The First Forgiveness

Values and People

Ethics can’t exist without persons – not humans, necessarily, but interpersonal relationships. Principles can’t exist in a void; there isn’t some law against lying floating around the universe somewhere, unmoored from any actual relationship. Ethics isn’t a series of logical rules; it’s a system of interaction between one being and another. I think it’s very important that we remember this part of ethics – that it’s not about abstractions; it’s about persons – if we’re to get it right.

Guilt and Forgiveness

This has many applications, but the one I want to talk about today is guilt. Now, if I walk up to my mother and slap her, I ought to feel guilty about it. Moreover, I can’t just forgive myself and move on, because my mother is the victim, the wronged party. It’s her call. I grew up with an overly sensitive conscience, which was probably a good thing, but was very uncomfortable a lot of the time. So I am aware that, for good reason, guilt is one of our least favorite emotions, and one we’d very much like to explain away sometimes. But what’s needed isn’t rationalization; it’s forgiveness.

We tend to go about forgiveness in a very backwards way. We generally start by trying to minimize what’s gone wrong, and instead of forgiving the person, we talk ourselves into thinking that he or she doesn’t need forgiveness (which we don’t actually believe, and so end up making up for with resentment and bitterness afterwards). Because of this, when something comes along so big that we just can’t explain it away, we’re left without knowing what to do.

You see, forgiveness isn’t supposed to be about excusing what someone’s done wrong; in fact, forgiveness is predicated upon someone wronging someone else. You can’t forgive someone if she hasn’t done anything. People speak of ‘unmerited grace,’ but there’s really no other kind. That’s the beautiful thing about forgiveness, you see; it frees us from trying to come up with excuses and rationales for why something really wasn’t as bad or evil as it seems. We look the bad and the evil right in the face, and we acknowledge it in all its grime and ugliness, and then we look at the person and we forgive him anyway. The extent of the badness doesn’t come into the equation.

The Original Wronged Party

I’m well aware that this is much harder than I make it sound. In point of fact, I would argue that it’s impossible, on the face of it. But the difficulty doesn’t matter, because of yet another thing we’ve left out of the equation, that changes things around entirely yet again. And that thing is the original wronged party.

I have said that guilt requires a wronged party; it is a debt we owe another person, having gone back on our obligations (one can’t have obligations to a neutral universe; there has to be a person). What, then, of the guilt that we bear for things we’ve done in solitude, the deep, dark places of our hearts and minds that have never seen the light of day, but which deep down inside, we know we’re guilty of nonetheless? The solution must be that there is a wronged person who is not a human, an original wronged party. And while this argument may not go terribly far toward proving it, I think that when we combine it with what else we know of the world, it is sensible to say that this original wronged party is God – at least, it is more sensible than starting from the other end and arguing that since there is no God, we are not guilty, when we know we are.

This is why our guilt is objective, why it remains no matter how much time passes, how much other people admire us, how much net good we do, how much we rationalize away our actions and choose our own moralities and forgive ourselves. We don’t have the right to forgive ourselves; we are not the wronged party. We owe a debt.

The First Forgiveness

However, just as God was the original wronged party, he was the original forgiver. He embodies justice; he makes no pretense of explaining away our guilt. Such guilt required an impossibly immense sacrifice, one which we could never make. And so God himself made it. Through a mystery, as we are guilty in Adam, we can be righteous in Christ, cleansed not only of Adam’s guilt, but of our own as well, heinous though our acts may have been. We can never win by rationalization and penance, but we do not need to; we need only accept the cross, where all debts were paid for all time.

And so we have no right to withhold forgiveness, having been granted it freely ourselves, if we choose to take it. You ask how certain things may be excused, but remember: the magnitude of the offense doesn’t come into it. We are not granting evildoers excuses; we are not saying that they didn’t know what they were doing, or that the secret lies in their childhood, or that they thought they were doing right (though these may be true sometimes). Nor are we disregarding the legal or practical consequences of their actions. They did evil.

But so have we. We, too, are flawed creatures, and we, too, are creations of God. A price does indeed need to be paid for these deeds, but it has been paid, with the death of Life himself. What more can be demanded? What God has, through blood, freely offered all, will we pettily withhold – from them, or from ourselves?