The command to forgive sins willingly must be seen in light of this incredible and crazy generosity. The operative word here is willingly. It’s a word with no upper limit. Of course, as we saw in our last chapter, we are in no immediate danger of bumping our heads on any ceiling. Merely acknowledging the command to forgive is often all we can muster. Yet such is the goodness and condescension of God to our weak state that gritting our teeth and saying “I forgive that jerk” is gladly reckoned by him as “willing” (much as a parent accepts the efforts of an angry child to be conciliatory even when the kid is still kicking his sister under the table for taking his toy). We have to start somewhere, and God will humble himself to accept our barest attempt at forgiveness, so long as it is a real attempt.
But God is also always saying to us, “You are not nearly as happy as I intend you to be!” Our forgiveness needs to grow, to become more willing, more generous, more joyful at the good of the other. In a word, it must become more godlike, more like him who commends his love to us in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.
As it happens, we Catholics have been given by God an endless fountain of grace where we get to see this poured out. It’s called the sacrament of reconciliation. I remember my first experiences of it as though it were yesterday. I’d known various self-described “recovering Catholics” who loved to brag about how “guilty” confession made them feel. I never understood that, because I was raised completely outside the Church, and I could tell you all about guilt.
When I encountered the sacrament, it was a miracle (literally)! Imagine: a place where you could go and pour out all the poison of shame you had been lugging around for years. And when it was all over, you didn’t get some psychoanalysis that provided nothing whatsoever to help. You didn’t get somebody saying, “You sicken me! Get out of my sight!” You got a father putting his hands on your head and saying, with a voice like the waters of the sea washing your whole dead past away, “I absolve you of all your sins in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Go in peace.”
It didn’t—couldn’t—cost a thing, and it was the most precious thing in the world. And more than the forgiveness (which was enough!) was the fact that, for God, forgiveness was not enough. He insisted on pouring out grace so that, as I walked out of the confessional, I was not just forgiven but made stronger with his divine life to do better next time. He is proactive, that One. He forgives willingly, lavishly, not grudgingly. It is as if he loves me or something!
In this sacrament I saw not only God’s forgiveness but also the tirelessness of our priests, modeling what the work of mercy looks like. I remember asking a couple of priests about what it felt like to sit there week after week, month after month, year after year, as the endless litany of human failure, wretchedness, and loss paraded in and out of that little box. I think, were it me, I would go crazy having to listen to the endless round of repetitive sins and moral wreckage. What, I wondered, must it be like to have to subject yourself to the torrent of sewage and, when you have heard it all yet again, to reply with mercy and a prayer of grace? I wonder if a priest ever feels awkward talking to people whose sins he knows all about.
One priest told me, to my amazement, that he never remembered a thing and was at perfect peace once he exited the confessional—a grace he chalked up to his ordination. That was striking. What was even more striking was that another priest said he found confession to be the most beautiful sacrament it was his honor to celebrate.
“People come in, and they are absolutely genuine,” he said. “They tell the truth about their sins as best they can, and then, when the words of absolution are pronounced, they go out with the mask taken away and their own true face revealed.”
It was a point he insisted on: that sin is the mask and Jesus Christ the true face of each person.
That truth lies behind the Church’s insistence on forgiving sins willingly. Far too many of us (me included) think of forgiveness as “pretending a sin was not committed.” It’s closer to the mark to say that forgiveness is “realizing that sin does not name us, Christ does.” Ever since God the Son joined himself to our fallen humanity, took it down to the grave with him, and raised it up all the way to the right hand of the Father in glory, he made himself, not our sin, the most fundamental fact about the human person. No matter how many sins we commit, we cannot pile them up high enough to touch him as he sits at the right hand of the Father in his glorified humanity. Even our murder of him had no power to stop his love for us: He instead made it the fountainhead of our race’s greatest blessing. Now he, not our sin, is the last Word on who the human person is. Because of this he has a toehold in even the darkest heart. That does not mean automatic heaven for one and all. It means that we can hand the sinner (sometimes an impenitent sinner) over to Jesus in the hope that he (who is closer to the sinner than we could ever hope to be) will transform fallen human nature with his divinized human nature. As we do that, we share a bit more in his divinized human nature and do something that is simply not possible apart from his Spirit: forgive offenses willingly.
(For more information, see my book THE WORK OF MERCY: BEING THE HANDS AND HEART OF CHRIST (available here, signed by me, or in Kindle format here, or as an audiobook here).
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