Christian Forgiveness is to Forgive the Unforgivable

Mark Shea on mercy. Excerpts:

...increasingly, we are a culture that only has "mercy" on people who "couldn't help it" or "didn't know any better." The problem is, that's not mercy because allowing for weakness, ignorance, or some other excuse is not mercy. It’s excusing. Now, it’s a fine thing, in any conflict, to search first for reasons why somebody who appears to have acted in malice did not really do so. We should always do this as our first act of charity. But a curious thing has happened in our culture, something that impinges even on Christians who ought to know better. As we reject God more and more, we have allowed more and more space for excusing evil and less and less space for admitting sin. Result: we have arrived at an era in which everything must be excused and nothing may be forgiven.

We see this in the weird combination of sophistry and mercilessness that is post-modernity. Straining credulity, we create enormous and preposterous excuses for all manner of moral derangement precisely because we believe there is no mercy for sin. Then, when somebody finally does cross the line into what is undeniably sin (Nazis, child molestors, racists, terrorists, tobacco lobbyists or some other category of culturally inexcusable evil), we simply rain down on their heads all the contempt and vilification in the world—and live in fear of what judgment awaits us should we fail to find an excuse for our own sins.

That’s not hard to grasp. Apart from the miraculous forgiveness of the gospel, what else should we expect? When we look sin in the eye—real sin in all its vicious, willful, sneering, lying malice—well, who wants to forgive that? Why, if you did that, that bastard would get off scot free! Forgive that tool I work with, the one who has been gunning for my job and spreading ugly rumors about me at the office water cooler? Forgive that bitch who spent years beating me as a kid and laughing at my tears? Forgive that zit-faced moron who deliberately keyed my car when I confronted him about tormenting the neighbor’s cat? Forgive Osama bin Laden? NO!

But Jesus does, in fact, demand exactly that mercy of us. In fact, both here and in the Our Father, he predicates any hope of our receiving mercy on our willingness to extend it to others. Be merciful and you shall obtain mercy. Forgive and you shall be forgiven...

For more on the sort of mercy we're talking about, see here and here.