Newspaper Columns by Bishop Paul V. Marshall
Forgiven – but not absolved?
By Bishop Paul V. Marshall
January, 2005Your spouse cheated on you -- and tells you about it. Under most traditional religious systems you have the right to a divorce. Perhaps they apologize. For whatever reason, you do not act on your rights. You choose not to cut them off.
That is the basic Christian understanding of forgiveness: God’s refusal to end a marred relationship. The gift is given, through the pain, because God values the relationship.
Your marriage goes on, but you notice you are not interested in intimacy and your trust level may be quite low. Your erring spouse has to recognize something: they have been forgiven for violating the relationship between you, but they have not been absolved of the consequences of their action. It may come as a shock to the forgiven to know they are not necessarily absolved. Profound healing may entail considerable suffering.
Christians understand Jesus to have fulfilled the prophet Jeremiah’s promise of a new covenant based on the forgiveness of sins. We hear the words, “This is my blood of the new covenant, which is shed for you and for many for the forgiveness of sins,” each time we celebrate eucharist. Because forgiveness is a key Christian understanding, we sometimes oversimplify the notion for others and in our own minds.
Early Christians generally came to say that forgiveness means something when there is a change of heart, restitution whenever that is possible, determination to change behavior, and perhaps a period of penitence to allow change to take place. St. Paul was serious when he advised his readers to “work out” their salvation “with fear and trembling.”
With our married couple, something more than giving up vengeance is required if their emotional life is ever to regain what it lost. The process beyond forgiveness, that of reconciliation, takes time, energy and tears — if successful, it leads to deeper levels of forgiveness and reunion.
In life, those who love us forgive us for much of which we are not even aware. Those offenses of which we are aware, however, call for action on our part, not to earn forgiveness but to implement it through change, growth and reconciliation.
To “come to Jesus,” as the saying goes, is the beginning of a journey, not its end. The invitation to Christian life is not a get-out-of-jail-free card. This thought is not owned by us who do not identify as protestants. The very first of Martin Luther’s famous “Ninety-Five Theses” was that Christ calls people to entire lives of repentance. Luther’s emphasis on free grace was paradoxically an attempt to make the converted life more serious.
Most conflict I see in church and ordinary affairs requires less forgiveness and more reconciliation, less denial of pain and more exploration of problems and attitudes. Reconciliation between individuals or among peoples requires the work of understanding each other, of working through history that is often painful, and of constructing a way to live where all are respected and their rights acknowledged.
The South African determination to avoid a reign of terror by requiring former oppressors simply to tell the whole truth about Apartheid was an important example of how healing begins. Not with the cheap grace of “let’s forget about it.” To forget some things may well take centuries. Because the South Africans have painfully owned what has happened among them they are in a position to rebuild their society, even though that is proving to be a long and complicated project.
Care about using words like forgiveness and reconciliation can deliver us from quick fixes that do not work, and lead us to deeper and more lasting healing of our relationships with God and each other.
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