Forgiveness

I was in church the other Sunday when a song began that I had never encountered before. It was a little slow and soft for my personal preference (Someone called me a Quaker once because I can't stay still when I'm worshiping), and most of the lyrics were less than inspiring to me. Suddenly, I sat down, grabbed a pen and started scribbling on the edge of the program. A line from the song had struck me deeply, and I needed to make sure I didn't forget it.

"With You there is forgiveness
and therefore you are feared"

Church history is rife with threats of punishment in Hell, but very few preachers have ever thought to threaten congregations with grace. Tell someone who has done something wrong that they will be punished, and they are not surprised. Simple human logic would indicate that. Every human idea of justice recorded is based on the idea that when someone acts inappropriately, they will be punished for it. What is much harder for people to grasp is that they are actually forgiven. Forgiveness disrupts the normal functioning of our everyday lives. It nullifies the equal and opposite reaction of any action, and we have no idea what to do with that.

Overwhelmingly, humanity is utterly obsessed with order. We want everything to make concrete, logical sense expressed in a format used since ancient Greece. Both the law and the Law fit very nicely into this worldview. When we do something wrong, we suffer the consequences. When we throw a ball, it moves in the direction we released it. When you pull the trigger, a small explosion projects a bullet down the barrel. Sometimes the gun jams, or the shell is bad, or any number of other things go wrong, but what happens when everything is right, and it doesn't fire. You put in a new shell, you replace every component, you buy a new gun and it won't fire. What then? Nothing is out of the ordinary. There is no logical reason for it not to work, and yet it doesn't. I know I would be more than a little confused, perhaps even the term scared would apply.

Does this differ from forgiveness? Is forgiveness more sensible? If we stop thinking forgiveness as some casual arrangement of words which mean you're not going to get a punishment, and start realizing that it is a fundamental violation of everything we have come to expect from reality. That is a much more frightening thing than any version of Hell I could imagine, and yet a sweeter sound I have not heard.