Forgiveness
05 Jul 2021
One of the ways you can tell that the gospel of Jesus Christ has really taken root in a culture is that the influence of God’s word spreads beyond individuals becoming Christians. Laws begin to be passed which reflect what God commands and prohibits. The norms of society become influenced by what Jesus teaches.
The opposite is also true. When a culture begins to reject Christianity, over time this isn’t just shown by a shrinking church. Laws are passed which very clearly go against God’s word. Attitudes and behaviours which were once considered normal begin to change. Eventually people realise that they have no grounds for attitudes they once took for granted (having rejected the foundations they were built on).
This is seen in many ways in the West in 2021. One surprising, but noticeable, aspect of modern culture is that today we simply do not know what to do with past sins and mistakes. Our culture does not know how to repent, and is beginning to find forgiveness impossible.
The cricketer Ollie Robinson found this out to his cost earlier this year. He made his debut for England a couple of months ago, but on that same day someone discovered that 10 years ago (when he was 17) he had posted a couple of undeniably racist comments on social media. The England and Wales Cricket Board investigated and punished him with a suspension.
This seemed crazy, especially as the tweets in question were a decade old, written when he was young, and have no bearing on his abilities as a player now. No one (to my knowledge) had brought an accusation that he still held or acted on those beliefs now.
At no point during the whole saga was what would have been the common sense approach (up to about 10 years ago) seen as appropriate. Robinson did apologise but it wasn’t deemed as good enough for his bosses and us looking on to respond by saying “Thank you for apologising. We understand and we forgive you. Let’s move on”. There needed to be punishment. Forgiveness was simply not considered. Nor was there any awareness of the fact that we all sin and fail and say and do wrong things. This is especially true when we are young.
This story is played out again and again. The “entertainment’ section of the BBC News website seems like an endless succession of celebrities explaining why they didn’t mean something that they clearly did say or do a number of years ago - all in a desperate attempt to avoid the wrath of an angry culture. What is played out amongst celebrities and their fans in the media is also reflected in ordinary folks lives. What do we do with our sins, mistakes and failings? Are we doomed to have them dug up, many years later, and have them destroy our lives? Repentance (sorrow for wrong, and a turning away from it) is not deemed as good enough. There must be evidence of re-education - because after all (it is assumed!) , only really terrible people beyond any redemption deliberately do things that are wrong! On the other hand, we are very happy to overlook some of the most terrible wrongdoings of people who we consider to be on our side (whatever that is).
Douglas Murray is a not a Christian, but in his recent book “The Madness of Crowds” he understands that something is very wrong, and he even begins to recognise the root cause of the problem -
“In some manner with which we still haven’t even begun to wrestle, we have created a world in which forgiveness has become virtually impossible…..and we remain remarkably unconcerned to create any mechanisms or consensus over how to address the resulting conundrum.
The consensus for centuries was that only God could forgive the ultimate sins. But on a day to day level the Christian tradition among others, also stressed the desirability - if not the necessity - of forgiveness. Even to the point of infinite forgiveness…..Today we do seem to live in a world where actions can have consequences we could never have imagined, where guilt and shame are more at hand than ever, and where we have no means whatsoever of redemption, We do not know who could offer it, who could accept it, and whether it is a desirable quality compared to the endless cycle of fiery certainty and denunciation”.
I don’t write this just to encourage us to be forgiving people - although we must be! But I just wanted to point out the obvious - that the gospel is really good news.
Here is a point where people are beginning to see that there is problem in our culture that is crying out for a solution. It is not right to think that people are not asking questions anymore, rather they are asking different, deeper questions - questions that the gospel has the answer to. It is a great opportunity to re-introduce people to a message they think they have rejected without thinking through what else they are losing. Talking about forgiveness with people (perhaps in the context of the most recent celebrity news, there will be more from where the Robinson scandal came from) is a way of showing that Christianity is almost “too good to be true”. Getting people to a point where they want Christianity to be true is a big step - once they are there they will listen to the truth.
Once we begin to talk about the problem, necessity and seeming impossibility of forgiveness between us as human beings, it naturally leads on to talking about the greater forgiveness which seems even more impossible (as we have offended a holy God) - but is offered freely to us in Christ.