Like virtually everyone I know, I’ve been watching the news these last few weeks with shock and grief. There seems to be no limit to the horrors human beings will inflict on each other. The world is full of impossible pain. Of course, to be aware of this we don’t need focus on events across the globe. Our own local communities are also filled with impossibly painful stories of things that people have suffered terribly, not just at the hands of strangers but at the hands of members of their households.
Forgiveness is a central theme in Jesus’ teaching: “Don’t judge and you won’t be judged. Don’t condemn and you won’t be condemned. Forgive, and you will be forgiven” (Luke 6:37). I know from my own experience how challenging it can be to practice such a posture, even in the best of circumstances. I’ve spent years processing pain and working my way slowly toward forgiveness of what must surely measure on a global scale as relatively minor wounds. And so I wonder, what could forgiveness mean in the context of impossible pain? Where on earth would it even begin? From what tiniest first particles would it have the slightest hope of growing?
I do not pretend to be an expert on forgiveness in the most extreme human circumstances. Perhaps the truest thing we can do is acknowledge that forgiveness itself is impossible in the face of impossible pain without direct divine intervention. It must flow from a source outside of ourselves. Forgiveness of this scope and quality belongs to none but God alone. We can only channel it, not produce it in ourselves.
In early Christian teachings, however, there do seem to be hints about the nature of the divinely-planted seed from which impossible forgiveness has a hope to grow. This seed is our own reliance on grace—and our gradually expanding awareness of it.
In one of the most famous sermons in American history, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” Jonathan Edwards once described sinners as a spider, dangling over the fires of hell, held back from imminent destruction only by the thinnest thread of God’s forbearance. It’s a vivid, terrifying image, designed to frighten toward repentance. But perhaps viewing God in light of Jesus, we might appropriate the metaphor and picture the scene slightly differently:
There is indeed a fire burning, threatening to consume the world, to dissolve it into ashes. We watch it leap across our news feed, mesmerized by the flames. The thing is, we humans are the ones who lit this fire, alone and together, and we are the ones who keep on feeding it fuel, whether by twigs or giant logs or bottles of lighter fluid. Our position is precarious, no doubt about it.
But there is something still holding us and the world apart from total destruction—a golden thread of the infinite, unmerited grace of God. This thread of unmerited grace holds us back from plunging into the burning chasm that we created, that otherwise would have swallowed us long ago. The threat is not that God will suddenly lose God’s temper, grow impatient, and snap the delicate thread. The real problem, the real threat, is that the rest of us will keep sawing away the cord that we depend on.
It’s ridiculous, almost comical, when you imagine it this way—the spider over the fire, sawing back and forth at the thread above its head. But I can’t help suspecting this is exactly the scene Jesus has in mind when he issues one of his most challenging teachings: “If you forgive others their sins, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you won’t forgive others, neither will your Father forgive your sins” (Matthew 6:14-15). I don’t think Jesus is picturing God holding an open pair of scissors. Rather, I think he is observing that the one holding the sharp instrument is us.
We, in our hate and fear and pain, are constantly sawing away at the thread that’s holding us. This is not what we think we are doing, of course. Our actual aim is to see that the sinner next to us gets their just deserts. It’s their cord we mean to cut. And our wrath may truly be just. The trouble is, we have failed to understand the nature of the universe in which we live—there is only one golden, live-preserving thread sustaining all of us. We cannot cut our neighbor’s thread without cutting our own. One cord of grace holds us all, together.
I won’t suggest that this realization alone makes radical forgiveness any easier, or even humanly possible. But I do believe it is the core foundation, the base reality, on which any response to impossible pain must build for anyone who takes seriously Jesus’ revelation of God. Here is the world, held at the bottom of a golden thread of heaven’s grace. Until we begin to grasp the reality of our situation, the very idea of forgiveness as something worth talking about seems nonsensical. But once we do see this greater picture, we finally begin to recognize the necessity of the question: how do we, wounder and wounded, live together in a universe of one sustaining cord?
