Walking in the Steps of Jesus: Forgiving Others

This reflection is a companion reflection to the one that I posted earlier. 

In this particular reflection I not only draw from Jesus’ teaching and example but also from my experience and knowledge as a retired social worker. While our life experiences may be different, I believe that we all struggle with anger and forgiveness. The culture in which we live also gives us mixed messages about anger and forgiveness. We live in what has been described as the age of outrage. The practice of forgiving the trespasses of others and letting bygone be bygones may have fallen by the wayside.

One of the finest examples of forgiveness with which I am acquainted was displayed by the mother, older sister, and brother-in-law of young man who was a waiter at a vegan restaurant where I often ate lunch. With the exception of the young man’s father the whole family were vegans. They were not Christians. The young man was murdered late one night, shot to death in a failed robbery attempt. His assailant was caught, arrested, and put on trial. He was found guilty of murder. The family forgave him in court and asked the judge to show him clemency. They earnestly believed that was what the young man himself would have wanted. He was a gentle soul who valued all life. When he was not working at the restaurant, he investigated reports of animal neglect and abuse for the local humane society. It was not that the family did not value the life of the young man. They valued all life like he had, and they lived in accordance with their beliefs.

I go on social media and read post after post of people who identify themselves as Christians, who say all kinds of harsh things about their fellow human beings and show no remorse for what they say, much less display forgiveness toward those against whom they harbor bitter feelings.  

Jesus, on the other hand, forgave his persecutors from the cross.

In the New Testament we read that the disciples asked Jesus how many times were they supposed to forgive someone if they committed a sin or offense against them. The rabbis taught their followers that they needed to forgive the one who committed a sin or offense against them only seven times. After that, they were free to hold the sin or offense against the one who committed it. Jesus’ response was that his disciples must forgive someone who committed a sin or offense against them seventy time seven, a ridiculously high number of times. It was his way of telling them that they were to forgive ad infinite. They were not to keep count of how many times that they forgive. They were to keep on forgiving over and over again.

This I suspect must have taken the disciples aback. What Jesus was saying was that they could not store up anger and resentment toward someone who kept committing sins and offenses against them. They could not hold onto that anger and resentment and when a certain point was reached let the individual feel the full force of their anger and resentment. Wham!! They could not use their accumulated anger and resentment to justify taking what might be an unconscionable action against the individual. They could not let their anger and resentment turn to bitterness. They could not hold a grudge against the individual for the remainder of the individual’s life.

It may have been an innocent question. But we cannot say that for certain. The disciples may have been contemplating revenge against someone for slighting them or otherwise injuring them. We must not forget that the disciples could be extremely vengeful in their thinking. They wanted Jesus to call down fire from heaven on a Samaritan village that refused them hospitality because they were going to Jerusalem. They wanted to burn up every man, woman, and child in the village, the innocent along with the guilty.

On both occasions Jesus pulled the rug out from under disciples. He told them that there was no limit to the number of times that they must forgive someone. He refused to call down fire upon the village. He refused to take offense at the village’s unwillingness to show hospitality to him and his disciples.

I am reminded of these words from the prayer of the Prophet Jonah, “I knew you were a gracious and merciful God, slow to be angry, rich in love, and ready to forgive.” God had spared Nineveh and Jonah wanted God to take his life. He was angry and upset that God had forgiven the people of Nineveh.

When we forgive someone, we no longer harbor anger and resentment toward them. We do not hold whatever they said or did against them. We wipe the slate clean.

In today’s parlance we completely erase a file from our computer so that there is no way of retrieving it. There is not back-up file on the cloud. It is gone forever!  

When God forgives us, he blots out our offense, wipes it away in its entirety. There is no memory of it.

God wants us to forgive others in the same way. No making a mental note of a slight or an injury for future use it against the individual who slighted or injured us. No collecting of angry feelings and resentment.

When a postage stamp on an envelope is cancelled, it cannot be used again. When someone is forgiven, the angry feelings and resentment are cancelled too. They cannot also be used again.

There is a connection between what Jesus teaches us about anger and what he teaches us about forgiveness. Jesus does not tell us that we should not get angry. He does, however, tell us not to let our anger fester, to rankle us, to gnaw at our heart. He warns us that if we do not let go of our anger, the devil will take advantage of our anger to harm not only the individual with whom we may be angry but also ourselves and others. For this reason, Jesus advises us against letting the sun go down on our anger and urges us if we are angry with someone, if have something against them, to try to make things right with them.

Jesus knew that festering anger can turn to hatred and ill-will. We can come to deeply resent the individual who elicited our feelings of anger. When we feel hatred and ill-will toward someone, they cease to be a human being in our eyes. They become a thing. This helps to explain why Jesus equated hating someone with murdering them. When we “thing” someone in our mind, it is a step closer to murdering them. We may already be thinking of ways of making them go away and killing them may be one of them. We can become trapped in what may be called an “anger cycle.” We keep feeding our angry feelings with thoughts of slights and injuries, real and imagined, until we lose control of our anger and act upon it. We take steps to make them go away.

There is a real danger that people whom we know and who have anger of their own towards others may egg us on. Anger affects our judgment and the judgment of those whom we know and who have anger of their own. Anger can also affect our perceptions of reality. It can affect their perceptions of reality too. We may act impulsively, giving little or no thought to what we are doing, and our actions may have unforeseen consequences that we later regret.

