Bereaved vicar struggles with forgiveness

I saw Mrs Nicholson on Breakfast news this morning. She is the clergyperson whose daughter was killed in the London bombings. In her interview she said something like:

I can't forgive the killers for my daughter's death. I can forgive for my own pain and loss...

I may not have a very word-accurate recollection but the impression I came away with was that she seemed to be hesitating to forgive the actual death of her daughter. The damage to herself seemed to be forgiven or on the way but it seemed like she was saying that she did not have the right to forgive on behalf of her daughter. And in a sense, I think she's right. The sins against others, those others have to forgive for themselves. However, I also wondered whether she was getting at the issue of what such a forgiveness might seem to say. That is, she could not forgive the actual death of Jennifer because if she did so it might seem to condone or too lightly accept the wrongness of that death. She needs to have the perpetrators acknowledge that what happened was a wrong, an evil. Without that acknowledgement, to simply 'give up' her daughthers death would violate a sense of right and wrong; it would feel tantamount to saying that it was alright for Jennifer to die.

I don't believe that it is wrong to insist the death was wrong and that those who engineered that death were evildoers. Forgiveness here must not condone the wrong. It must, however, enable those left behind who are mourning the death to move on without bitterness polluting their lives and to build the possibility of understanding any mitigations and were it possible in this life, to hear and to begin accept the sincere repentance of the wrongdoers. She may not be there yet, but I do hope and pray that she is making progress towards the latter things.

And I wonder; does this give us an insight into the meaning of forgiveness for God? That God cannot forgive unless it's personal. That's the point about incarnation and cross. If God just 'forgave', without having God's own hurt, grief and pain to forgive, it would just be without any real meaning. We can 'forgive' all manner of things if they do not touch us personally. But for it to be real forgiveness, we must be personally involved; we must have a hurt to put to one side, a pain to refuse to impose back onto the perpetrator, the possibility of forgoing revenge, the acceptance and determination that for us love, grace and mercy trump strict justice.

So as we view Christ accepting to be harmed, vilified, mistried, misunderstood, betrayed and killed, we are seeing God personally imaging the cost of forgiveness; playing out in spacetime the personal price of forgiveness. This is not so much the price of our sins, first and foremost, but bearing the pain of forgiving of not passing on the hurt or passing back the wrong to the perpetrators. It is living out the prayer to 'forgive them for they do not know what they are doing'.

And more than living out. It is the event where it actually happens. It is not illustrative but performative. God accepts to be harmed by humanity so that forgiveness is actually personal. God is not condoning wrong but putting God's own being in the way of harm so that God may work through the hard task of forgiving in God's own person not as some kind of blithe and untouched benevolence making easy pronouncements of forgiveness because the hurt is not personal.

Without the cross we only have karma: an impersonal principle of Justice. The cross tells us that there is something about ultimate reality that is personal, that personal love [and therefore apathy and malevolence] do matter in the grand scheme of things; that forgiveness is the way to life where strict justice will lead to death.

BBC NEWS | England | Bristol | Bereaved vicar in 7/7 documentary
Filed in: forgiveness, Christian, spirituality, bombing
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