Coming to Terms With Forgiveness

“And be kind to one another, tender-hearted, forgiving one another, even as God in Christ forgave you.” (Ephesians 4:32 NKJV)

The steely look in her eyes showed me how convinced my accuser was that I had knowingly demonstrated or harbored harmful attitudes towards her . . . from our youth! My impulse was to flee, get away from the ugly, imagined (as far as I knew) charges; but I was captive, a guest in her home until the next morning. I stopped my furtive packing and turned to face her, drained by the bewildering situation.

I had successfully maneuvered similar moments in the past, mostly long-distance. But face-to-face with this unforeseen onslaught, figuring out how to deal with it without irreparably damaging the relationship eluded me. Setting aside the facts as I knew them, and reining in the knee-jerk self-defensive reaction, I made an internal appeal to heaven. Somehow, WWJD was not bringing up a ready answer for how to renew forgiveness with my repeat offender. As I later discovered, C. S. Lewis felt similarly about the very Christian concept of forgiveness. He wrote,

To believe in the forgiveness of sins is not so easy as I thought. Real belief in it is the sort of thing that easily slips away if we don’t keep on polishing it up.[1]

In his essay, unsurprisingly titled, “On Forgiveness,” Lewis validates the necessity of the phrase “I believe in the forgiveness of sins” in a creed of the Church. His premise rests on his observation that often, when he thinks he is asking God’s forgiveness, he is rather asking God to excuse him. “But there is all the difference in the world between forgiving and excusing,” he continues.

Forgiveness says, “Yes, you have done this thing, but I accept your apology; I will never hold it against you and everything between us two will be exactly as it was before.” . . . If one was not really to blame then there is nothing to forgive. In that sense forgiveness and excusing are almost opposites.[2]

His observation bears out that people tend to believe that to be asked to forgive an offender is to behave as though the offense did not happen. That seems to be a version of the popular concept of “gaslighting,” described by online sources as “a form of psychological manipulation in which an abuser forces a victim to question their own reality, memory or sanity.” The term derives from the 1944 psychological thriller, Gaslight.

In a recent interview that received fair publicity, Teasi Cannon, the True Comfort podcaster and author of Counterfeit Forgiveness, made a compelling case against modern therapeutic models of forgiveness that justifies Lewis’ warning. She writes that “the Bible calls us to release bitterness and entrust justice to God, but that forgiveness itself is a promise made to a repentant person that their sin will no longer be held against them.” Her emphasis seems to align with what Lewis highlights from the creed of the Church of England, stating that “Jesus never taught His followers to forgive unrepentant people or to make forgiveness a psychological self-help strategy. [Rather] biblical forgiveness is a beautiful living parable of the Gospel.”[3]

An Audacious Challenge

Media coverage of a recent Harvard commencement, lighted on a line from the valedictorian’s speech: “Listen like you might be wrong!” The seemingly unreasonable suggestion no doubt caught the media’s attention since, in our “age of information,” at the touch of a button everyone is an instant expert. Fact-checking now gives us the privilege, we imagine, of never having to be wrong.

The speaker’s phrase describes the idea which presented itself in that moment when my eyes locked with those of my accuser, and my appeal went up to heaven. The audacious comment reminded me of similar counsel I had received as a new MA student. The sources were an essay by Azusa Pacific University professor of Literature Diana Glyer, titled “Intellectual Hospitality,” and Mortimer Adler’s timeless work, How to Read a Book.

In her introduction, Glyer writes, “Rather than merely tolerating people we disagree with, we can cultivate genuine curiosity and compassion while at the same time holding fast to our deep convictions.” Adler, meanwhile, advocated that one could read any text, as long as one was willing to do what it takes to “come to terms” with its writer. Adler’s first edition described that posture with the somewhat archaic term of being “docile” to the writer.

The valedictorian’s thesis, “Listen like you might be wrong,” had fallen uncomfortably on my ears also, but my resistance to it resolved as understanding set in: I would fail to “come to terms” with any author’s meanings and intentions, if I approach the reading process in an argumentative and critical manner.

