Wretched Forgiveness: How the New Testament Ignores Jesus

Forgiveness makes people very uncomfortable, it’s radical and illogical. So much so, it has even been taken out of Christian theology all together. Often there is a certain economy present in the logic of forgiveness – if the person shows remorse, perhaps repents, apologizes, poses no further threat to the offended party, or maybe even there is a benefit to the offended party – the transgressor may be forgiven. In fact many people see Jesus working in the same manner, calling people to repent and enter the Kingdom of God, and thus be forgiven of their sins. Furthermore, Christians often claim and even more rigid economy to forgiveness than repentance, that of the death of Christ. Christ’s death somehow magically and mysteriously imputes righteousness onto those who trust in it, and thus we are justified to stand before God. This is a very strange turn of events from the Jesus who preached radical forgiveness of sins, not the imputation of righteousness. If we stand before God with our offenses annulled, as some claim, by the death of Christ, then there is nothing left to forgive. Similarly, if we are “clothed in the righteousness of Christ,” something many Christians celebrate the prospect of, it is almost as though we are Arnold Schwarzenegger’s character Dutch in Predator, in one of the last scenes where he covers himself in mud in order to avoid the alien hunter’s heat based vision. Christ is the mud that keeps God from detecting our sin! If we are justified or covered by the perfect essence of Christ, there is nothing left for God to forgive.

So does God actually forgive us? And what is forgiveness? First, it is important to understand that the forgiveness of sins was precisely what got Jesus in trouble with the authorities and ultimately what lead to his execution. But we must be quick to point out that we’re not speaking of run of the mill mercy and forgiveness, for as New Testament Scholar E.P. Sanders points out, the Pharisees were not quite the unforgiving murderous brood early Christian writers make them out to be, early Christians were so cynical about the Jewish religion they render it quite inaccurately. If Jesus had taught something like teshuva, or “return,” he would have been saying something quite Jewish, not anti-establishment. Almost all of the Hebrew prophets call for return, especially Ezekiel and Hosea, and it is hard to imagine anyone would pick out Jesus’ message as such as remarkable or heretical.

We might be tempted to end our discussion by claiming that Jesus offered forgiveness prior repentance, while the Pharisees only offered conditional forgiveness and mercy, i.e. repent and the be forgiven. As Sanders puts it, “The gift should precede the demand.” In other words, Jesus forgives with the telos, or goal in mind of the forgiven repenting. However philosopher John Caputo contends that while this is an intriguing and provocative theological point, it is hardly something that would have put Jesus on the cross, and furthermore if Jesus had dined with the prostitutes and tax-collectors and told them they were forgiven, and that lead to tax collectors giving up tac collecting and prostitutes to stop prostituting, the Jewish people would have been thrilled. These were not completely impractical or non-pragmatic folks! But of course this type of forgiveness, while working in the opposite direction of the pharisees offer, is hardly unconditional, it is simply forgiveness offered “on credit” as Caputo says. There is a demand! Is it more generous to offer something on credit, perhaps without interest, than waiting for someone to earn it? Surely! But again, hardly the radical teaching that gets a man killed.

Sanders proposal of how Jesus got into such trouble lies in his radical departure from those like Ezekiel -  Jesus did not offer forgiveness in exchange for repentance, nor did he offer it on credit, he simply offered it. This was even a sharp division between Jesus and John the Baptist, who also was calling for repentance as a condition. Of course this is not to say that Jesus did not desire for sinners to change their ways, but rather he did not require it, or demand it. Jesus says things like “the tax collectors and prostitutes are going into the Kingdom of Heaven before you” (Mat. 21:31) to the Pharisees. This is not an indictment on the poor moral character of the Pharisees – by all accounts they may have been perfect Jews. What Jesus is saying – and forgive my overuse of this term – is extremely radical and illogical, if not downright unethical. Jesus is claiming that sinners, not ex-sinners, get the front row seats in the Kingdom. Not that once tax collectors humble themselves and repent that they will enter the Kingdom first, but that they already are ahead in line!

