Forgiveness is Too Weak a Word

Observing Ascension When Every Day is Advent

Acts 1.1-11

One of my friends, a member of my former church, spends half his year in Florida. He coaches cross-country at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. He was on a group text thread with his runners as the coaches and runners messaged each other pleas for help and advice for where to flee as they attempted to escape the school shooting in 2018. He messaged me that night to give me the names of his kids who were still in surgery, and the name of the murdered bus driver who drove the team to all their meets. He asked me to add them to the church prayer list.

“Pray for Maddie,” he messaged me, “She has a collapsed lung. She was shot in the arm and the leg and the back. Her ribs are shattered. I’m not in denial or shock. I’m not depressed. I’m just angry. I’m just really, really angry. The SOB pulled the fire alarm so he could shoot the teachers and the children as they exited. And I’m angry at the thought that the Church has nothing else to say except we’re called to forgive Nikolas Cruz for what he did. Those who would forgive apart from all his evil deeds and America’s sinful indifference being put to rights have substituted themselves for God. Whatever happened to judgment? If Christianity is nothing more than an apparatus of absolution and forgiveness, then it’s positively immoral. If that’s blasphemy so be it.”

It’s not blasphemy.

And he was not wrong.

If forgiveness is all there is to Christianity— forgiveness without judgment, absolution apart any justice, love without any reckoning with sin— then Christianity is immoral.

The New Testament scholar Reginald Fuller registers the very same point in his book Interpreting the Miracles:

“Forgiveness is too weak a word for what God does.”

Grace doesn’t go far enough to describe the purposes of God.

The day after the Parkland massacre he messaged me again:

“Thoughts and Prayers?! WTF?! What’s even more galling is that as the nation grieved last night, just hours after the massacre, the NRA contracted the same operatives who circulated conspiracy theories about Sandy Hook and committed funds to an attempt to spread allegations that the Parkland student protesters— my kids— were child actors. I gotta tell you Jason, when the majority of American Christians believe that two people of the same sex kissing each other is a bigger problem than gun violence, I really can’t identify as being a Christian anymore.”

And…he doesn’t. Grace didn’t go far enough for him in order for the Gospel to sound like good news. Like Jesus today disappearing behind the clouds, he left.

But if forgiveness is too weak a word for what God does, what is the better word?

Ask the average American churchgoer to describe God and he or she will almost certainly first describe God as “loving.”

This is not wrong.

It’s thin.