FORGIVING THE ACCEPTABLE

CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith for the Years of Winter… ©

Forgiveness is the most difficult task for humans, and thus it is the thing Jesus talked about more than anything else, except for money. I think he talked about money so much because most of us especially need a lot of forgiveness for the way we relate to money.

Forgiveness is hard, and we don’t want to do it, so, in order to avoid having to forgive people, we choose their unforgivable qualities to discriminate against them.

For instance, if Donald Trump asks forgiveness for lying, for hypocrisy, for greed, for cheating, for fraud, for sexual promiscuity, for divorce, for meanness, for chicanery, for being a bad citizen, for refusing to pay his share of the taxes for the common good, for demeaning the poor and handicapped, for willful ignorance, for duplicity, for taking advantage of the poor and gullible while claiming to be a Christian, for taking bankruptcies so he would not have to pay the small business owners to whom he owed money while claiming to be extremely rich, for disrespecting all who disagree with him—any or all of those--I have a responsibility as a Christian to forgive him. After all, Jesus taught me to pray, “Forgive me my sins as I forgive those who sin against me,” and I pray such every day.

I cannot forgive Trump, however, for his parents, for his place of birth, for being white and old and straight and male, just as Hillary Clinton cannot be forgiven for her parents or her place of birth, for being white and old and straight and female, because they have no control over those attributes. There is nothing to forgive. They are unforgivable.

Something about which we have no choice cannot be a sin, and thus cannot be forgiven. It can only be accepted, and Jesus only put into that prayer about forgiving the forgivable, not accepting the unacceptable [Unless maybe you count Thy kingdom come and Thy will be done and lead us not into temptation and deliver us from evil and Thine is the power].

It’s a clever arrangement, in order to avoid having to obey God and forgive—be against only those qualities which cannot be forgiven. Once again, God, who is remarkably naive at times about these things, underestimated our human ability to find a way to be unkind to one another.

JRMcF

johnrobertmcfarland@gmail.com

The problem with writing a blog for old people, CHRIST IN WINTER, is an ever-diminishing population, of people who cannot remember to go to the blog site.

I tweet as yooper1721.

Here I come to save the day! No, not Mighty Mouse. Yuri Strelnikov, the boy genius of Katie McFarland Kennedy’s delightful Learning to Swear in America. Buy it or borrow it, but read this book! [What do you mean, you’re not old enough to remember Mighty Mouse?”