There is a strong emphasis within the Christian tradition around forgiveness. While the Bible highlights the importance of forgiving others, what is stressed repeatedly is our need for God’s forgiveness, for God to forgive us. However, I have found that there is another type of forgiveness that is rarely discussed within Christian communities, and yet it is one that I see a profound need for within my palliative care and spiritual direction ministries, namely the need to forgive God. In this blog, I plan to explain our need to forgive God and what that experience of forgiving God looks like. I went looking in the Bible for any story or verse that talks about forgiving God. I could not find one. Now, you know why forgiving God is rarely if ever preached about in Church. And yet some Christian writers realize that we, humans, have a need to forgive God. For example, Chris Baldwin, a Christian blogger, speaker, and writer, writes that “we need to forgive God, not because He needs forgiveness, but because we need to have forgiven Him” (https://chrisbaldwin.com/why-forgive-god/). Baldwin argues, and many Christian leaders including myself would agree with him, that God can only act in good ways. God cannot do evil things that hurt people. Yet I find in my spiritual direction and palliative care ministries that most people need to forgive God. Why is that? It is not because God caused hurt to us. Rather, it is because God has failed to protect us from the many traumas that have happened to us in our life. The reality is that we find ourselves living in a world where we often experience life as very traumatic. By traumatic, I mean that we have had times in life where we felt our survival was threaten, when our soul felt overwhelmed due to too much physical or emotional distress. We now know that adults develop Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) when they “have experienced or witnessed a traumatic event such as a natural disaster, a serious accident, a terrorist act, war/combat, or rape or who have been threatened with death, sexual violence or serious injury” (https:/www.psychiatry.org/patients-families/ptsd). If trauma happens to adults in these circumstances, how often do children with young sensitive souls experience trauma in their childhood homes or in elementary schools? A lot more than we, in the past, have realized. Why does God allow these life-threatening traumas to happen, especially when they cause such damage to our soul and body? Such trauma destroys our trust in the goodness in life and in the goodness and faithfulness of God. Very few people truly trust the goodness of the flow of Life and God’s spirit within their life. Instead, people look to themselves or wealth or power or medical professionals or family or their community of friends or government or job security or insurance, and the list goes on, to protect them from the uncertainties of life. There is nothing wrong in looking to these to experience some security in life but the reality is that nothing can provide us total security in life. This is especially evident as we face the reality of dying and death for all our earthly securities begin to break down. Now, we have to lean into our trust of life and God, and it is here that many people struggle for this trust is often missing or very fragile. That lack of trust and faith in God within us tells us that many of us have a need to forgive God for the times that God has failed to protect us from the traumas of life. This forgiveness journey is a journey I know well from watching my two younger hemophiliac brothers die both of HIV/AIDS, Jamie in 1992 at the age of 24 and Kevin in 1997 at the age of 32. I remember preaching a sermon as a student pastor a month before Jamie died where I expressed my anger and lament with God for what was happening to my youngest brother. During the years between my two brother’s death, I developed the “Why Workshop” where I explored with participants various reasons for why God allowed suffering and death to be part of earthly life. In wrestling with the why question with many people and scholars, I came to see cognitively the gift side of suffering in this world. Dr. Paul Brandt and Philip Yancey capture well this point in their book titled “Pain: The Gift Nobody Wants” (Dr. Paul Brandt and Philip Yancey, 1993). But while my mind was somewhat satisfied, my heart was not. From my heart’s perspective, no right theology or belief could take away the feeling that it was wrong that my brothers died so young in their lives. My heart does not want God to rationalize away the pain that has happened. This pain should never have happened in the first place, period. Instead, my heart wanted God to admit to me that I was right, that my brother’s death was a tragedy that should never have happened. If God could admit that, then possibly my heart could find the compassion and courage to forgive God for failing to protect us from evil, sin, illness, and trauma. In the Old Testament, there is the story of Job who wrestled profoundly with the issue of suffering and the why question. He is portrayed at the beginning of the story as a good family man who God blessed with children and a thriving farming operation. And then he loses everything. His farming operation of many herds of sheep and camels is destroyed by a powerful thieving tribe. A freak wind storm causes his home to collapse killing all his sons and daughters. Then Job himself becomes physically sick with painful sores on his head and feet. In the midst of all of this suffering, I can imagine Job being very angry at the unfairness of life. These tragedies should not have happened...and yet he seeks to hold onto his faith in God. Throughout the Biblical story of Job, people challenge Job about his faith in God. First, it begins with his wife who says, “how can you believe in God when God has does this to you?” Then three friends come to comfort Job, but all three of them believe in some form that Job must have done something sinful in the eyes of God. For them, suffering is seen as a consequence from God for doing something wrong. Job