A Little More on Forgiveness

A question arose for me this morning, about our role as a forgiven people. Being forgiven people, as I wrote in my previous post, offers to us the possibility of forgiving others. But what does this forgiveness look like? Are we to forgive without the reckoning of the debt? Or do we, like the lord, approach our offender with the offense, making the action of forgiveness and reconciliation an interpersonal event?

The answer to this is easy to say, but very difficult to do. While I do not recommend approaching anyone with the threat of torture - notice that in the parable the one who owed the steward did not punish the steward for the steward's lack of mercy, but the lord did - the gospel of Matthew is clear that we do approach those who sin against us.

This is difficult, not just because it is hard to approach someone close to you with something hurtful, but because we know that they may not be able to hear it. This action might very well end up in a broken relationship. But this kind of interpersonal event can be difficult in unexpected ways. While we might approach someone and say "you hurt me in this way," there is a distinct possibility that we might hear that we ourselves were the cause of the offense. We might hear "I did that because you hurt me first."

This only underlines the need for all of us to be practiced in repentance, as Matthew is also clear about. And this is how we ought to read Jesus' saying about the plank in our own eye, not that only the perfect may approach the sinner, but that only the repentant ought to ask for repentance from others. And as I wrote the other day, repentance begins with asking the Lord our God for the forgiveness of our sins against Him, a forgiveness that makes possible our forgieveness of others. And in this way, if our own planks in our own eyes are revealed in our own approach of the one who hurt us, we can take the time to say "it looks like I am at fault too. Forgive me, even though I have asked you for your repentance." We can repent, along with the original offender, because we are already practiced in the discipline of repentance.

And by this we are not only reconciled with God, but become a reconciled and reconciling people, and through this reconciliation a true witness to the world of God's mercy and forgiveness.