Then Peter came and said to him, “Lord, if another member of the church sins against me, how often should I forgive? As many as seven times?” Jesus said to him, “Not seven times, but, I tell you, seventy-seven times.”
(Matt. 18:21-22, NRSV)
In case you have not noticed, Christianity is a religion in which the sinners have all the advantages. They can step on your feet 50 times and you are supposed to keep smiling. They can talk bad about you every time you leave the room and it is your job to excuse them with no thought of getting even. The burden is on you, because you have been forgiven yourself, and God expects you to do unto others as God has done unto you.
This is not a bad motivation for learning how to forgive. If God is willing to stay with me in spite of my meanness, my weakness, my stubborn self-righteousness, then who am I to hold those same things against someone else? Better I should confess my own sins than keep track of yours, only it is hard to stay focused on my shortcomings. I would so much rather stay focused on yours, especially when they are hurtful to me.
Staying angry with you is how I protect myself from you. Refusing to forgive you is not only how I punish you; it is also how I keep you from getting close enough to hurt me again, and nine times out of ten it works—only there is a serious side effect. It is called bitterness, and it can do terrible things to the human body and soul.
Once on a trip into Atlanta I stopped at a gift shop to buy a couple of wedding presents, some nice brass picture frames, which I asked the clerk to wrap. “Well, what is the occasion?” she snarled. “Are you going to tell me or am I supposed to guess?” I looked at her then for the first time and saw a heavy, middle-aged woman whose brow was all bunched up over two hard, cold eyes. Her mouth turned down at the sides like she had just tasted something rancid, and she had both her hands planted on the glass counter, leaning against it with such malice that I thought she might push it over on me if I irritated her any further.
Generally speaking, I get mad when someone comes at me like that, but this time I just got scared because I could see what her anger had done to her, and I wanted to get away from it before it did something similar to me. Actually, it was something stronger than plain anger that had twisted that woman’s face. All by itself, anger is not that damaging. It is not much more than that quick rush of adrenaline you feel when you are being threatened. It tells you that something you hold dear is in danger—your property, your beliefs, your physical safety. I think of anger as a kind of flashing yellow light. “Caution,” it says, “something is going on here. Slow down and see if you can figure out what it is.”
When I do slow down, I can usually learn something from my anger, and if I am lucky I can use the energy of it to push for change in myself or in my relationships with others. Often I can see my own part in what I am angry about, and that helps, because if I had a hand in it, then I can concentrate on getting my hand back out of it again instead of spinning my wheels in blame. I can, in other words, figure out what my anger has to teach me and then let it go, but when my anger goes on and on without my learning or changing anything, then it is not plain anger anymore. It has become bitterness instead. It has become resentment, which a friend of mine calls “arthritis of the spirit.”
So there is another motivation for learning how to forgive—not only because we owe it to God, but because we owe it to ourselves. Because resentment deforms us. Because unforgiveness is a boomerang. We use it to protect ourselves—to hurt back before we can be hurt again—but it has a sinister way of circling right back at us so that we become the victims of our own ill will.
One summer the New York Times Book Review ran a series on the deadly sins. Joyce Carol Oates wrote on despair, Gore Vidal wrote on pride, and John Updike, of all people, wrote on lust. Mary Gordon’s essay on anger was a real beauty, chiefly because she was willing to admit she knew a lot about it. One hot August afternoon, she wrote, she was in the kitchen preparing dinner for ten. Although the house was full of people, no one offered to help her chop, stir, or set the table. She was stewing in her own juices, she said, when her two small children and her 78-year-old mother insisted that she stop what she was doing and take them swimming.
They positioned themselves in the car, she said, leaning on the horn and shouting her name out the window so all the neighbors could hear them, loudly reminding her that she had promised to take them to the pond. That, Gordon said, was when she lost it. She flew outside and jumped on the hood of the car. She pounded on the windshield. She told her mother and her children that she was never, ever going to take any of them anywhere, and none of them was ever going to have one friend in any house of hers until the hour of their death—which, she said, she hoped was soon.
Then the frightening thing happened. “I became a huge bird,” she said. “A carrion crow. My legs became hard stalks, my eyes were sharp and vicious. I developed a murderous beak. Greasy black feathers took the place of arms. I flapped and flapped. I blotted out the sun’s light with my flapping.” Even after she had been forced off the hood of the car, she said, it took her a while to come back to herself, and when she did, she was appalled, because she realized she had genuinely frightened her children. Her son said to her, “I was scared because I didn’t know who you were.”
“Sin makes the sinner unrecognizable,” Gordon concluded, and the only antidote to it is forgiveness; but the problem is that anger is so exciting, so enlivening, that forgiveness can seem like a limp surrender. If you have ever cherished a resentment, you know how right it can make you feel to have someone in the world whom you believe is all wrong. You may not be up to admitting it yet, but one of the great benefits of having an enemy is that you get to look good by comparison. It also helps to have someone to blame for why your life is not turning out the way it was supposed to.
Several years ago on National Public Radio I heard Linda Wertheimer talking to a correspondent in the Middle East about the amazing moves toward peace that were then happening there between Israelis and Palestinians. “How are people reacting?” she asked him. “After all, losing an enemy is as upsetting as losing a friend.” I hadn’t thought about it that way before, but she is right. When you allow your enemy to stop being your enemy, all the rules change. Nobody knows how to act anymore, because forgiveness is an act of transformation. It does not offer the adrenaline rush of anger, nor the feeling of power that comes from a well-established resentment. It is a quiet revolution, as easy to miss as a fist uncurling to become an open hand, but it changes people in ways that anger only wishes it could.
So why don’t we do it more often? Because it is scary, to lay down your arms like that, to trade in your pride and your power on the off-chance that you may discover something more valuable than either of them. “To forgive,” writes Mary Gordon, “is to give up the exhilaration of one’s own unassailable rightness.” And there is loss in that, only it is the loss of an illusion, and what is gained is unmistakably real: the chance to live again, free from the bitterness that draws the sweetness from our lives, that gives us scary faces and turns us into carrion crows who blot out the sun with our flapping. No one else does this to us. We do it to ourselves, but we do not have to.
We are being forgiven every day of our lives. We are being set free by someone who has arranged things so that we have all the advantages. We have choices. We have will. And we have an advocate, who seems to know that we need lots of practice at this forgiveness business. How often should we forgive? Will seven times take care of it? “Not seven times,” Jesus says, “but, I tell you, seventy-seven times.” This is no chore. This is a promise, because forgiveness is the way of life. It is God’s cure for the deformity our resentments cause us. It is how we discover our true shape, and every time we do it we get to be a little more alive. What God knows and we don’t yet is that once we get the hang of it, seventy times seven won’t be enough, not to mention seventy-seven. We’ll be so carried away by it that we’ll hope it never ends.
Barbara Brown Taylor has been named one of the most effective preachers in the English-speaking world by Baylor University. This article is reprinted with permission from Gospel Medicine, published by Cowley Publications, 28 Temple Place, Boston, Massachusetts. To order, call 1-800-225-1534.
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