totally disagrees with them for he believes that he has been a good and upright man before God. And yet Job cannot make sense of his suffering. Such painful suffering should not be happening to him who has been good and faithful. It does not make sense and so Job is in many ways questioning the ways of God. He may be possibly even looking for a way to forgive God for all the tragedy that has happened in his life. In the end of book, the author of Job has God appear to Job through a whirlwind and God confronts Job, “What give you the right to question me? Let me interrogate you and see how you respond” (Job 38: 3). In the end, Job is humbled, and says “I am of little worth. How can I answer you?” (Job 40: 3) Clearly within the book of Job, there is no room within the theology of its author for the forgiveness of God...where God is forgiven for allowing tragedies in life that should not have happened. I have come to realize that this is Old Testament thinking... older theology before God is revealed more clearly through the person and life of Jesus. There is a gospel story where Jesus is asked directly the why question around a tragedy, the death of a brother who died before his time. I want to turn to this story in the gospel of John now for I think it sheds light on what it means for us to forgive God. The gospel of John is challenging to interpret for it is clearly more than a history of Jesus’ life. Being written a few decades after the gospels of Mark, Matthew, and Luke, it has a very different flavour and goal than the other gospels. We see within John's gospel a theology that reveals how the early Johannine Christian community came to understand Jesus and his life. As a result, we should treat these stories as based less on historical fact and more on the theological truths that the author of John’s gospel wanted his Christian community to believe, that is, "Jesus Christ is the Son of God." With this lens in mind, let us turn to this story of Lazarus. . In the gospel of John, we read how Lazarus, the brother to Mary and Martha, is quite sick. It is also apparent from this story that Lazarus, Mary, and Martha are very close friends to Jesus. In fact, when the sisters sent a message to Jesus to quickly come here for Lazarus, they described Lazarus as “the one who you, Jesus, love.” When Jesus finally arrived at Mary’s and Martha’s home, his close friend Lazarus has already been dead four days. It is here that Jesus is faced first with Martha’s version of her why question. “Jesus, if you had been here, my brother would not have died” (John 11:21). The author has Jesus respond, “I am the resurrection and life. Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die...Your brother will rise again.” These words placed in Jesus’ mouth by the author of John’s gospel in response to Martha’s question are theological promises based on what the Johannine Christian community had come to believe about Jesus based on his resurrection. Then Mary, Martha’s sister, comes to where Jesus is and upon seeing him, she kneels at his feet and asks Jesus the same why question, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died” (John 11:32). This time Jesus does something totally different. No theological platitudes. Instead, we see a very different person. The gospel writer writes, “When Jesus saw her weeping, and the Jews who came with her also weeping, he was greatly disturbed in spirit and deeply moved. He said, 'Where have you laid him?' They said to him, 'Lord, come and see.' Jesus began to weep." (John 11: 33-35). Jesus was so greatly disturbed in spirit that he wept. Jesus wept. Those two words have become very significant for me. I remember after my brother Jamie died that I was numbed. Those words “God, if you had been here, my brother would not have died” echoed so true to my heart then. I felt so abandoned by God, alone, by myself. I remember going through 4 funeral visitations, trying to put on a brave face as people shared their condolences with me and my family. Even though I was surrounded by all those caring people, my heart felt frozen and alone. I was in too much pain to sense God's presence or have any faith in God. Then the funeral service finally came. The church sanctuary in Lucknow United Church was full...easily over 200 people. Just before the memorial service began, my family walked in to sit on the front benches. As I came in, I was struck by how everyone in the sanctuary seem to be crying. Then it hit me. I realized that all those tears I was seeing were signs of God crying with me in my pain...that God, like Jesus, was disturbed in spirit and deeply moved. God was in as much pain as I was over the tragedy that had happened to my brother Jamie. God too saw his death as wrong, that it should never have happened. In that moment of realization, I began to sobbed deeply and as I did so, I felt a profound love of God flow into me, a Divine love that I had not felt for a long time. In that moment, I realize now that my heart had forgiven God for the tragedy that had happened to Jamie. And with that forgiveness, my life was spiritually resurrected. I felt alive again. My soul had risen to life. In some ways, I wish the story of Lazarus ended in John's gospel very differently then having Jesus raised Lazarus from physical death. Instead, I wish we read about Jesus weeping with his friends Mary and Martha as they remembered and celebrated Lazarus’ life at his Jewish funeral service. However, the gospel writer John had more important theological purposes in mind when he wrote his gospel. He needed to prove that Jesus was the Son of God for first/second century Christians were in conflict with the dominant Roman culture who had come to see their Roman Emperor as Son of God. Today, scholars are divided around whether this Lazarus story actually happened historically. As a spiritual care provider who see palliative care clients every day of my work, the good news of the Lazarus story for them, who are in pain, is not Jesus raising Lazarus from the physical grave. Rather the good news in this story is that fact that Jesus wept when he saw