness? It may be, but there’s much more to it. For one thing, you know you can’t forget it.
Think of these apparently complicated quotations I read you.
Forgiveness is not at our disposal, because we are involved in each other’s failures.
What does this mean? Think of yourself as a small child; you have offended mother or father. Your parent is apparently a good strong, wise person, whereas you are weak, small and naughty. You want to be forgiven, and forgiveness seems like a gift coming from the good to the naughty. But the quotation says this is not so; forgiveness is not at our disposal. We are none of us good in this sense; even Jesus disclaimed this description. We are all caught in the web of evil. If forgiveness comes into the situation what has really happened. You must ask what really mattered. Wasn’t it this: that your consciousness of having done something hurts because it means separation from someone you care about: mother or father, brother, friend. Separation. The real heart of forgiveness is being re-united, reconciled; being able to start again in the relationship. It doesn’t in any way depend upon the one person being better than the other.
In fact, true forgiveness involves the two people admitting that they share a common humanity, a common faultiness. That is the point from which you can start again. No mother who understands herself thinks of herself as good and her child as bad. She thinks of herself as a person who often fails in her love for her child, who is often unwise, impatient or irritable. So to her, just as much as to her child, what matters is that they shall be reunited – so that they can hold each other tight for a moment in the realisations that the separation is all over. Any of you who have watched this – as I have recently with my grandchildren – will know how agonisingly important this hug is to the child.
Forgiveness is an opportunity grasped. It is an activity. It is of the future.
This means much the same as the idea of starting again. It opens up the future for both people, for mother and child, for friend and friend. They were stopped, embarrassed, frustrated. Now they can move ahead, separately or together.
If you do not forgive others, you yourself will not be forgiven. This is not the idea of an angry god who punished you because you are not generous to others. It is a simple statement of fact - because forgiveness is an activity, part of the way you behave all the time. It is not an isolated act necessary when you hurt somebody or are hurth (sic) by him. You cannot really forgive any one at any time unless forgiveness is part of your being. Why does this also mean that you cannot be forgiven for what you have done? Forgiveness is bound up with seeing and grasping opportunities – opportunities of love and friendship. If you do not care enough about these opportunities to be able to offer them to others, how can you know when they are being offered to you?
Forgiveness has nothing to do with the past. The past is dead. Let the dead bury the dead.
Your friend said: Oh, forget it! But you know you can’t forget it. It happened, nothing can unmake it. But forgiveness makes it possible to remember the past and yet be free from the oppression and the guilt of it. If you insist on looking back with bitterness or resentment, if you continue to blame your friend, then you will remain scarred, and so will your friend. You will both be tied together and to the past in mutual injury. But if forgiveness enters then the very thing what went wrong between you may bring you into deeper friendship. That is one of the meanings of redemption.
Then – The dead are stirred by a new voice, new energy is poured into us, life looks promising once more. Love and hope have taken the place of guilt.
Forgiveness is primarily imagination in action. The feeler that reaches out into uncharted space . . . . . . .
Why should there be any connection between forgiveness and imagination? A person who has no imagination cannot see beyond the obstacles in front of him. He comes to a wall and he has to stop; it is the end. He cannot imagine what is beyond the wall, so he is not challenged to climb it or fetch a ladder. The eprson (sic) who has no forgiveness in his nature is like one who blunders about in a maze of meaningless streets, merely rutning (sic) turning back when he cannot get any further, and therefore always turning back, back into himself. But if we have imagination that reaches out towards other people and into them, there are always possibilities. The past can be left to the past; the dead can bury the dead.
Forgiveness is unconditional or it is not forgiveness at all.
If forgiveness happens between you and a friend who has hurt you, can you possibly say: I’ll be friends with you again on the understanding that you behave yourself properly in future. No, that’s absurd. Real forgiveness says: We are both of us fallible human beings; we shall probably hurt each other again, but we accept that fact and that’s not going to stop our being united and reconciled. We forgive the other person not because he’s going to be good in future, but in spite of the fatc (sic) that we know he probably won’t.
When one person forgives another he must not do so with any pride, otherwise the forgiveness isn’t real. You can forgive only if you too know that you need forgiveness. You cannot forgive if you think you are among the righteous, that you are better than the other person.
Forgiveness could not come to us if we were not asking for it.
Although forgiveness does not lay down any conditions, there is a pre-condition for it. Forgiveness is a response to a need, the answer to a question. So you have to know that you are in need, you have to ask the question to which it is the answer. If your philosophy of life is “I’m all right Jack” you will not know forgiveness AND YOU WILL GO TROUGH LIFE DEAD FROM THE N you will not know forgiveness and you will go through life dead from the neck up.
Now we must look to see how Jesus expressed forgiveness. If you don’t call yourself a Christian, at least recognise this: that Jesus had an immediate insight into human nature, and this insight anticipated much that has been discovered about the human mind and feelings in this century. His greatest parable was about forgiveness: The Prodigal Son. You remember how the father saw the son from afar off. The son had wasted his inheritance and was on his way back in a contrite frame of mind, ready for the humblest job. But he didn’t have time even to say this before his father had flung his arms round him in delight. Notice what the emphasis of the story is. It is not a story about a good father being kind to a bad son. The emphasis is on joy – the sheer joy of being together again: hence the loving arms, the kiss, the fatted calf, the feasting. The son had recognised his real need, he was on his way back; nothing else mattered.
It was the brother who was good – who indeed claimed that he was good; and precisely because he thought himself good, he could not forgive, he could not share the joy. He stayed outside.
That was a parable, but there are stories of events in the life of Jesus that are deeply concerned with forgiveness. I notice that in none of these does Jesus say: I forgive you. He says instead: Your sins are forgiven. This is important. Think of the paralysed man who was brought to Jesus. He may have been paralysed by guilt. (People to this day can be paralysed be feeling intensely guilty about something.) Jesus simply said; Yours (sic) sins are forgiven. Notice how you can profoundly alter the meaning of a statement by altering the emphasis and inflection. Jesus could have said: YOUR SINS are forgiven – with his voice falling on the last word, and implying that her was conferring forgiveness from on high. Bout (sic) I like to think that he said it with a rising inflection, implying that the very fact that the man came to him with desire and faith, brought forgiveness. Jesus didn’t need to do anything but show him that he could walk.
The same is implied in the story of the whore who washed his feet with her tears. Jesus doesn’t put himself in any position of power, as one who can dispense what people want. Her simply tells the stupid people round him what is happening in the woman, not claiming that he himself is doing anything.
This, it seems to me is typical of the attitude of Jesus; he didn’t want to be thought of as a wonder-worker, and when surprising things happened to people as a result of their relationship with him he tried, unsuccessfully, to make them keep quiet about it. He didn’t want that kind of reputation. He wanted people simply to recognise what is true – what is true about life, about their relationships with each other and with God, what is true and what will happen whether he is present or not.
And the nature and result of forgiveness is a very great part of what is true about life – of what is true for anyone no matter what his beliefs.
Let me summarise:
Forgiveness is important to every human being
.
It is not a gift from a superior to an inferior, but something that can happen between any two ordinary people.
Forgiveness is not a way of being virtuous. It is not letting someone off the punishment; it is not a free pardon.
It is a condition that sets you free from the past and enables you to look forward, to go on “becoming”.
To hurt and be hurt is human and normal; forgiveness enables us to suffer hurt without being injured, to transcend our troubles,
To reach forward to what is new.
Archive reference: PP KCB 3/7/3 document 03