Forgive or Die

 

Forgiveness in the teaching of Jesus is not for the sake of moral purity;
it’s quite simply for the sake of a future. ~Fr. Richard Rohr

The above quote from Rohr is nagging at me. I think it may be profoundly true on a level we're happy to miss.

On the surface, it's a fine piece of rhetoric: by a simple use of antithesis, Rohr challenges a common assumption—that the letting go of one's offenses, as if they had never been committed, in the teachings of Jesus had as its primary objective the cleaning up of one's life (inside and out). Sure, that may be one means to the end, but it's the end—the future—that faces extinction without forgiveness.

This idea isn't original with Rohr, of course. I think most notably of former Archbishop of Cape Town Desmond Tutu's book No Future Without Forgiveness (Image, 2000). Through his eyewitness account, Tutu focuses on how the Truth and Reconciliation Commission he chaired (pressed upon him by President Mandela, et al.) attempted to move beyond the various forms of institutionalized retribution taking place in post-apartheid South Africa. Calling out the unworkable "solution" of bringing perpetrators of apartheid to court, he describes the highs and lows of his commission's approach to justice: the granting of political amnesty to those who make a full confession of their crimes.

While Tutu's account centers on this world, it's deeply informed by the next. It's a working out of the blueprint Israel's god YHWH drew up so long ago. It's the imperfect attempt to follow the model that God in Christ lived out. It's God's way to approach justice that his Spirit continues to empower up to this very day.

While we are no doubt chosen "to be [God's] through our union with Christ, so that we would be holy and without fault before him" (Eph 1:4; see also Col 1:22), it's God's forgiveness that creates the biblical vision of his future—resurrected life on a renewed earth. The bit that gets so hard to grasp is the fact that the creator God bound himself to forgive. Without forgiveness, even his future goes. What else does the story of him walking through the animal halves alone when ratifying his covenant with Abraham mean (Gen 15:12–21)? That if the promise fails, YHWH himself will be like those shredded carcasses. This is why in the new covenant, ratified by the life and death and resurrection of Jesus, we see that if "we confess our sins to God, he will keep his promise and do what is right: he will forgive us our sins and purify us from all our wrongdoing" (1 Jn 1:9). How striking that the writer includes that God will "do what is right"! Why is it "right" (or "just") for God to forgive sins when they're confessed? Because that's what he promised to do, precisely because of his promised future.

He binds himself to forgive. Remember that the next time you fall into the same old sinful patterns that betray his covenant.

As Tutu's example shows, this kind of forgiveness for the sake of the future, the kind that God himself enacts and ultimately embodied in Jesus by the power of his Spirit, easily applies to every relationship we experience. From the creator God to his created, to the rebuilding of nations, and (not least) to familial ties, withholding forgiveness murders the future—and it will kill you.

Forgive (and be reconciled) or die.

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Status Symbol Land

FEAR—especially the fear of losing control—serves as the impetus for an awful lot of art. It also, of course, serves as the catalyst for an unhealthy dose of insomnia, depression, anxiety, fatigue, and death (either of the silent or walking variety).

Motivated by Alan Noble's "Why Christians Should Read Disturbing, Dark, and Secular Fiction," I thought that since I have read and am now again reading a good bit of it that I'd do well to put some thoughts down on a piece that I've read recently. (This is a bit like pulling the winner out of a hat; I'm working through an anthology of American short stories and there are too many from which to choose. I decided against O'Connor's terrifyingly bizarre "Good Country People" because (1) she's not exactly "secular"; and (2) apparently she's now a Christian-hipster favorite, and I'm like light years ahead of those people.)

So, John Cheever's "The Swimmer" it is (originally published in The New Yorker on 18 July 1964). Summary of the plot:

“The Swimmer” begins with suburbanites gathered around a backyard pool, nursing their respective hangovers from the previous night's cocktail party. The hero of the tale is a youthfully middle-aged, athletic, and affluent denizen of suburbia. His desire to rise above complacently takes the form of an odd, comical quest: He decides to swim home, fifteen pools to the south. The narrative follows his journey from pool to pool, from his initial exhilaration to subsequent exhaustion, from bright and sunny to darker and colder, to unprepared and exposed. After crossing a highway, he descends into a public pool—hell to his social class. But even here he is excluded after failing to provide the proper identification. The journey is further corrupted when he finds his mistress has replaced him with a new lover, and a couple he has previously dismissed socially denies him. Finally, when he is alienated from what he knows to be true, and dispossessed of his comfortable reality, he arrives home to a dark, empty, and locked house.

