Bulletin Column: Forgiveness…490 Times

Last week, the Gospel spoke to us about the need for forgiveness. It’s worth continuing to reflect on, given that forgiveness is one of the cornerstones of the Christian life. If we get this wrong, we can go astray quite quickly. If we get it right, it will help immensely in our aspirations to emulate Christ in all we do.

Now, looking to the passage from Scripture, every Bible we read is a translation, and so it is not always clear how to render the original passage. This is true of last weekend’s Gospel passage. How many times does Jesus command Peter to forgive? Is it seventy-seven (77) times? Or is it seven times seventy (490)? At the end of the day, it doesn’t much matter; Jesus gives us the standard that we must forgive over and over and over again. Even this, though, can be understood in a least a couple different ways. The most natural reading would have us forgive somebody even if they commit 77 (or 490!) faults against us. And this is true so far as it goes. This can be understood in a different way, however.

Often enough, we can find ourselves in the difficult position where we have forgiven somebody for something, and yet it keeps popping up. It keeps bothering us. This thing we supposedly let go of still rents out space in our heads, and we can once again feel hurt or angry. Does this mean we haven’t actually forgiven this person? Was this forgiveness we though we had simply fake? No. On the contrary, we probably did forgive them, but the forgiveness was for that day at that moment. “I do not, right now, choose to hold this fault against them.” Often enough, what happens is that we must forgive somebody, not for 490 offenses, but for one single offense, over...and over…and over again.

This is the crucial thing to recognize: Unless the offense is slight, very rarely do we simply offer forgiveness one, and only one, time. It is rather that every time some hurt or annoyance comes to mind, we have to offer forgiveness, even if we’ve offered it before. Now, this isn’t to belittle the terrible suffering some people have suffered at the hands of others. Forgiveness is not some easy, flippant thing. But it is to say that forgiveness is a day-to-day thing; it expires quickly and requires frequent renewal. This should not bother us, and it should not make us think we are failures in the realm of forgiveness. What it does necessitate is that we are realistic about the fact that the same forgiveness will likely have to be offered tomorrow, and the next day, and the next day. It would be nice if we could simply choose not to be hurt and not to be bothered by something someone else has done or said, and perhaps we can choose that a little bit. But in large part, the effects of the offense still linger. So it is then that we must take Jesus’s teaching to heart. How often must we forgive? Often enough, 490 times. And even then, we’ve only just begun.