I struggled to find an organizing metaphor to help me understand the flood of questions and dilemmas that come to mind when I think about forgiveness, then it struck me: A deep connection exists between the dynamics of forgiveness and sex in a marriage.

Before you tune me out, give me a hearing. I think I have stumbled onto something important. Why after all—outside of perhaps torture and death—do we find infidelity in marriage the most difficult thing to forgive? Or as the inverse, what married couple has not experienced the culmination of forgiveness in making love with one's partner?

Most often the Adult Sabbath School Bible Study Guide has provided texts for me to study but little in way of guidance in its comments. This week I was gratefully surprised at how helpful the comments were in suggesting a path to follow through the minefield of quandaries posed by the question, "Why Forgive?"

The first step of this path I learned is that "inherent in the concept of forgiveness is a sense of unfairness and injustice.–You don't forgive someone for giving you money, fixing your flat tire, or helping your mother cross a busy street. You forgive them when they insult you, when they cheat you, when they hurt you or someone you love.–You forgive, whether or not the offense is, or ever could be rectified by the offender. This isn't fairness, this isn't justice—this is forgiveness. If we demanded fairness and justice in every aspect of our lives, we could never forgive, or for that matter, be forgiven" (81).

If I understand the author, inherent in the very notion of forgiveness is a sense of unfairness and injustice. Without unfairness or injustice, there would be no need of forgiveness. If slander improved our reputations or torture improved our health and pleasure we would not seek repentance for these things. Taking the point a step further, if we could really repay our debts then we would not require forgiveness of our debts. The very act of forgiveness—given and received—highlights the unfairness and injustice of any given act or situation.

The one thing I have learned from reading the Bible is that where unfairness and injustice exist, prophets, priests, and people alike complain and cry out for recompense. Even Jesus on the cross, cried out in the lament of Psalms 22, "My God, My God, why has thou forsaken me?"—a cry that seeks recompense at the end of the Psalm.

Forgiveness, then, insofar as it highlights unfairness and injustice, is never an alternative or a roadblock in the road to fairness and justice. It is an active crying out against the wrong. But it is more than this. It is a giving forth of the only spirit that can ever create a world of safety and security, and yes, satisfaction and delight. Laws can never accomplish as much.

Secondly, the lesson reinforced an idea that I had only recently come to ponder—the will to act is motivated more by example than by command. This is the reading that the lesson gives to C. S. Lewis's potentially ambiguous statement, "To be a Christian means to forgive the inexcusable, because God has forgiven the inexcusable in you" (83). Lewis's point is not to gird up one's willpower to copy God.

Rather the point is the inexplicable nature of the Christian act of forgiving the inexcusable. Such forgiveness is an oxymoron: It cannot be explained or codified. It can only be experienced. Grace begets Grace. Nothing else does. Quoting the lesson, "God forgave us our sins, not because we were worthy, not because we deserved it, not because of anything that we could do to earn that forgiveness. It was purely by grace; unmerited favor that we, so unworthy, have been given.–" (83).

Finally, what I learned from the lesson about forgiveness is that it has less to do with being victims of others than with God "honouring us by allowing us to share in His labours – for the world He loves."1 Forgiving our enemies, who rightfully deserve the name enemy because of their enmity toward us, is not to condone their wrong or to forget their violations toward the ones we love or us. But at the end of the day, forgiveness is the only possible path to a world without enemies.

Enemies cannot be legislated, isolated, or decapitated out of existence. Such actions are sowing fields of new enemies. Enemies can only be forgiven out of existence. This is not to say that all enemies become friends. Enemies who reject forgiveness in the end cut themselves off from existence—for all beings require relationships, and human relationships require forgiveness of wrong and commitment to caring.

We can see then why marriage is the highest symbol of salvation. Marriage is the crucible for creating oneness. Christ's final prayer for his disciples was that they might experience the very oneness that he and the Father experience between themselves. Here is a oneness closer even than marriage, for it is a heresy to call them two. The church's attention to preserving the sanctity of marriage above almost every other act of life is well founded. We have correctly theologically grasped the sexual component of being human.

It is not clear that we have theologically grasped in equal measure the significance of forgiveness in ordinary human life. Interestingly, as a moment's reflection reminds us, almost all of the great stories of forgiveness in the Bible involve adulterers or prostitutes—Judah and Tamar, David and Bathsheba, Hosea and Gomar, Mary Magdalene, the Prodigal Son, the woman thrown at Jesus' feet, the woman at the well, and our own broken relationship with God.

In the Bible, physical and spiritual adultery and prostitution are treated the same. Perhaps this is what the Bible has in mind when it says that God will forgive us as we forgive others.

This is not theological prattle. It is the essential ingredient of the oneness God seeks in all creation.

Notes and References

1. Ernest Gordon, Miracle on the River Kwai (London: Collins, 1963), 163, 164, quoted in this week's Bible Study Guide, 84.

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