This is what Derrida would call “the impossible.” It is forgiveness with no reason whatsoever. Furthermore, Caputo comments, this kind of forgiveness shifts the focus away from human beings and our differences, our distinctions between good and wicked, and to the God of unconditional forgiveness. This is a complete short-circuit of the economy of forgiveness and even the ethical. We are no different from the Pharisees, and not by virtue of the typical comparison, that we are judgmental like them. Rather, we are like the Pharisees, and the Pharisees are like everyone else in this sense:

It is just maddening that someone would get off scot-free, without having to pay for what they did. It offends all economy, our economic reason, which cannot tolerate this sort of disequilibrium… We want to get even, settle the score, a point which leads us back to Nietzsche’s “Genealogy of Morals.”

Has this ever been more evident than in the wake of the Casey Anthony verdict? Who hasn’t been calling for blood? Hasn’t this picture incensed rage

in almost everyone who has seen it? Someone we perceived as a murderer, of a small child no less, smiling because they have gotten off “scot-free.” Do not misunderstand me, I am not endorsing anything Casey Anthony did, or celebrating the fact that she seems to be free of any consequences for a truly evil action. Rather, this situation provides the perfect illustration of how typical Jews and Pharisees alike must have felt when Jesus told them that even unrepentant sinners may enter Heaven before them. This photo enrages us because she does not have a look of repentance on her face, rather one of having got away with something significant. This is exactly what the Pharisees must have been imagining in Matthew 21 when they are told people like Casey Anthony may enter the Kingdom ahead of them.

Sanders argues that this casts the “Christian-Jewish polemic in a clearer light.”

This was not a debate between the lovers of the gift and cold-hearted legalists. There was no disagreement between Jesus and his contemporaries, his fellow Jews, about whether God was loving, gracious, and forgiving. Everyone was agreed on the value and beauty of the “gift” so long as it is taken abstractly. What they disagreed about was whether the gift of forgiving occurred under the concrete conditions of repentance and restitution traditionally required by the  law and set forth explicitly in Ezekiel, or whether God granted forgiveness unconditionally and without repentance or restitution to those who followed Jesus. Jesus was being opposed, not by bigots and hypocrites, the unworthy opponents who Matthew describes (Mat. 6, 23), but by earnest and responsible religious people who were understandably offended by his views on forgiveness.  (Caputo, The Weakness of God: A Theology of the Event 223) 

The Pharisees vilified by Matthew especially are only appealing to a common sense of public justice. They want to see Casey Anthony pay for her crimes, just like the rest of us. Rachel Maddow would have an aneurism on the air if Jesus came on her show and declared that perhaps Casey Anthony, smiling as she leaves the court room, may enter the Kingdom of Heaven before the rest of us fine, upstanding citizens. It is scandalous. We already see the early Christians modifying this offensive teaching of Jesus in the Gospel of Luke, with his insistance upon repentance, meeting conditions, and sinning no more.

Writer A.N. Wilson postulates that the popular Lucan story of the tax collector and Pharisee in Luke 18 in which both ascend a mountain to worship God, wherein the Pharisee thanks God that he is not like the sinners and the tax collector, the hero of the story, humbles himself and simply askes God for mercy on him, a sinner, is an updating of a pre-Lucan parable told by Jesus. The difference, Wilson suggests, is that the original story is not about repentance and humility, as exemplified in the tax collector, but the unconditional grace and forgiveness of God. Rather than holding up the tax collector as a hero, Wilson speculates that Jesus was communicating that the perfect Jew who does not sin, the Pharisee, and the wretched tax collector, a betrayer of his own people, come before God on equal terms. God’s mercy levels any difference between the two men, and perhaps shows the preferred access to God of the tax collector, who has numerous transgressions to be forgiven. The sun of forgiveness and grace rises and shines upon the good and the wicked.

