Introspection: Struggling with Forgiveness

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Struggling with Forgiveness

Whenever you stand praying, forgive, if you have anything against anyone; so that your Father in heaven may also forgive you your trespasses.

Mark 11:25 (NRSV)

I cry out to God
Seeking only His decision
Gabriel stands and confirms
I've created my own prison

From "My Own Prison" by Creed

You may or may not have noticed that I've written a lot about forgiveness over the last few months.  A couple of months ago, I preached a sermon on Jesus' Parable of the Unforgiving Servant,¹ in which I suggest that forgiveness can be hard work, not only for someone forgiving another person but also for someone receiving forgiveness from another person.  Normally, when I preach, my sermon is based on one of the readings assigned for the week by the Revised Common Lectionary, but I chose to preach on that particular parable, not because it was one of the assigned readings but simply because it came to mind a few weeks earlier.

A couple of weeks later, I wrote a perspective on the story of Joseph, who forgives his own brothers for selling him into slavery years earlier, even though he has the authority to make their lives a living hell.²  Earlier this month, I wrote a perspective on the story from the Gospels about a group of friends who go to great lengths to take their paralyzed friend to Jesus.³  I suggest that maybe they put forth all that effort just so that their friend can hear from Jesus the message he needs to hear the most, that he is forgiven.

Naturally, I started to wonder if there might be some subconscious reason I've been gravitating around this particular subject.  I wondered if maybe somewhere deep in my soul I yearn for forgiveness.

There are sermons I've written that are deeply personal to me, even though I did not share any personal stories in them.  The sermon I preached back in August is one of them.  The truth is that I struggle with forgiveness.  I struggle to forgive people who have wronged me, and I also struggle to forgive myself for things I've done.

In my sermon, I suggested that there might actually be reasons that someone doesn't want to be forgiven.  For example, a person might not want to be let off the hook because he foolishly and pridefully thinks that he can undo what he did.  This is something we might actually see in Jesus' parable.  It has been suggested that the servant in the parable, who has been forgiven a huge debt he would never be able to repay, refuses to forgive someone else a comparatively measly debt because he is trying to scrape together all the money he can get in a feeble attempt to repay his cancelled debt.⁴

I went on to suggest that someone might not want to be forgiven because, despite any guilt he might be repressing, he insists that he hasn't done anything that has to be forgiven or that he was completely justified in doing whatever he did.  I also suggested that someone might not want to be forgiven because he thinks that he is an irredeemable piece of garbage who deserves to be hated forever for what he did.  These are things I've observed in myself amid my own struggles with forgiveness.

I've started to think that sometimes my struggles to forgive other people might be linked to my struggles to forgive myself.  I argued in my sermon that a person cannot truly experience forgiveness without first experiencing guilt.  Quite often, my sources of guilt are my failures to do things I think I should have done.  Some of my failures occurred when I was put into difficult situations by the actions or inactions of other people.  In such a cases, I tend to fixate on what other people did in order to avoid facing the guilt I feel over my own part in the matter.

For example, in late 2015, I left the church I had attended all my life.  The church had been in decline for many years, and, by the time I left, I was the youngest member by a wide margin.  A couple of years after I left, the church closed.  Sometimes, instead of confronting my guilt over abandoning the church I promised to support with my prayers, presence, gifts, and service or my guilt over failing to do more to serve my church while I was still attending, I blamed members of my church who caused divisions or failed to do what was necessary to ensure that the church remained vital for future generations.

Regardless of what other members of my church did or failed to do, I have to own my decision to leave.  I simply wanted to be part of a more healthy faith community with people my own age.  Whether or not any guilt I feel about leaving my church is actually warranted, I have to confront it so that I can forgive myself and move on.

Truth be told, I have some examples of failures that weigh on me a bit more right now, but, for various reasons, I will not be sharing them at this time.

Sometimes I have trouble figuring out if I really did something selfish or if I just did what was right for myself.  Sometimes I'm overly critical of myself, and sometimes I feel unnecessarily guilty.  I'm unsure about a lot of things, but I am sure of the fact that I cannot keep shielding myself from my guilt by scapegoating others and fixating on they did to me.  In the end, I will only be accountable for my own actions.  I have to let go of what I've been holding against others so that I can own my actions, confront my guilt whether or not it is justified, and work through it.

Jesus warns us that we will only be forgiven to the extent that we forgive other people.⁵  We cannot forgive ourselves unless we confront our guilt, and we cannot confront our guilt if we are distracting ourselves with the wrongdoings of others.


Notes:

1. Matthew 18:23-35
2. Genesis 37-45
3. Matthew 9:2-8; Mark 2:1-12; Luke 5:17-26
4. David A. Seamands.  Healing for Damaged Emotions.  1981, David C. Cook.  p. 28-29
5. Matthew 6:14-15

The photograph of the olive branch has been released to the public domain.  The photographer is in no way affiliated with this blog.