Similarly, in any other context of human communication (such as the charged dispute I faced), a haughty attitude and vain conceit would land me at a volatile impasse. Suddenly, this idea found relevance, as my eyes locked with the squinting angry ones of my accuser. I was at that impasse and the Divine Tutor was pointing the way to get by, if not through it. The invitation was to view the one before me as a work to be read—a masterpiece of His. She too was His poeima. “No mere mortal” as Lewis wrote.

I realized the call was not to excuse the bad behaviour of an unrepentant sinner, nor to receive, unexamined, that which presented itself on the face of the situation. I concluded that trying to expose the misjudgment to which I was being subjected was work only the Holy Spirit could do in bringing either of our hearts to repentance. Rather, I was to reach beyond that, to focus on “coming to terms”; to read past the cover. My response at the very least was to begin with the internal posture that I could be missing something. I could be misreading a heart crying to be heard, insecurely seeing it as an attack! I would never know if I did not . . . read on.

But what if it is a deliberate attack? Here, Lewis offers more helpful insight in light of the scriptural fact that all have sinned. He writes that when it comes to a question of forgiving other people . . .

One must therefore begin by attending to everything which may show that the other man was not so much to blame as we thought. But even if he is absolutely fully to blame, we still have to forgive him. . . . To be a Christian means to forgive the inexcusable, because God has forgiven the inexcusable in us.[4]

“Do you want to win the argument or do you want to win the relationship?” the counsellor asks.

“Do you want to win the argument or do you want your opponent to win . . . at life?” Jesus asks.

I have never been an easy weeper. My cerebral nature often comes out ahead of the emotional. But I knew salvation had come to the situation when with tear-filled eyes I honestly asked to be informed when she found me practicing the said hurtful attitudes. I daresay I had the cooperation of the emotional center of my brain to thank for washing my eyes clear that night, when at the Holy Spirit’s bidding I saw my offender with the Master’s eyes and grasped the true meaning of forgiveness—wanting her to win.

An Exemplar of Forgiveness

I wondered if the Hebrew patriarch, Joseph, had felt as surprised in the end, as I had, by his tears when his dreams and premonitions of ascendancy over his brothers had motivated them to sell him into slavery. Scripture says he had pleaded with them as they had prepared to do so. A quick search reveals seven occasions when tears marked the course of Joseph’s troubled but God-ordained journey to becoming the deliverer of his people and arguably the world.

He pleaded tearfully with his brothers to not be sold into slavery.

He wept at the sight of his ten older brothers, coming to seek corn for the family, as the famine set in.

He wept when they brought him his younger brother, his deceased mother’s only other child, Benjamin.

He wept so loudly during his momentous self-revelation to his brothers that all Pharaoh’s household heard, or heard about it.

He wept when his eyes beheld his father, Jacob, once again.

And he wept when Jacob died.

Last of all, when his brothers expected retribution following their father’s death, Joseph wept. With a heart breaking for his broken brothers, Joseph spoke immortal words in response: “Do not be afraid, for am I in the place of God? But as for you, you meant evil against me: but God meant it for good, in order to bring it about as it is this day, to save many people alive.” (Genesis 50.19-20 NKJV)

Folding the blue evening dress into my suitcase which she gifted me, following our eventual reprieve, I released a hopeful breath. What a privilege it is to believe in the true forgiveness of sins. By it we get to demonstrate that which saves us, our offenders, and many people alive.

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[1], [2], [4] From C. S. Lewis’ essay, “On Forgiveness,” which was written at the request of a priest named Patrick Kevin Irwin in 1947. First published in Lewis’ Fern-Seed and Elephants and Other Essays on Christianity, it currently appears in The Weight of Glory, a collection gathered by Walter Hooper under the title of the main essay.

[3] This quote is from a segment of Teasi Cannon’s website dedicated entirely to her studied position on biblical forgiveness. https://www.teasicannon.com/biblical-forgiveness 

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The featured image, “Good Morning Autumn,” is courtesy of Julie Jablonski and is used with her kind permission for Cultivating.

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