What Jesus implies in his teaching is that when we get angry, we need to calm down and cool off before we do anything. A piece of advice that I often heard as a child was, “Don’t make a mountain out of a mole hill.” While a mountain may be thousands of feet high, a mole hill is a small mound of earth that a mole leaves on the surface of the ground when the mole tunnels to the surface. When we are angry, we have a way of magnifying things in our mind. What is triggering our anger may loom large in our mind like a mountain. When we have calmed down and cooled off, we may discover that the mountain has shrunk to a mole hill, a mound of earth so small that it may go unnoticed.

What is triggering our anger may also evoke anger from the past.  It may revive memories of painful trauma that we have experienced. While Jesus may have not hung a psychologist’s shingle outside his carpentry shop, Jesus understood this sort of thing. He understood what goes on in our minds when we are angry.

What Jesus urges us to do is calm down, cool off, and then try to make things right with whomever we are angry. That may not be easy, but Jesus encourages us to make a sincere effort.

Jesus is not telling us to bottle up our anger, to keep it in. We can experience and express our anger when and where it is appropriate. Jesus expressed anger toward the Pharisees. He also expressed anger toward the moneychangers in the Temple. What Jesus is telling us is not to hold onto our anger, to retain bitter feelings.

Due to our past experiences some of us may not be in touch with our anger. We may have learned to hide our anger even from ourselves. We may be afraid of our anger. Our anger, however, may manifest itself in our interactions with other people. When we do become angry, it may be disproportion to whatever triggered our anger. It is the anger that we have been bottling up inside us.

We may also fear someone else's anger. While they may display a calm exterior, we fear that beneath that calm exterior they are seething with anger and they may suddenly without warning lash out at us. 

Some of us may experience anxiety rather than anger. Anxiety is what we feel when we are caught between fighting and fleeing. We feel anger but experience has taught us that we cannot express it. When we did, we experienced negative consequences. 

Our anxiety may be so high that we avoid people and situations that trigger our anxiety. This includes people with whom we are angry. We may need a safe environment in which we can experience and express our anger at the individual at whom we are angry. This may have the effect of clearing the air, lowering our anxiety, reducing any tension between us and that individual, and eventually leading to reconciliation and healing.

Our anxiety may also stem from our fear of someone else's anger. They are too calm for our liking and we fear that they may explode at any moment. 

When I was a social worker, I had to deal with all kinds of angry people. Clients would call me on the telephone and verbally abuse me or they would come into the office and let me have it. While they might not be angry with me personally,they were frustrated and angry with the agency or the court system. I , however, represented these authorities in their eyes and they took their anger out on me. 

It is very unnerving to have someone drop into the office and calmly say that they have a gun and they are thinking of killing me and then themselves. I have an appreciation of how someone may feel around a calm individual whom they expect to be angry. Their anxiety may soar. 

What Jesus is not telling us is to reconcile with a physically and emotionally abusive partner, spouse, parent, or child. When he talks about trying to make things right with someone who has wronged us, he is not talking about an individual who has physically and emotionally abused us and is likely to do it again and again. 

While he does not expressly say this in his teaching about anger, urging us to reconcile with a physically and emotionally abusive partner or spouse would not be consistent with the compassion that he himself shows. He teaches us that we should be merciful as God is merciful. Encouraging someone to reconcile with a partner, spouse, parent, or child who is physical and emotionally abusive is far from merciful.

What then is the connection between anger and forgiveness? When we forgive someone, we make a conscious decision not to be angry with them, not to resent them. We are not saying what they said or did was right or acceptable. We are not expressing approval of their words or actions. We are choosing not to hold whatever they said or did against them.

The more we cling to our anger, the more we feed our anger, the more difficult it is for us to forgive. Whether we may realize it, anger can be toxic to us. It can poison our heart and our mind. In Norse mythology a serpent gnaws at the roots of Yggdrasill the World Tree. Anger is like a serpent gnawing at our heart.

If we are followers of Jesus, bitter feelings can become a serious obstacle to our walking in the footsteps of Jesus. They can keep us from loving God, loving others, and loving our fellow Christians.

When Jesus taught his disciples to pray, he taught them to ask God to forgive their sins as they forgive those who sinned against them. He told his disciples, “If you forgive others their trespasses, then your heavenly Father will forgive you; but if you do not forgive others, your Father will not forgive your trespasses either.” Once more Jesus pulled the rug from under the feet of his disciples. If they want to be forgiven, they must first forgive!  Jesus tied God’s forgiveness of us to our forgiveness of others. We should not expect God to be forgiving toward us if we were not forgiving toward others.

Something that we do not always remember is that while God’s love for us is without bounds, we can sadden him with what we say or do. The idea of a grieving God may surprise us, but it should not. A God who is loving and compassionate is a God who can feel deep sorrow. God grieved over the hardheartedness of his chosen people, the children of Israel. Jesus grieved over the obstinacy of Jerusalem. The apostle Paul warned the Ephesians against grieving the Holy Spirit.

If God withholds forgiveness from us because we withhold forgiveness from others, it does not mean God has stopped loving us. A parent who loves a child will not let that child do whatever they please. The parent will set limits for the child and enforce these limits. A loving parent whose child wishes to run to the edge of the cliff and throw themselves from a great height into the raging sea will not indulge the child. The parent will protect the child from themselves. Loving a child is not gratifying their every wish. God is the same way. God does not spare us from the consequences of our words and actions when we outstep the limits that he has set for us. God will keep back his forgiveness of us when we keep back our forgiveness of others.

God, however, will not abandon or reject us. His Holy Spirit will gently nudge us to repent, to make a U-turn and to begin forgiving others as we would to be forgiven. God will give us plenty of room in which we can turn around. God will supply us with the grace to enable us to make that U-turn. That is how loving God is.