Then Peter came and said to him, "Lord, if another
member of the church sins against me, how often should I forgive?
As many as seven times?" Jesus said to him, "Not even times, but, I
tell you, seventy-seven times." (Matt. 18:21,22, NRSV)
In case you have not noticed, Christianity is a
religion in which the sinners have all of the advantages. They can step on
your feet 50 times and you are supposed to keep smiling. They can talk bad
about you every time that you leave the room and it is your job to excuse
them with no thought of getting even. The burden is on you, because you
have been forgiven yourself, and God expects you to do unto others as God
has done unto you.
This is not a bad motivation for learning how to
forgive. If God is willing to stay with me in spite of my meanness, my
weakness, my stubborn self-righteousness, then who am I to hold those same
things against someone else? Better I should confess my own sins than to
keep track of yours, only it is hard to stay focused on my shortcomings, I
would so much rather stay focused on yours, especially when they are
hurtful to me.
Staying angry with you is how I protect myself from
you. Refusing to forgive you is not only how I punish you, it is also how
I keep you from getting close enough to hurt me again, and nine times out
of ten it works – only there is a serious side effect. It is called
bitterness, and it can do terrible things to the human body and soul.
Once on a trip into Atlanta, I stopped at a gift shop
to buy a couple of wedding presents, some nice brass picture frames, which
I asked the clerk to wrap. “Well, what is the occasion?” she
snarled. “Are you going to tell me or am I supposed to guess?” I
looked at her then for the first time and saw a heavy, middle-aged woman
whose brow was all bunched up over two hard, cold eyes. Her mouth turned
down at the sides like she had just tasted something rancid, and she had
both of her hands planted on the glass counter, leaning against it with
such malice that I thought that she might push it over on me if I
irritated her in any way further.
Generally speaking, I get mad when someone comes at me
like that but this time I just got scared because I could see what her
anger had done to her, and I wanted to get away from it before it did
something similar to me. Actually, it was something stronger than plain
anger that had twisted that woman’s face. All by itself, anger is not that
damaging. It is not much more than that quick rush of adrenaline that you
feel when you are being threatened. It tells you that something that you
hold dear is in danger – your property, your beliefs, your physical
safety. I think of anger as a kind of flashing yellow light. “Caution,”
it says, “something is going on here. Slow down and see if you can
figure out what it is.”
When I do slow down, I can usually learn something from
my anger, and if I am lucky, I can use the energy of it to push for change
in myself or in my relationships with others. Often, I can see my own part
in what I am angry about, and that helps, because if I had a hand in it,
then I can concentrate on getting my hand back out of it again instead of
spinning my wheels in blame. I can, in other words, figure out what my
anger has to teach me and then let it go, but when my anger goes on and on
without my learning or changing anything, then it is not plain anger
anymore. It has become bitterness instead. It has become resentment, which
a friend of mine calls “arthritis of the spirit.”
So, there is another motivation for learning how to
forgive – not only because we owe it to God, but because we owe it to
ourselves. Because resentment deforms us. Because unforgiveness is a
boomerang. We use it to protect ourselves – to hurt back before we can be
hurt again – but it has a sinister way of circling right back at us so
that we become the victims of our own ill will.
One summer, the New York Times Book Review ran a series
on the deadly sins. Joyce Carol Oates wrote on despair, Gore Vidal wrote
on pride, and John Updike, of all people, wrote on lust. Mary Gordon’s
essay on anger was a real beauty, chiefly because she was willing to admit
that she knew a lot about it. One hot August afternoon, she wrote, she was
in the kitchen preparing dinner for ten. Although the house was full of
people, no one offered to help her chop, stir, or set the table. She was
stewing in here own juices, she said, when her two small children and her
78-year-old mother insisted that she stop what she was doing and take them
swimming.
They positioned themselves in the car, she said,
leaning on the horn and shouting her name out of the window so that all of
the neighbors could hear them, loudly reminding her that she had promised
to take them to the pond. That, Gordon said, was when she lost it. She
flew outside and jumped on the hood of the car. She pounded on the
windshield. She told her mother and her children that she was never, ever
going to take any of them anywhere, and none of them was ever going to
have one friend in any house of hers until the hour of their death –
which, she said, she hoped was soon.
Then the frightening thing happened. “I became a
huge bird” she said. “A carrion crow. My legs became hard stalks,
my eyes were sharp and vicious, I developed a murderous beak. Greasy black
feathers took the place of my arms. I flapped and flapped. I blotted out
the sun’s light with my flapping.” Even after she had been forced off
of the hood of the car, she said, it took her a while to come back to
herself, and when she did, she was appalled, because she realized that she
had genuinely frightened her children. Her son said to her, “I was
scared because I didn’t know who you were.”
“Sin makes the sinner unrecognizable,” Gordon
concluded. And the only antidote to it is forgiveness, but the problem is
that anger is so exciting, so enlivening, that forgiveness can seem like a
limp surrender. If you have ever cherished resentment, you know how right
it can make you feel to have someone in the world whom you believe is all
wrong. You may not be up to admitting it yet, but one of the greatest
benefits of having an enemy is that you get to look good by comparison. It
also helps to have someone to blame for why your life is not turning out
the way it was supposed to.
Several years ago on National Public Radio, I heard
Linda Wertheimer talking to a correspondent in the Middle East about the
amazing moves toward peace there, between Israelis and Palestinians.
“How are people reacting?” she asked him. “After all, losing an
enemy is as upsetting as losing a friend.” I hadn’t thought about it
that way before, but she is right. When you allow your enemy to stop being
your enemy, all of the rules change. Nobody knows how to react anymore,
because forgiveness is an act of transformation. It does not offer the
adrenaline rush of anger, nor the feeling of power that comes from a
well-established resentment. It is a quiet revolution, as easy to miss as
a fist uncurling to become an open hand, but it changes people in ways
that anger only wishes that it could.
So, why don’t we do it more often? Because it is scary
to lay down your arms like that, to trade in your pride and your power on
the off-chance that you may discover something more valuable than either
of them. “To forgive,” writes Mary Gordon, “is to give up the
exhilaration of one’s own unassailable rightness.” And there is a loss
in that, only it is the loss of an illusion, and what is gained is
unmistakably real – the chance to live again, free from the bitterness
that draws the sweetness from our lives, that gives us scary faces and
turns us into carrion crows who blot out the sun with our flapping. No one
else does this to us. We do it to ourselves, but we do not have to.
We are being forgiven every day of our lives. Someone
who has arranged things is setting us free so that we have all of the
advantages. We have choices. We have will. And we have …who seems to know
that we need lots of practice at this forgiveness business. How often
should we forgive? Will seven times take care of it? “Not seven times,”
Jesus said, “but I tell you, Seventy-seven times.” This is no
chore. This is a promise, because forgiveness is the way of life. It is
God’s cure for the deformity that our resentments cause us. It is how we
discover our true shape, and every time that we do it, we get to be a
little more alive. What God knows and we don’t yet know, is that once we
get the hang of it, seventy times seven won’t be enough, not to mention
seventy-seven. We’ll be so carried away by it that we’ll hope that it
never ends.
By Barbara Brown Taylor
(Reprinted from Gospel Medicine, published by
Cowley Publications, 28 Temple Place, Boston, Mass.)