“God Can Always Survive the Hurt We Do Him”

A single word cuts through all the noise and bustle and bravado around the circle at the jail. It’s prayer time and the guys aren’t super focused. A few talk about upcoming court dates and girlfriends in rehab and various health concerns over the humming, buzzing banter. I’m loudly repeating the requests, struggling a bit to maintain control of the room. The word is spoken softly by a young man to my immediate right. He’s been a regular ever since he arrived on the remand unit. He has an intense curiosity about him, always leaning forward on his knees, always paying careful attention, always asking questions. He’s often one of the cheerier guys in the room, but he’s not smiling right now. He looks, I don’t know, thoughtful, pensive, a little sad as he speaks the one word that reduces the room to silence.

“Forgiveness.”

“Forgiveness?” I repeat. “Yeah, forgiveness,” he says. “We’ve all done bad things. And, you know, I just think we all wanna ask for forgiveness.” The heads slowly begin to nod. I’m just smart enough to stop asking questions and to pray. Father, please forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us…  

As we forgive those who sin against us… I’ve been around the jail long enough to know a bit about the specific ways in which the men around the circle have sinned against others and been sinned against. I’ve heard some pretty horrible stories, stories that make me want to shudder or cringe or weep or walk away in disgust. Like everything else in the prison chapel, “Forgive us our sins” sounds different here. This is not sin as an abstract theological category, or the relatively inoffensive less-than-ideal brokenness that we acknowledge on Sunday mornings. These are ugly, offensive, degrading, often shockingly violent sins. I often like it better when I don’t know what the guys around the circle have done.

A thought occurred to me as I was praying for the guys around the circle, as I was thanking God for a mercy wider than we can imagine. I couldn’t help but wonder, am I being a little casual or presumptuous with the pardon of God? Am I tossing mercy around a little too cheaply? Do I mostly just want these guys to feel better when in fact they might be better served by squirming? What right do I have to pronounce the forgiveness of God upon these sinners?

This afternoon, I came across the following passage from former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams. It is from a sermon called “The Forgiveness of Sins” in a collection of sermons and addresses called Open to Judgment:

Only the victim has the “right” to forgive: I can’t forgive on someone else’s behalf. I can’t intrude into that dreadful intimate relation between the one who hurts and the one who is hurt. So it seems as if there can be no forgiveness if the victim doesn’t forgive—and the dead, you might say, don’t forgive. We might find a reason for pardoning the murderer, but that is not the same thing. Are there, then, wounds never to be healed, personally as well as globally? After all, our love is not very strong. It is hardly surprising if we come to a point where we say, “I can’t take that. That is the end of love.” Is forgiveness to depend on this, on our hopeless, inept struggles to love?

The reply of the gospel is “no.” Christian faith here pushes right against the limits of the credible once again in saying that God forgives and has the right to forgive. God is the ultimate victim of all human cruelty, says the gospel: God bleeds for every human wound. Inasmuch as we do good or ill to any human person, it is done to God. Forgiveness is not only a matter to be settled among ourselves—or left unsettled because of our inadequacies. It is God’s affair too. And the good news of Christianity is that, since God suffers human pain, since God is the victim of human injury, then there is beyond all our sin a love that is inexhaustible. God’s love for creation never comes to a point where it can take no more.

God can always survive the hurt we do him; whenever we turn to him in sorrow and longing, after we have done some injury, this love is still there, waiting for us, a home whose door is always open. Whatever we do can never shut that door to his merciful acceptance. The only thing that can keep us out is the refusal to ask for and trust in that mercy.

There is our hope—the infinite resource of God’s love, the relationship with his creatures that no sin can finally unmake.

I thank God that there is indeed a love beyond all our sin that is inexhaustible. Not just for the guys in the jail, but for myself, too. For there is a collection of fairly grimy, specific, offensive sins on my ledger, too. My love, too, is hopelessly inept and inadequate. I am no less in need of the home whose door is always open than the guys around the circle at the jail. We are united in this one thing—our need for the God who can always survive the hurt we do him, the one relationship that our sin cannot unmake.

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