Related articles and links |  1 of 3

"Embodying Forgiveness: A Theological Analysis," by L. Gregory Jones (Eerdmans, 332 pp.; $28, hardcover; $18, paper).

Anybody who thinks hard about forgiveness will start a lot more rabbits than he can catch. The topic raises a whole nest of questions, and the good answers will seldom be the easy ones.

Take a case. Suppose that you are a lonesome, middle-aged woman who has finally met a suitable man. He speaks gently, laughs musically, and reads widely. He walks you slowly through spring air that is laden with the scent of lilacs and points out the nesting habits of finches, particularly of the yellow ones. He relishes a good Sunday sermon and can later recall whole swatches of it while he cooks your dinner. He is almost unimaginably attentive. This charming man fills you with such a sense of promise, with so much trust and love and longing, that you never do ask why he wants to arrange a joint banking account while the two of you are still on your honeymoon. After he cleans you out, disappears immaculately, and then shows up on a most-wanted list (six aliases, two previous convictions for similar offenses), you face a terrible truth. You have been betrayed, and you never saw it coming.

Now some questions. What would have to happen before you could forgive this louse? Would he have to repent? Suppose you never see him again. Could you forgive him anyway? As a Christian, must you forgive him? How soon? For his sake or for yours? What if you try to forgive him, but can't? May your pastor, sedate in his wisdom and serene in his marriage, urge you to forgive? Doesn't that just add a load of guilt to your trauma?

Anyhow, isn't forgiveness too good for traitors? Isn't there something almost unjust about it--something that trivializes the offense and encourages the offender to repeat it? May people just go around hurting other people, changing their lives forever, and then nonchalantly accept forgiveness for all the litter they leave behind?

Suppose you eventually do succeed in forgiving the litterer. Does this mean you must take him back into your life somehow? Does it mean you would not testify against him at his bigamy trial or acquiesce in his imprisonment? Does it mean you like him better than you used to?

In his thoughtful and wide-ranging book, L. Gregory Jones does not fully answer all such questions, but he does raise and address many of them. Mainly, he teaches us how to think about the topic that generates them. Perhaps the one-sentence message of this book is that we need to ponder and practice forgiveness in proper context. Hence the book's title. Describing forgiveness as "not so much a word spoken, an action performed, or a feeling felt as it is an embodied way of life," and, drawing upon a wide range of resources, including film and fiction, Jones keeps showing us the settings or "narratives" in which forgiveness belongs.

It naturally belongs in our churches, for example. Our church communities ought to be cities of refuge for sinners, busy with the traffic of forgiveness, busy with people learning the "craft" of forgiveness--ordinarily by getting apprenticed to a master forgiver or two. The idea is that saints ought to teach forgiveness to saints-in-training. In the holy catholic church (the communion of saints), we should be rehearsing the forgiveness of sins like pianists, practicing the hard parts over and over till we get them right.

Why? Because forgiveness of sins leads to the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting. Because forgiveness of sins expresses the deepest rhythm of the Christian life, namely, dying and rising with Jesus Christ. True, we die and rise with Christ in our baptism, but then we also keep the rhythm going throughout our whole careers as believers. Every time we kill resentment and raise up kindness, every time we mortify pride and vivify humility, every time we put off hatred and put on mercy, we die and rise with Jesus Christ. Of course, the grace of the vivifying Holy Spirit must be at work in us, but the basic rhythm is also something we have to work out ourselves. And the assignment is pretty urgent. If we don't learn how to die and rise now, how will we manage at the end of our lives?

next page... |  1 of 3

share this page

April 29 1996, Vol. 40, No. 5