Mary, Martha, and the Jewish community weeping over the loss of Lazarus. He felt their pain...his spirit was deeply disturbed...and as a result he wept. When we realize that God feels our pain as deeply as we do, and we see signs of this incarnation through faithful people of God caring and crying on God’s behalf, our hearts begin to soften. This softening opens the door to us beginning to forgive God for not protecting us from the tragedies that have happened in our lives. Until we forgive God, I am not sure we can fully embrace the experience of the resurrection. This is a key role I play when I visit people who are dying. I help them experience forgiving God through my ability to feel and hold their pain, and as result, they begin to hope that God will be there for them when they die. There is a teaching in John’s gospel that has taken on a whole new meaning for me as I understand more fully how we experience forgiving God. The gospel writer of John has Jesus teach, “I am the vine, you are the branches. Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit” (John 15: 5). When Jesus says that each of us is connected to the vine of God, that means that God experiences everything we experience in life. We often see this connection to God as the source of our experience of love, peace, joy, compassion, strength, power, value, grace, and so on. That is very true. But our experiences in life also flow the other way meaning that the vine, which symbolizes God, feels everything that we, the branches, feel. When we feel pain, God feels our pain. And that is not only true of pain, but of all the negative experiences and thoughts including guilt, shame, worthlessness, helplessness, fear, despair, depression, grief, etc.. Everything that we experience in life, God also experiences. Most of us managed these negative experiences that we judge as wrong. God doesn't. When God experiences our many painful struggles, the spirit within God becomes deeply disturbed. God's heart fills with compassion and God weeps with us. Can you imagine what God experienced on that day when he saw Jesus, one of his faithful children, being crucified on a cross by his supposedly faithful religious leaders who believed they were doing God’s will? It must have been torture for God to see this. God witnessed trauma firsthand that day, a trauma he wished never happened and was powerless to stop. God wept profoundly that day when Jesus cried out on the cross his why question, “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matt. 27:46). I cannot imagine Jesus experiencing the God that Job supposedly encountered, the God who scolded Job saying, “What give you the right to question me? Let me interrogate you and see how you respond.” Clearly, God felt the trauma that Jesus experienced that day as he was a crucified, a trauma that never should have happened. When I was a pastor, I saw the Good Friday service as an opportunity for my congregants to relive the tragic story that led up to Jesus’ crucifixion. Through reliving this story, we begin to feel what God experienced on that day through Jesus, through Judas who betrayed Jesus to the religious leaders, through Peter who denied knowing Jesus, the scheming religious leaders, the Roman governor, the thieves on the cross, etc. It was a very tragic day...trauma at its worst. And God saw it all... experienced it all...and God’s heart was so deeply disturbed that day, just like the women's hearts who beat their breasts and wailed as they followed the convicted Jesus to the hill where he would be crucified (Luke 23: 27). When we sense God experiencing deeply our pain with us, it opens the door for us to forgive God for the trauma that has happened to us. If you look at all the Bible stories connected to Easter through this framework, you soon realize that each character goes through a process of forgiving God. All of them are in shock for they can’t believe that Jesus is dead, that God allowed Jesus to die on the cross. They all believed in the same why question as Martha and Mary did, “Surely, God, if you had been here, Jesus never would have died.” A major trust with God had been broken. But as each character encounters the risen Christ, God meets them in their place of pain. For Mary Magdalene, it was her grief. For Thomas, it was his doubt. For Peter, it was his guilt for denying Jesus. For the two on the road to Emmaus, it was their disillusionment for they believed Jesus would free their Jewish people from Roman oppression. As these characters felt the presence of God at their point of pain, that is, God experienced their pain, they soon forgave God for the trauma that had happened in the painful death of Jesus. They were now able to embrace the profound truth that Jesus is alive, that death is not the end of life. Rather, life continues on beyond the grave, that death is merely a doorway to a heavenly life beyond this earthly life, as revealed in their experiences of the resurrected Jesus.
It is very apparent to me that God’s Love is far more powerful than we realize, but not in the way the world understands power. When we experience this love, not only can we forgive others and ourselves; we are also able to forgive God. For this “love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. It never ends. This love is eternal” ( 1 Cor 13: 7-8a). This love that allows God to bear all pain opens the door for us to forgive God for the trauma that has happened to us. Amen. Questions to Ponder: 1. What is your response to this idea of forgiving God? Does it resonate for you, and if so, why? If it does not resonate for you, explore why. 2. Explore the areas in your life where you don't trust the flow of Life and God. When did you lose that trust? What possible trauma is behind this lost of trust? 3. What is needed for you to regain this trust? What experiences of life do you hold God responsible for and thus need to forgive God for? 4. How does remembering the events of Good Friday and Easter help you in your journey to forgive God? Gord Alton MDiv RP CASC Supervisor-Educator
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