Forgiven and Forgiving. L. William Countryman

see the goal from the starting point and where the road led directly from the one to the other. It doesn't sound too exciting, but it does sound more secure. We would be born knowing what it means to be a grown-up human being, and we would just keep practicing until we had it by rote.

      But—for reasons best known to God—human life doesn't work that way. We acquire the sense of what human adulthood might mean only gradually—sometimes only in retrospect. We don't even begin with a perfect understanding of good and evil. If we did, all we would have to do is make up our mind to do one or the other. But in practice, we find that we have to keep thinking about good and evil all our lives, refining our understanding of them and recommitting ourselves to the good. God created us to lead precisely this kind of messy, adventurous, educational existence.

      It might sound, in Genesis 2 and 3, as if we had found a way out. Wasn't the tree of the knowledge of good and evil the ultimate educational pill? Eat its fruit and you'll know everything. But human knowledge—at least our knowledge of ourselves and of similarly important things—doesn't work that way. All that the tree gave the human race was the ability to learn. In the ancient Greek version of the passage, the tree is actually called something closer to “the tree of knowing what can be known of good and evil.” What can be known changes as we grow. We can discern some things in advance, but not everything.

      Forgiveness, then, gives us space to live and to learn, and it frees us from the temptation to credit our own goodness for too much. God forgives us because that was and is the most liberating thing God could do for us. It is the starting place for everything else.

      Forgiveness and the Basic Structure of Reality

      For the most part, we religious people tend to assume that the basic thing in life is commandments and rules: be good; do the right thing; love one another. We tend to assume that the world, or at least its moral side, is built on rules like these. And the rules are very important. They are worth taking seriously, both for our own sakes and for those of others. They teach us a certain beautiful order for life, one that respects the rights of others and seeks the well-being of the whole human race.

      As I've already said, we'd all be better off in a world where everyone followed the basic commandments. Yet the commandments aren't central, either to God's inner life or to the world God has made. There's something more basic that under girds reality, something that even the commandments depend on for their existence: God's love. God didn't create us because we were so good. We hadn't had a chance to be good. God created us out of love, the love that floods God's inner life and spills over into the work of creation. This love that began by creating us now goes on to reclaim us by taking the form of forgiveness. Like the father of the prodigal son, God constantly welcomes us home.

      The message isn't a matter of “Be good! Oh, and by the way, God forgives you, too.” It's a matter of “God has loved you and forgiven you. Now, what else needs to be said? How are you going to respond to that?” The only useful response, of course, is conversion—to take in this surprising reality and let it assume its rightful place at the center of your world. Jesus is calling us, through the message of forgiveness, to change our minds. If we do, we'll have a different notion of God and a different notion of ourselves as a result.

      We may not necessarily welcome this idea at first. God says, “I love you right now, the person you are as well as the person you can become.” We say, “That's all very well for you, but I have higher standards.” Or God says, “I forgive you everything.” And we say, “Go forgive somebody who needs it. I could give you a list.” We resist forgiveness because we fear it will demean us. It will make too light of our hard work and our difficult virtues. Or it will treat our real faults too lightly. But God is not making light of us, God is making light of what bars us from living fully in God's love.

      The message of forgiveness says to us, “Get over yourself!” Get over your goodness and your righteousness, if they threaten to keep you from full participation in your humanity. Get over your faults, your inadequacy, if they're what hold you back. Get over whatever it is that makes you self-obsessed, whatever makes you reject God's wooing of you, whatever makes you feel that you would rather not go in to the party, whatever makes you feel like you belong to some separate and superior race of beings, whatever makes you feel like an eternal victim, whatever keeps you from living a real human life, whatever makes you imagine that there's something in this world more important and more fundamental than love.

      Instead, be loved. Why would you refuse it? Perhaps you do it out of pique because you think God isn't taking you seriously enough. Perhaps you do it out of shame and embarrassment because God is being kinder to you than you think you deserve. Either way, get over yourself. You are forgiven. Start there. In the whole universe, it is the only starting point there is, anyway. There is no reality deeper than God's overflowing love.

      Here's a story about accepting forgiveness:

      THE TWO DEBTORS

      Two accountants worked for the same, very rich employer, and each of them independently used some of their employer's funds to speculate in securities. They didn't intend to steal the money, they just believed that they were very good at investments, and they expected to present their employer with a handsome profit by and by and to get praised for their good work. Instead, in the same market crash they both lost everything they had staked.

      Both of them ran away. But they were people of principle, and they were very distressed by the way things had turned out. Each of them separately resolved to devote his life to replacing what he had wasted.

      Through austerity, self-denial, and better investing, each of them finally succeeded in accumulating the needed amount. By chance, they returned on the same day, which happened to be their employer's birthday.

      The first came in, made himself known, and explained that he was there to repay the money he had lost all those years before. But when the employer recognized him, he exclaimed, “Oh, that's right! That's who you are. But I can't accept the money. I forgave the debt years ago—only we couldn't find you to tell you so. You must come in as a friend and join my birthday party.”

      The man refused. He said, “No, I've worked all these years to pay you back. I can't think of myself as your friend until you have accepted my reparations. Otherwise, I'd feel like a hypocrite at your birthday party.” He left and sat in the park across from the house and watched people going in to the festivities. He was angry, and his heart gnawed at him because his reparations had been refused and he felt he had been made light of.

      As he sat there, the other man who had misused his employer's funds came past and went into the house. When he had entered, he made himself known and explained that he was there to repay the money he had lost all those years before. But when the employer recognized him, he exclaimed, “Oh, that's right! That's who you are. But I can't accept the money. I forgave the debt years ago—only we couldn't find you to tell you so. You must come in as a friend and join my birthday party.”

      The second man began to refuse like the first, saying, “No, I can't think of myself as your friend until you have accepted my reparations. Otherwise, I'll feel like a hypocrite…” But before he finished, he burst out laughing and said, “If you won't take this money back as reparation, then I give it to you as a birthday gift—and I accept your gracious invitation.”

      And the two of them went in to dinner.

       Forgiving Oneself

      Do We Really Accept God's Forgiveness?

      Sometimes we think that we've accepted God's forgiveness of us, only to find that, deep down, we haven't. We have somehow bracketed it and treated it as interesting but irrelevant information. How can we tell? By the fact that we remain unforgiving of ourselves. It's all very well of God to forgive us, and we deign to accept the kindness, knowing that it is well meant. But we're