Truly, I envied the swimmer Neddy Merrill's excursion. It sounded fun. Even in the rain. The absurdity part of it only becomes apparent during the last few dips, and especially when he arrives "home." The fun of swimming across several pools in a couple of neighborhoods looks pathetic indeed when Neddy reaches his now foreclosed destination. And the enthusiasm with which Neddy is greeted at first is subverted by the tale's end: all those drinks and smiles look more like pity than friendship. Status symbols are, we must admit, everything to this crowd (our collective crowd in these United States), and Neddy's loss of them feeds a fear that grips him to the point of extreme denial, acting out the absurd.

How poignant is the climax of the story today? Neddy swims "home" to an abandoned and decrepit structure. How many of those have we seen walking the neighborhood these past few years? Ah, home ownership, a grand American institution. It looks to be only a vestige of its former glory.

Speaking of American social institutions, what about the extramarital affair? Neddy’s inability to cope with his situation caused him to shut down and retreat from reality, ultimately hurting all the people in his life that he ever cared about. The same could be said about any one of the other poor choices he has apparently made (in response to a financial misfortune).

Neddy’s swimming pool journey effectively parallels our false lives, our swimming through life with eyes half closed, choosing not to acknowledge behaviors that are significant and detrimental to those we love the most. Extramarital affairs, alcoholism, gambling, and debt—all these activities gradually eat away at relationships every day. Of course, these are all symptoms of a much deeper problem: "Who can understand the human heart? There is nothing else so deceitful."

The mix of realism and surrealism, concrete rootedness and absurdity, the lack of a single vision holding reality together, the rusty linings of every cloud, are a few of the reasons I so enjoy this era of literature (roughly described as "postwar"). Yet in spite of all the aforementioned disturbing darkness, we still pine after love and understanding, and thus we must face the vertigo of absurdity with practical action—like Candide tending his garden forevermore.

So, then, "have reverence for God, and obey his commands, because this is all that we were created for." Or, put somewhat differently, love thy neighbor as thyself.


Listen to Cheever read "The Swimmer" here.

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Remembering God's Grace

FOR MANY OF US, at the beginning of our Christian journeys, we thought of and spoke often about the radical forgiveness of a God who has been greatly sinned against. I remember myself going on and on about God’s longsuffering and patience, and how grateful I was for it. I also recall having conversations with friends who did not convert out of a debauched past, who had never known a time they didn’t consider themselves Christian.

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Repentance from First to Last

{This originally appeared in Tabletalk 28.3 (March 2004): 25}

On October 31, 1517, Dr. Martin Luther posted his ninety-five theses on the academy bulletin board (which happened to be the church door in those days). Essentially, the theses rebuked church leaders for abusing indulgences. Indulgences, he argued, cannot forgive sins. Rather, they are in danger of bringing a false peace to the sinner’s conscience — a place reserved only for God’s once-for-all justification of His children.

Can anyone recall the first thesis, the one upon which all the others follow? True, it is not as bold as, for example, thesis 86, which chides the wealthy pope for not funding the building of Saint Peter’s Basilica with his own money. But on second glance, Luther’s first thesis is far more substantial than the eighty-sixth. It reads as follows: “Our Lord and Master Jesus Christ, when He said ‘Do sincerely repent,’ willed that the whole life of believers should be repentance.”

This has less to do with that revivalistic moment of conversion so popular in American culture, and more to do with the perpetual call not to harden our hearts and neglect so great a salvation. Luther’s first thesis brings us directly to Tabletalk’s Scripture texts for both Friday and Monday (Heb. 4:6–8). In the middle of his discussion about the promise of rest, the author of Hebrews quotes the words of David from Psalm 95: “Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts” (vv. 7–8). The covenant promise of rest still stands, but “today” we must respond.

This principle is not new in the new covenant; it can be observed throughout redemptive history. The patriarchs heard it loudly when circumcision was instituted (Gen. 17:9–14); the wandering generation heard it at the foot of Mount Sinai (Deut. 10:16); amid the Conquest, the Israelites heard it (Josh. 22:4–6); during the rise and fall of the Israeli kingdom, its prophets repeatedly declared it (Isa. 30:15; Jer. 5:3; Ezek. 18:30; Hos. 6:1; Joel 1:13); the apostle Paul described it (Gal. 2:20); and last, but not least, Jesus commanded it (Luke 9:23).

What this gives us today is a connection with those believers who have gone before us. For example, circumcision — just like baptism — was never intended to be merely an external act. Since the fall, God has called all people to turn to Him perpetually so that the promise of rest will not be missed. A one-time “sinner’s prayer” is nothing if not followed by an entire life of repentance, which comes from God from first to last (Rom. 2:4).

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