Going further than demanding humilty to attain God’s forgiveness, the New Testament moves beyond the entire category of divine forgiveness, and creates a paradigm of “God’s justice” or “holiness.” In this system, God forgives no one, rather, God is perceived as operating under the ancient common sense justice of people getting what they deserve, “an eye for an eye.” God is perfectly just, God balances the scales, thus, we must redefine forgiveness. Instead of Jesus-like unmerited forgiveness, forgiveness is reframed in the guise of grace being extended in the form of Christ’s sacrifice. If I haven’t already lost you, I will here

In the oversight (or coverup) of Christ’s teachings on forgiveness, it becomes necessary to “cheat” justice, to find a loophole. If God cannot forgive because he is just, then what? As I mentioned in the beginning of the post, this is where the Church begins theorizing about atonement mechanisms, really beginning at the start of the second century in earnest. We start reading things like Christ dies “in our place” or “for us” so that God is ultimately compensated for the offense of humanity. Others write (even in the New Testament) that Christ’s righteousness is transferred to us if we believe. Not only is this transference conditional, it is not conditioned forgiveness, but conditioned magic, a loop hole. Obviously God cannot stand sinners, the logic goes, he cannot just let them go scot-free, so we must be clothed in Christ, or be in Christ so that God does not judge us. The logic is quite perverse, and forgetful of what got Jesus in trouble in the first place (among other things). The church has done backflips to avoid the idea that God forgoes his claim on any transgression on account of humanity. This idea offends us like sin apparently offends God. I close with one more articulation of the unpopular message of Jesus on forgiveness:

… Forgiving sinners emerges as one of the most fascinating short-circuits of all time. To be sure, forgiveness is is a well-known and venerable idea that enjoys an excellent theological reputation, but it appears, upon closer examination, to be utterly mad and, in the anarchical sense we are describing here, actually to have been more or less rejected by both philosophical and theological traditions, despite the favorable press it is regularly given there. We all agree that forgiveness is for sinners, but when we speak of forgiving sinners, we usually mean for those who are not sinners anymore, former and reformed sinners, or sinners who at least intend to sin no more. But if by sinners you mean people who are sinner and are still sinning, with little or no intention of ceasing their sin, then it appears unreasonable or mad to forgive them, because they do not deserve it and common sense tells us we might not be doing them any favors in forgiving them when they have no intention of reform… but if we are not simply giving back to repentant sinners what they have earned and deserve, then it is the sinner qua sinner, the sinner who is still sinning, whom we must forgive, who, in a certain sense, is the only one we can ”forgive” if forgiveness is a gift and not an economic exchange. Unconditional forgiveness would institute a special alliance between God and sinners, which makes religion, although it says it is for sinners, very nervous, even as it makes philosophers nervous, for they drag their feet when it comes to doing things without sufficient reason. (Caputo, 212)

Lastly, we must remember that forgiveness is not forgetting, just like it is not “hiding” behind Jesus and his righteousness. As the pharisee and the tax collector together on a mountain, it is not as if God literally fogets, but does not hold the past against the forgiven. All the pharisee has on the tax collector is the past, and God wipes it away, not because he is fooled by it or forgets it, but knowing full well what is is, releases his claim on it.

No institute cannot operate like this, with this powerful of a short circuit at its core, and I content there has been a massive cover up. Evangelicals may say you must believe that you are saved to be saved and forgiven, Catholics may say you must confess or say a prayer, many others would say that we need Jesus’ death in order to be forgiven, and thus we theologize til the end of the world about how exactly God can allow us to live, to find a loophole in order to avoid this illogical, wretched, enraging forgiveness. Are we all terrible people for finding this type of “justice of forgiveness” repugnant? Were the Pharisees as awful as Matthew would have us believe? I don’t think so, we are doing what comes naturally to us, yet Jesus calls us beyond. Not to advocate letting murders and thieves run around to hurt people again and again, but to not hold the past against them. To forgive them as they are in the act. While this teaching enraged the Pharisees and other pious Jews and Romans,  the rest of the writers of the New Testament seem to overlook it, especially Paul, who obsesses over “Christ crucified” and hardly at all about the life and teachings of Jesus. If he had spent more time with waht Jesus said (perhaps he did not have access to it), maybe Paul would see that we do not need a sacrifice to be forgiven, that such a statement is in fact a contradiction, and economy in place of a gift. God help us all.