How Far Does Forgiveness Extend?

            I preached about forgiveness recently and a person came to me after the service and said: “that business about forgiveness is great, father, but what about Hitler?  Is he also forgiven?  He was pure evil!”  I certainly agree with him about Hitler.  How could anybody forgive a man who sent six million Jews and many others to horrible deaths?  And Hitler isn’t the only one.  How about the man who so brutally executed two Americans in the desert over the past couple of weeks, or the people who drove four airplanes into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a field in Somerset County?  Such evil is impossible to put out of our minds, or for us to nonchalantly forgive.  That is certainly what was on that man’s mind as he asked me the question, and he was right to ask it.  Deep in my heart, I have no means of letting that evil go.  I mourn the desolation that it has caused in so many lives and I have no way to forget any of it.

            But in a larger context, it isn’t up to me to forgive Hitler or any of the others who have caused such misery and desolation.  It is solely up to God; and God is remarkable in his ability to forgive all of the imperfections of humankind.  I accept that truth with great joy because when I look at my own imperfections, while perhaps not adding up to the evil that I see in other places in this world, they certainly fail to live up to what our Lord taught us in terms of caring for each other.

            I am really attracted to Paul’s words to the Romans in chapter 13 when he says that the law is fulfilled when we love each other.  That may sound simplistic to some, and impossible to others, but it really tells the truth.  Love includes forgiveness.  That is where the tall order comes.  I don’t think that any of us have a harder problem than forgiving one another for the things that have been done to us.  The reality is that holding on to grudges and problems caused by other people has become a way of life to most of us.  Forgiveness is a very hard thing to do when it involves serious matters. 

           

            The experience that I had in Western Penitentiary ministering to my group of convicts taught me a great deal about this subject.  All of the men in my group yearned to be forgiven.  I talked about it frequently and saw the longing in their faces.  One of them told me, “God could never forgive what I did,” and he said it with all sincerity.  One day a while later in our group, I was talking about forgiveness once again and I saw a light in his eyes that I had never seen before.  All of a sudden, he got it.  He could see that despite what he obviously believed about himself that God’s forgiveness extended even to him.  It was a profound moment for him and for all of us.  Forgiveness is a reality.  From that moment on, he was a changed man.  It was as if an immense burden had been lifted from his shoulders.  It was a refreshing and incredible moment for me to see what God’s almost inconceivable love could do for one isolated man. 

            In another one of his epistles, Paul talks about the “refining fire” that cleanses all of us.  It burns out all of the impurities that cause so much of our behavior to go wrong and reveals the beauty of the person that we were created to be.  That refining fire is the work of forgiveness. 

            Then why do we all have such a problem with forgiving one another?  I think that holding on to hurts is a way of saving treasure.  We somehow think that the things that have been done to us make us better than the person who has done these things.  Forgiving would somehow diminish that.  The reality is that forgiveness is a way of lifting a burden from us and letting us continue to live our lives without the weight of the pain caused by whatever it was that was done to us.  Forgiveness is a road to freedom; freedom from continuing to hold on to anger and resentment and to enter again into love.  After all, it is Love that creates community and holds us all together, despite our many failures.

            Which of us is perfect?  Certainly Paul wasn’t.  As a Pharisee, he held the coats of the people who stoned to death the martyr Stephen.  He knew his faults very well, and it was his own forgiveness that prompted his comments in his letters.  I will hold the notion of forgiving Hitler for another time.  Right now, the issue is much smaller: the problem of forgiving one another.  Paul is telling us to do that by entering again into Love and getting on with our lives.  That is the message that he has for his audience and it is the best advice that we can get.