For most people, forgiveness has conditions. I’ll forgive if someone apologizes to me, or if they do something to somehow “make it up” to me. I’ll forgive if they take the first step.
I always find that curious. When you were wronged by the person you’re refusing to forgive, that person had control over you. By waiting for them to make the first move and apologize, you’re allowing them to continue to have control over you. Is that truly what you had in mind? Does that really make any sense?
In 1979, 19-year-old Anne Marie Hagan’s father was murdered. Hagan was consumed with anger, bitterness, vengeance, and self-pity. Almost twenty years later, she was able to meet with the killer, and she forgave him. Her forgiveness wasn’t based on the offender asking for it. “Forgiveness cannot be conditional on remorse,” she says, “because that would mean we can only forgive those who are sorry.”
In 2006, a man walked into an Amish school and shot 10 girls between the ages of nine and 13. The shooter, Charles Roberts, then committed suicide. In the midst of their grief over this shocking loss, the Amish community didn’t cast blame. Instead, they reached out with grace and compassion toward the killer’s family. That same day, Amish neighbors visited the Roberts family to comfort them in their sorrow and pain. Amish mourners outnumbered the non-Amish at the Roberts’ funeral.
These are two very different and very striking examples of forgiveness. As long as Anne Marie Hagan held onto her bitterness, she couldn’t live her life fully; it wasn’t until she forgave that she felt free. And the Amish didn’t wait: their automatic reaction was to forgive.
Today’s Gospel reading is at the root of these and many other acts of forgiveness. As Christians, we are called to forgive, not because anyone who has wronged us asks us for it, but because God asks it of us.
Peter, ever the questioning one, always trying to get it right, asks Jesus, “Lord, if my brother sins against me, how often must I forgive him? As many as seven times?” Jesus must have looked at him with compassion–but, perhaps, also with some amusement. Peter was thinking in such small terms! “I say to you,” Jesus replies, “not seven times, but seventy-seven times.”
Seventy-seven times! Peter must have been gobsmacked. He probably thought that forgiving someone seven times would make him a pretty fine fellow–but that wasn’t even close. Seventy-seven times might as well be infinite; and that is, of course, the point. God forgives us, over and over and over again. And it’s our responsibility, our calling, to pass that along, as Jesus underlines in the story of the servant forgiven his debt who won’t forgive someone else their debt. How can we stand in the light of God’s unending forgiveness–and not forgive others?
The bonus is that, occasionally, forgiveness isn’t as difficult a task as we make it out to be. In Letters to Malcolm, Chiefly on Prayer C.S. Lewis writes,
Last week while at prayer, I suddenly discovered—or felt as if I did—that I had really forgiven someone I have been trying to forgive for over thirty years. Trying, and praying that I might. When the things actually happened (sudden as the longed-for cessation of one’s neighbor’s radio), my feeling was, “But it’s so easy. Why didn’t you do it ages ago?”
Sometimes God grants us the grace to forgive easily. More often, it takes effort, and discipline, and faith on our part to get over whatever insult or injury someone has done to us. But in this as in many others lessons, Jesus is wise. Carrying the burden of a grudge, of hatred, of anger isn’t hurting the other person–it’s hurting us. It’s keeping us away from the perfect freedom of life in Christ. It’s erecting a wall between us and God’s grace.
For the Amish of Pennsylvania, forgiveness was as natural as breathing. Forgiveness didn’t negate their pain or grief or loss, but it elevated it, instead, into an offering to God.
We who are forgiven must forgive. It is that simple, and that difficult, and that necessary.
Jeannette de Beauvoir works in the digital department of Pauline Books & Media as marketing copywriter and editor. A graduate of Yale Divinity School, where she studied with Adian Kavanagh, OSB, she is particularly interested in liturgics and Church history.
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