Christian Friendship and the Necessity of Forgiveness
Like all areas of Catholic spiritual growth, keeping a Christian friendship strong requires some conscious, deliberate effort. We need to cultivate and nourish our friendships by giving them the gift of time and by consecrating them with a relationship with God. Unfortunately, even when we take the time and effort to carefully nurture our relationships, human sin and ignorance can get in the way. You’ve heard the cliché that we only hurt the ones we love, right? Well, it’s the very fact that true friends open their hearts to one another that makes the potential for causing each other pain so much greater. That’s why one of the most important friendship building skills you can learn is the skill of forgiveness. No relationship can last very long without forgiveness. And yet we can find forgiveness really difficult sometimes, can’t we?
Like most of the important elements of human relationships, we tend to misunderstand and misdefine the term forgiveness. We think of forgiveness as some sort of emotional release. If we forgive, then we no longer have hurt feelings and we’d be able to have a normal relationship with the person who hurt us. But true forgiveness has very little to do with feelings. Like real love, true forgiveness is a choice.
Forgiveness is defined as the choice to give up the right for revenge. Revenge is often seen as a inherently negative. Indeed, God warns against revenge on many occasions. The Old Testament principle, “An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth” was actually meant to put a limit on revenge. In the ancient world, the norm was absolute revenge. You steal my sheep. I kill your entire family. God was telling the Hebrew People that they would be different. They wouldn’t seek absolute revenge. They would seek only justice. But justice is understood as a reasonable level of revenge. If someone does harm to another, it is good to see justice done – restitution paid.
But Jesus teaches us that the new standard of love is to forgive perfectly. You know the scripture, right? Saint Peter asks, “Lord, how often should we forgive our brother? As many as seven times?” Now, in Biblical language the number seven is almost always symbolic. It is often used to depict completion or perfection. In this case, Peter sought to show how much he had learned from Jesus about love. He was saying, “Should we forgive our brother perfectly?” But Jesus ups the ante. He tells Peter, “I tell you not seven times, but seven-seven times.” This is sometimes translated as seven times seven, sometimes as seventy times seven, and sometimes as seventy seven times. But what’s happening in the Aramaic is more linguistic than mathematic.. Hebrew and Aramaic languages lack words like “very” or “most.” To indicate degrees, words were repeated. So we say “Holy, holy holy Lord,” meaning that God is the holiest. In Genesis, Lamech uses seven in this same way. He says, “Cain was avenged seven times, but I am avenged seven-seven times,” meaning that he was avenged more than perfectly – as much as humanly possible. Lamech was boasting about absolute revenge. Jesus was harkening back to Lamech’s two-fold revenge to teach about forgiveness. We need not just to forgive perfectly – meaning exact justice – we must forgive as much as humanly possible.
To forgive as Jesus commands us means that we must choose – in love – to not only give up the desire for inordinate revenge (which is the definition of the capital sin of anger), but that we must choose to give up even the desire for justice. Sometimes justice must be done for the sake of the greater community. But when we love as Christ loves – going beyond simply willing the good of the other to the point of making ourselves a gift for another person – we can choose to give up everything that is “coming to us” for the love of the other person.
But the choice to forgive doesn’t always come with the feeling of reconciliation – at least not right away. To forgive doesn’t always mean that we forget. We may remember the hurt done to us. We may still feel the pain. But we can still make the choice to let go of revenge or justice.
Once we realize that forgiveness is a choice, we can apply its power to our relationships. Forgiveness does heal relationships, even if the emotions are slow to follow the choice. It gets rid of bitterness, which can be poison. In fact, it often does more good for the forgiver than for the one forgiven. And because forgiveness is a choice, it is a skill that can be learned.
In fact, the skills of friendship are part of the course “From Faith to Friendship” from the Keys to Spiritual Growth program. You can get started with this program really easily by enrolling in a FREE introductory course called “The Keys of Spiritual Growth.” This course will introduce you to five key areas of spiritual growth – including relationship building – that we all need to nurture if we hope to deepen our relationship with Jesus. Come join us at www.fromtheabbey.com and start rebuilding your inner abbey – the place in your heart where you can shut out the distractions of the world and focus on your relationship with God.
Brought to you by Jeff Arrowood. My mission is to help Catholic adults like you rediscover the JOY of learning and living their faith.
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