Forgiveness à la carte

In today’s gospel reading (Matthew 18.21-35), a slave’s master cancels a substantial debt (‘ten thousand talents’), only to see him go and throttle, then imprison his fellow-slave to call in a debt of a truly trivial ‘hundred denarii’. Faced with this ‘unmerciful servant’, the master locks him away to be tortured until his own massive debt is, after all, paid in full. Jesus warns his audience that any who behave like the unforgiving slave will be similarly punished by God, who has forgiven each of us handsomely, and to the point of spilling the blood of his own only-begotten Son.

This is a clear indication that to forgive is to pass on to others what we ourselves have already received. So although forgiveness can feel like the awarding of a costly ointment to a possibly undeserving recipient, there is usually good reason to regard it as an ordinary act of the will, part of the natural mechanism of relationship among families, friends, churches and so on. As Aristotle teaches, if you behave every day as if you have forgiven those who offended you; one day you will wake up and discover that you have.

The virtue of forgiveness is that it frees captives of circumstance, victim or perpetrator, and lets a story develop, rather than being abandoned after unhappy events. There is of course no question that, in serious matters, the justice of the law should be applied unwaveringly, and that consequences must follow actions, especially when actions have been truly evil or psychopathic.

Indeed, in such horrific circumstances, can forgiveness be expected? Is it possible, even for God? And if it is, under what conditions? A fairly recent book by Stephen Cherry, lately Dean of King’s College, Cambridge, asks these very questions and offers helpful correctives to the unthinking claims too often made by well-meaning Christians who fail to distinguish sins and our response according to their magnitude and affect. Even the saintly Desmond Tutu in post-apartheid South Africa stands corrected in the book for confusing forgiveness, which demands repentance, with amnesty, which does not.

Forgiveness, for Cherry, is always a process rather than ‘a single verbal expression’. It is especially true in cases like clerical sexual abuse, when there has been a dangerous tendency of senior clergy to forgive, and then unwisely to trust seemingly repentant abusers. For Cherry, treating the needs of victims as paramount will prevent the offer of forgiveness being made too quickly or too cheaply, and will emphasise the fact that, although as Christians we can never categorically rule out the possibility of divine and human forgiveness, we can be robustly clear that this will not be easy or instantaneous; but will require perpetrators of significant harm to be seriously and sincerely penitent, and to treat their victims in a manner indicative of a desire to make any possible amends. In short, says Cherry, ‘if an abuser does the right thing by the victim, then they move away from being unforgivable. If they don’t — they don’t.’

Horses for courses: familiar enough. We should certainly notice that ‘the unmerciful servant’ is ‘delivered to the tormentors till he should pay all that was due.’ This might be a lengthy process, from which he should expect no swift release. Likewise, when responding to this gospel command to forgive in cases where the inflicted pain and grief have been considerable, one should feel confident to follow the Dean’s lead, and consider forgiveness of one’s abuser as something towards which one may be working at one’s own pace, rather than it being an easy word from an easy mind that trips off the tongue like abracadabra.

Day to day, however, and in response to the more usual slings and arrows that flesh is heir to, the onus is more obviously on us to be less precious, more forgiving, rising above minor slights and inconveniences. For our imperfections are as great as those of our neighbour. And even if we do not necessarily recognise ourselves in Monty Python’s magnificent question – ‘How many of us can honestly say that at one time or another we haven’t set fire to some great public building?’, we are nonetheless only mortal; no more than dust. Let us therefore, by God’s grace and so far as we are able, forgive as we have been forgiven. For such is the way and will of our Father in heaven.