No monument, no obelisk, no vaulted mausoleum marks the final resting place of the anonymous person who lies buried there, only a simple stone and the single word, “Forgiven.”
Wouldn't it be wonderful if, when we died, the word “forgiven” might be marked on our gravestone? But in order to be forgiven we must forgive. For Jesus says, “If you do not forgive others, neither will your Father forgive you” (Mt 6:15).
Jesus knows that forgiveness is not easy. That's why he commands us to forgive, because he knows we don't want to do it on our own. Jesus calls us to make a hard choice, a decision, to forgive.
The problem with forgiveness is that many of us do not see it as a decision. We see forgiveness as something that is part of our feelings of hurt. Which means we often decide not to forgive until our feelings of hurt go away.
But the forgiveness Jesus talks about has nothing to do with feelings. Yes, we may feel anger and resentment toward someone who has hurt us. But feelings come and go like the wind and the rain. We cannot control our feelings any more than we can control when it rains or shines.
Yet, we can choose to forgive in spite of how we feel. This means we choose to forgive that person who caused us to be upset whether we feel like doing that or not. We make this choice because, through forgiveness, we are restored to intimate union with God, with others and with ourselves.
Jesus never asked us to “like” someone. He asks us to love someone. We don't have to like someone to love that person. For love, like forgiveness, is a decision we make. It is a choice to treat someone in the loving way Christ would treat that person, whether or not we feel any love toward that person.
When we choose to forgive, we do so despite feelings of anger or resentment. We don’t wait until those feelings go away before we make the choice to forgive. The choice to forgive helps us endure bad feelings because we know we have chosen the right course as we wait out the storm. Then one day, maybe a long time after we have forgiven someone, the storm subsides. Our feelings of anger and resentment are gone and we are glad we made the choice to forgive when it was hardest to do so. Somehow, that choice helped us get through the storm without losing our keel.
Forgiveness is like cloth dyed in India. After a bolt of cloth is dyed a certain color, workers go to riverbanks or streams and let out yards of fabric into the running water to rinse out the dye. Then they remove the cloth and let it dry in the sun to fasten the dye to the cloth. This process is repeated many times, until the color becomes permanent.
In the same way, forgiveness is not a onetime choice. It is a decision we make again and again. That's why Jesus says we are to forgive 70 times 7 times, if necessary (Mt 18: 21-22). We forgive over and over again until the dye of forgiveness is set permanently in our hearts.
In this way, we grow in freedom to live without the emotional fever of ongoing anger, resentment and judgment toward others. Which, at the end of our life’s journey, allows us to die in the peace of Christ, and to have carved on our gravestones the one word that is perhaps more important than our names or the dates in which we lived — “Forgiven.”
