Free of Charge by Miroslav Volf & Miroslav Volf

Author:Miroslav Volf & Miroslav Volf [Volf, Miroslav]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: Array
Publisher: Zondervan
Published: 2009-08-30T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 4

GOD THE FORGIVER

Ernest Hemingway began one of his memorable short stories entitled “The Capital of the World” with the following lines:

Madrid is full of boys named Paco, which is diminutive of the name Francisco, and there is a Madrid joke about a father who came to Madrid and inserted an advertisement in the personal columns of El Liberal which said: PACO MEET ME AT HOTEL MONTANA NOON TUESDAY ALL IS FORGIVEN PAPA and how a squadron of Guardia Civil had to be called out to disperse the eight hundred young men who answered the advertisement.1

The joke is about the ubiquity of the name “Paco” in Spain. But it works only because of the underlying longing of many to be forgiven, whether they are sons or daughters, mothers or fathers, friends or colleagues. We desire forgiveness because we value relationships, and we know that relationships cannot be mended without forgiveness.

Why does it take forgiveness to mend a relationship? First, we have to answer an even more fundamental, underlying question: How should we handle a situation when someone wrongs someone else? Wrongdoing rattles and possibly even undoes a relationship. A friend has betrayed us, and we have suffered disappointment, loss, possibly even serious harm. A father has abused us, and we carry the scars for the rest of our lives. We’ve been caught in a whirlwind of ethnic violence and have done to our neighbors things that no decent human being thought she could ever do. Forgiveness is one uniquely important way we deal with wrongdoing. That’s why we value forgiveness.

But it’s hard to carry out. Often we don’t see why we should forgive. Or we want to forgive but don’t seem able to. And other times, we forgive, but our forgiveness is rejected as an insult, and the relationship ends up in even greater disrepair. If we could somehow neutralize the wrongdoing, our reasoning goes, we would be able to restore the relationship without having to do the hard work of forgiving.

There are two major ways to neutralize wrongdoing. First, if we could somehow undo the done deed, wrongdoing would be gone, and forgiveness would be unnecessary. But we can’t. In the heat of an argument, we say an unkind word or make an exaggerated accusation, and our opponent challenges us, “Take that back!” Even if we consent and say, “All right, I didn’t mean what I said,” we still haven’t really taken it back. Our words remain forever uttered, even when they are long forgotten. Or in a moment of inattention, we hit a cyclist with a car, and she dies. At night or in a quiet moment of the day, we play the scene over and over again, wishing desperately to undo the tragedy and to somehow make it not have happened. But our deed remains forever done. Our life isn’t a motion picture in which we can, like a discerning editor, run a bad scene backward, cut it out, and keep replacing it with better ones until we are pleased with the result and are ready to show it to a critical audience.

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