Forgiveness
Whenever I ponder on the nature of forgiveness, I go back to Peter’s question to Jesus: “How oft shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? Til seven times? Jesus saith unto him, I say not unto thee, Until seven times: but, Until seventy times seven.” (Matthew 18:21-22).
490 times?!? That number must have shocked Peter considering that his offer to forgive a person seven times was more than double the three-time maximum that the Jewish clergy taught. The Rabbis preached that God offers forgiveness to the enemies of Israel three times but that on the fourth offense, “I will not turn away the punishment thereof, because they have despised the law of the Lord and have not kept His commandments, because their lies caused them to err, the same lies their fathers followed.” (Amos 2:4).
Basically, Jesus was telling Peter not to count.
The word ‘forgiveness’ comes up 36 times in the New Testament and it is most associated with the Greek meaning ‘to pardon sins.’ To pardon means to pass over an offense without punishing it. And while the phrase ‘forgive and forget’ is not found in the Bible, God has said, “I am he who blots out your transgressions for my own sake, and I will not remember your sins.” (Isaiah 43:25).
More specifically, to forgive means: 1) to let go of the emotional suffering associated with a mistake, offense, or traumatizing act against you; and 2) to choose not to personally punish the person who committed the mistake, offense, or traumatizing act against you but rather allow the natural order of things, including the formal justice system and Karma itself, to do its job and find ways to turn the wrongs into rights. Punishment does not make things better. No parent who has lost a child to murder has felt relief or real justice after the murderer receives a life sentence or the death penalty. God prefers to forgo punishment in exchange for rehabilitation, restitution, and, eventually, spiritual transformation. When these things do not work and all that is left is to isolate the offender, then, by all means, let the systems take care of business. There are people in the world that must be held in isolation away from civilized society because of their evil nature upon others.
To forget means to let go of the need to punish yourself or someone else by holding on to your pain every time you think about who or what hurt you in order to be right. The memories and the lessons of the experience remain with you but you choose not to remember the suffering. Essentially, when you forgive and forget, you are choosing to let go of your pain and your need to punish either yourself or someone else as a misguided means to relieve your pain.
So when Christ used the phrase ‘seventy-times seven,’ he was essentially teaching us that forgiveness should be unconditional. And why should we forget? Again, for the same reason God chooses to forget, for his own well-being: “I am he who blots out your transgressions for my own sake, and I will not remember your sins.” (Isaiah 43:25). Forgiveness is the price for inner peace, the end of seemingly endless suffering.
Mother Owl
