THE THREE MOST UNBELIEVABLE WORDS

If, as I maintain, the three most difficult words to utter and truly mean are “I forgive you”, then one of the ways to say those words is to remember that God always forgives us for what we have done. The lover always forgives the beloved as difficult as that is to do if the beloved is truly sorry for what has been said or done that needs forgiveness. God, who is the Ultimate Lover, if you will, always forgives us even when we do not ask for forgiveness, such is God’s ultimate and unconditional love for us.

God’s love, of course, does not give us carte blanche to do whatever we want simply because God will always forgive us in the same way that the lover does not give the beloved the same freedom. Love may mean that we never have to say we are sorry but it also means that we do not do anything that might require us to say we are such. It is our love for the other and God’s love for us that reminds us to never do anything that will require confession of things done or left undone.

The problem, of course, is that because we know how difficult it is to forgive another, we tend to assume that it is just as difficult for God to forgive us. And just as we innately want the one who has hurt us to somehow be hurt in return as a punishment for hurting us, so we have come to believe that God thinks and acts in the same way: God is going to make us pay for our sins somehow in some way either in this life or in the life to come. We don’t get off scot free.

Believe it or not, we do. Not only does God always forgive us, God even forgets. Back in the day when I was hearing confessions on a regular basis and granting forgiveness in the name of God and the church, even if I knew who the penitent was and the penitent knew I knew, once outside the confession box, whatever that penitent confessed was forgotten. If the penitent brought up the subject of the confession, s/he would have to tell me what the issue was as I had “forgotten” the confession. The sin had been forgiven and forgotten and it was time to move on.

What was left to the penitent was to have learned from the sin and move on and not wallow in it worried that God was going to make him pay for it sooner or later. The same is true for any one of us whether we make a formal confession to a priest or even to the one we have hurt. Sometimes, of course, making a confession to our beloved would be foolish. We did things in the past before our relationship began. We learned from those mistakes. We have grown. Time to move on.

The fact that as humans we cannot forget the past because it is stored in our brains forever does not mean we cannot live as if the past has been forgiven and forgotten. We can and we must. Yet the most important reason why we can is that we somehow have to come to believe, if we are not there already, that God also forgives and forgets. Our way of giving thanks for such love is to have learned from our sins and grown.