THE IMMORALITY OF FORGIVENESS

The trouble with forgiveness is that it is completely immoral when you stop to think about it. For in forgiveness we tell the victim of a great injustice that he must be the one to pay an even greater cost in order to free his perpretrator from guilt. We tell the wronged to pay for the crimes of his wrongdoer. We extract the payment for a wound not from wounder but from the wounded. Forgiveness, it seems, has got it all backwards.

Yet, we find this discovery a bit odd, if not completely disconcerting. Because there is something within us that dreams that all the casualties that have fallen prey to our self-obsessed rampage would somehow rise again and pronounce, through their bandaged wounds, that they have not held these things against us. We long for friends who will absorb the cost of all our wrongs and not extract the slow, harrowing payment of retribution from us. The reason that the utter immorality of forgiveness startles us when it dawns upon us is because it has always been such a deep need of humanity. It has been that dull ache, that vague suspicion that "something's not quite right in my inner world."

And to find that this longing for forgiveness is, in fact, a longing for the immoral leaves us at a loss. For it pins all of our hope for redemption solely on our ability to make restitution, to somehow make up for the wrongs we've inflicted knowing that the hopes of "taking it back" poses a real chronological problem. And yet we find no solution. For not even an infinite number of rights can undo a wrong. A lifetime of penance, an eternity of penance, cannot set time running backwards to erase a past. A deed done is forever a done deed, locked in time, registered eternally in the history books of the heart of another. Forgiveness, immoral forgiveness, seems to be the only solution.

It is in Christ alone that the possibility of forgiveness finds its footing. For in Christ, we see that the One who was cosmically wronged took upon himself the greater cost in order to free us, his perpetrators, from guilt. And even as we exacted that horrific payment to its very last drop, he said "Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing." And in that moment, we realized that it wasn't forgiveness that had it all backward, it was us. In the words of C.S. Lewis, we saw that he didn't come to turn the world upside down, but to turn it right side up.