Forgiving Others

When I search for “forgiveness” and “forgive others," three images are the most common to appear. First, there are hugs, then children forgiving, then cats and dogs. Even better is a cat forgiving a dog with a hug. Awwwww.

I did another search of about a hundred different works of literature, and I detected a pattern where there are lots and lots of lines asking “Forgive Me” but virtually none suggesting that we be forgiving of others. Why is that? It is, I believe, natural be discomfited by guilt. It distracts one moment by moment. And this is not the monumental guilt laid on a person who has committed a dreadfully wrong act, such as Raskolnikov’s murder of his landlady in Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment. It takes a genuine sociopath, or someone with a pathological feeling of entitlement, such as Judah Rosenthal in Woody Allen’s film, Crimes and Misdemeanors, where he, the murderer, feels less remorse than the Woody Allen character, who is guilty of, at most, a minor “misdemeanor”.

So, there is a great imbalance between the common urge to be forgiven, and the rare impulse to forgive in our stories about ourselves. The former relieves the subject from guilt. The latter is an invitation to enter into a painful exchange. Forgiving another may be construed as weakness, and an invitation to suffer the same infraction from your supplicant. To be sure, the same ratio of needing forgiveness to offering forgiveness seems to appear in the Bible. Look at the Psalms. Dozens of psalms include supplications to the LORD to forgive, but none that I’ve found which admonish one to forgive another.

But the admonition to forgive is there, prominently, as long as we are willing to pay attention to them. At the top of the list is the second verse of the great commandment: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” That doesn’t clearly spin off a recommendation to be forgiving, until you think about it a bit. If you want an even stronger suggestion, consider the lines in the Lord’s Prayer which say: “Forgive us our trespasses, as we who forgive those who trespass against us.” If that is not enough, Jesus even quantifies it in Matthew 18:22 where he says forgive not once, but seventy-seven times.

OK, but it is still not a commandment! At least not in so many words. But that is the point. It is not enough for Jesus to have you obey all the commandments. Paul boasts that he violated none of the commandments of the Torah. And, in fact, I believe Paul. I believe there are lots of observant Jews who obey every last 613th rule in the Torah, for the better part of their lives. But as Paul makes clear, that is not what Jesus wants. The Lord wants us to be virtuous. The heart of Christian ethics is based on being good, not on doing good.

If you need proof of that idea, consider passages in one of the most famous manuals of Christian behavior, The Manual of a Christian Knight by Desiderius Erasmus. On holding a grudge, he writes “…for nothing is so childish, so weak, nothing so feeble and of so vile a mind as to rejoice in vengeance.” On the other side, he writes “He hurt me, but it will be soon amended. Moreover, he is a child, he is of things unexpert, he is a young man, it is a woman, he did it through another man’s motion or counsel, he did it unaware, or when he had well drunk, it is meet that I forgive him. And on the other side he hath hurt me grievously. Certainly, but he is my father, my brother, my master, my friend, my wife, it is according that this grief should be forgiven…or else thou shalt set one against another…”

Erasmus considered forgiveness an important subject to teach young boys. Would it not be wise to continue that tradition with children?

-- Bruce Marold