Monday 22 December 2008

The first tentative words...?

I've been writing on forgiveness for a week. A pretty much solid week of work, and I've just about come to a point where I can stop at, and be happy with the work I have done. If I tried to do any more, it would feel incomplete, and thus, is probably not that great an idea to start now. January is for more work, methinks.

Over the week I have come to a few, tentative and very vague conclusions. Here they are, probably in slightly less coherent form than in the essay, but my brain is just about fried.

First off - God forgives us first. I know that sounds somewhat daft, and even somewhat obvious, but I had been plunging myself into Jesus' teaching on prayer, where he says 'forgive us our debts, as we forgive those who are indebted to us.' The way the sentence reads is as if we are only forgiven if we continue to forgive others. However, when we juxtapose this teaching with his parable of the unmerciful servant, we see that we cannot affect God's forgiveness of us, but as we are forgiven, we need to emulate God's character, and forgive others.

Second - it is nigh on impossible to forgive wrongs not done to you. This, as you may well imagine, poses a problem for the situation found in The Sunflower. Forgiveness is a very personal thing, and needs the victim to forgive. Which leads us to the question: is murder unforgivable?

2 comments:

Rachel said...

Did you leave in my contribution?

Rachel xxx

Steve said...

I don't think murder is unforgivable...because murder affects others, on a personal level. If my sister was murdered i would experience lots of different emotional and thoughts towards the person who murdered her, and ultimately i would have to forgive the person (that did the murdering) for the murder.