The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #101093   Message #2035593
Posted By: wysiwyg
25-Apr-07 - 02:42 PM
Thread Name: BS: Forgive Judas?
Subject: RE: BS: Forgive Judas?
I haven't read all the posts. I can only answer what I think about this myself. Caution-- Anglican answers are seldom short. :~)

I think that there are several kinds of forgiveness, and that the ultimate and most powerful forgiveness comes from God, in His own time and judgment, and that His forgiveness is not up to me and not something I can expect to know about. So that part is between them.

Another kind of forgiveness is the most personal kind, where someone has wronged you and wants to be forgiven by you. Speaking personally, sometimes I am not ready to forgive. But that does not preclude the person from seeking God's forgiveness. I recognize that His forgiveness is more powerful than my own, for their healing, and I hope that they confess their fault sincerely and gain His forgiveness. Mine, I will give when I can, and for me it seems necessary for their request to come from an effort to gain true understanding of the harm they did and the wrong they commmitted, not against me but against God and His purposes for them and for the situation within which they acted. If they say they are Christians but do not understand what His purposes may be, I sometimes have suggested the means by which they may gain that understanding. I am certainly willing to wish them the best in doing that.

But sometimes the seeking of "forgiveness" is merely the self-comforting effort to get out from under self-examination and responsibility-- the desire to smooth over a mess without looking inside to see where their own views or actions may be in need of growth. They are reaping the brokenness in relationship that their actions have sown. It doesn't help their growth for me to pretend that there is nothing broken. I'm not going to condemn them-- that's not up to me-- but I can only wish them well in their continued growth and, if they persist, require that they leave me alone.

I have sometimes heard from people, years later, from out of the blue, the story of how they kept seeking inner peace over the incident until they finally looked at the thing that had been hard to look at, and saw it differently, and appreciated that I had not let them off the hook and thereby had not relieved the very discomfort that had led them to keep mulling the matter until they took that deeper, harder look inside that they had been avoiding.

There is something else that some call forgiveness, that I think of more as intercessory prayer. One example of that is this-- when I think of the whole Lucifer story, I can only respond compassionately by hoping for that angel's repentance, restoration, and reconciliation... for God's forgiveness of Satan himself. I'd forgive him, if he genuinely asked. I might not invite him into my home, but I'd forgive him, if it was genine repentance.

Repentance-- now there's another concept our society is very mixed up about! First, remorse and repentance are not the same thing. Remorse, guilt, and feeling bad are not repentance. Repentance is an action of turning around and going in the other direction, back to the place where one went wrong and taking the better direction. Repentance means turning around. It doesn't mean beating oneself up. One can repent without beating oneself up. And one can be sorry-- express contrition-- without making oneself out to be a bad person, a weak person, a lesser person than the person God made them to be.

Some of my best repentace has come as a result of joyfully rediscovering the higher purpose God has had for me, or the higher view He has had of me than I sometimes have had of myself. And in those moments, of COURSE I've been spontaneously sorry for doing something stupid, even something I could not have known not to do. Even doing the best we can in any situation, we can do wrong that is regrettable, and we can make the decision to do better in future. And that is part of repentance.

Forgiveness absent repentance is not guaranteed. Not by God, and not by me. There's a the Biblical lesson about "how many times are we to forgive?" "Seventy times seven." (In other words, abundantly.) But that doesn't mean that the offender doesn't have to ask, first, and ask out of repentance and a desire to repair the brokenness their actions caused. What that lesson says, to me anyway, is that we are all fallible human beans and we all develop in slow stages. Along the way we are likely to do the same dumb things over and over until we learn that they are dumb and until we set a better direction. And each step may involve acknowledging that we messed up, and wanting another chance. For me, as long as I can see that the other person is genuinely trying to move in an upward direction, I think I owe them all the patience in the world that I can muster. But if there is no repentance-- no acknowledgement from them-- I'm not going to stand around and wait to get run over again, either. :~)

~Susan