Reinhold Niebuhr, the eminent theologian, once described forgiveness as "the final form of love." Since this quarter’s lessons deal with forgiveness and this week’s lesson deals with love, this is a good time to bring the two together. So, what does forgiveness, a specific form of love, tell us about the nature of love in general?

Love makes the world go ’round

The dramatic power of forgiveness reminds us that nothing is more powerful than love. The famous statement, "God is love" (1 John 4:8 NRSV), is the closest the Bible ever comes to giving us a definition of God. And it presents us with a view of God that departs from every conventional picture of divinity. Everybody knows that God, or the gods, have enormous power. In most religions, all through the ages, that’s what makes them gods. In the Bible, however, God is anything but power-centered. He’s powerful, of course; after all, he brought the world into existence.

Much more important is what he does with his power. He never uses it as an instrument of sheer force. He never demonstrates his superiority just to show off or to coerce obedience. Instead, he characteristically veils his power. In fact, some of the Bible’s most vivid descriptions of God show that God’s essential character is most fully revealed, not in the possession of almighty power, but in the fact that he declines to use it. When God passed before Moses in the wilderness, he proclaimed, "The LORD, the LORD, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for the thousandth generation, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin" (Exod. 34:6–7 NRSV).

Forbearance, then, is more important to God than force. This is upsetting to people, especially when they want God to display his wrath. Jonah was furious when God failed to destroy Nineveh, as he had prophesied, and this was his complaint: God is way too merciful, and what prophet can serve a God like that? "But this was very displeasing to Jonah, and he became angry. He prayed to the LORD and said, "O LORD! Is not this what I said while I was still in my own country? That is why I fled to Tarshish at the beginning; for I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, and ready to relent from punishing’" (Jonah 4:1–2 NRSV).

Forbearance is an essential element in forgiveness. According to Donald Shriver’s careful study, An Ethics for Enemies: Forgiveness as Politics, forbearance is where true forgiveness starts. It consists in the decision not to respond in kind to those who have done us harm. This is so unnatural that it seems outrageous. After all, the simplest principle of justice is fairness—an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. In other words, treating other people the way they treat us. But forgiveness cuts across this "ethic of reciprocity" and refuses to perpetuate the cycle of violence and revenge. In In Search of Belief, Joan Chittester calls forgiveness "the most divine of the divine attributes": "To forgive," she says, "is to be like God" (187). We are never closer to the ultimate nature of things than when we forgive.

And we are never more powerful than when we forgive. Forgiveness really does change lives. When we see what happens when people forgive, whether it’s the priest forgiving Jean Valjean in Les Miserables, or Corrie Ten Boom forgiving Nazi guards who imprisoned her, when we see what it does for those who have been wronged and for those who have wronged them—for both sinner and sinned against—we know that we are facing one of the most effective forces in human experience. The power of forgiveness is paradoxical, because forgiveness means abandoning power, giving up the right to exact revenge and even the score. But forgiveness achieves a loftier goal: It transforms this situation. It invests victims with dignity and authority. Those who forgive refuse to give the past a lock on the future. They are the ones who control their destiny.

Love awakens love

Forgiveness also reminds us that love awakens love. There is a close connection between being forgiven and being forgiving, or between forgiven-ness and forgiving-ness. We see it in the Lord’s prayer, "Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors," and in Paul’s counsel to the Ephesian Christians: "Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ has forgiven you" (Eph. 4:32 NRSV). The strongest motivation to forgive someone is the memory of someone who has forgiven you.

I have been much more tolerant of other drivers since I ran into a pickup truck not far from my house. I was entirely to blame for the collision—as the insurance report put it, "Accident 100 percent your fault." But the man climbed out of his cab, looked at the bumper I had knocked off, the only damage to his truck—my Honda was totaled—and said, "I’ll just have somebody bolt that back on. Nothing else is wrong, so let’s just forget it." He didn’t call me an idiot, or worse. He didn’t feign injury. And he didn’t threaten to sue me. He let it go. When someone treats you generously it’s much easier to be generous to others.

This means that love cannot be commanded. Well, it can be commanded, but no one ever becomes loving in response to a command. We can only love if someone inspires us to love. And that is just what God does. He loves us, and that’s what makes it possible for us to love. "We love because he first loved us" (1 John 4:19 NRSV).

Love never ends

The resources of true forgiveness are infinite. They never run out. A person who forgives sometimes and refuses to forgive at other times doesn’t know the meaning of forgiveness. Forgiveness isn’t a now and then operation. It’s a way of life. It’s a permanent disposition. In fact, on the deepest level, forgiveness isn’t something you do, it’s something you are. When Jesus told Simon Peter to forgive, not just seven times, but as many as seventy times seven, he didn’t mean that Peter’s limit on forgiveness was too low, that he had stopped too soon. He meant that true forgiveness has no limits.

If forgiveness is the ultimate example of love, it shows that love never runs out. Nothing can exhaust it. In his famous description of love, the apostle Paul writes, "love is not quick to take offense," or, as one version puts it, "love keeps no score of wrongs" (1 Cor. 13:5 [NEB]). This suggests that people who make a habit of forgiveness, who live by an ethic of forgiveness, are seldom faced with a long list of things to forgive, because they don’t keep such lists. They are not preoccupied with the slights and misdeeds they suffer. They do not nurse feelings of resentment for the wrongs done to them. Instead, they cultivate the perspective on wrongdoers that Jesus had. They see in people, not the harmful things they have done, but their true identity as children of God.

Love never makes sense

No matter how many reasons we give for it, forgiveness never makes perfect sense. It never fits comfortably within the natural patterns of human behavior. Moreover, rational arguments will never convince people of its value. On the surface, forgiveness always looks stupid. People assume that forgiveness means overlooking a wrong, letting the wrongdoer go. To some, it is even immoral. As Dennis Prager sees it, forgiveness is a downright sin. It is simply wrong to treat wrongdoers as if they hadn’t done anything wrong. And it undermines the moral foundation of society. Prager misunderstands the meaning of forgiveness, but he is right; there is something "wrong" about forgiveness. It violates conventional sensibilities, and it always will.

To love, as well as to forgive, we have to escape the clutches of convention. Forgiveness can never be justified—not by rational arguments, anyway. To illustrate forgiveness, Jesus told the story of the prodigal son. To portray the parable’s effect on him, Rembrandt painted "Return of the Prodigal Son." To describe his own path to understanding, Henri Nouwen wrote a book about his encounter with Rembrandt’s masterpiece, The Return of the Prodigal Son: A Story of Homecoming. So, we have a book about a painting about a story. This is how forgiveness is communicated—not by logic and argument, but by symbol and story.

In the same way, love cannot be justified; it can only be demonstrated. But even though love never makes perfect sense, there is an inner logic to love, a logic created by love itself. Once love happens, it creates a new reality. Entrenched patterns of thinking and acting give way, and we find ourselves in a strange, new and wonderful world, filled with exciting possibilities.

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