In these instances it is the singular completeness of Christ's
forgiveness which is the most startling feature. It would be a libel on
human nature to say that men do not forgive each other, but human
forgiveness usually has reservations, reticences, conditions. Jesus
taught unlimited forgiveness, and what He taught He practiced.
"_Then came Peter, and said to Him, 'Lord, how oft shall my brother sin
against me and I forgive him? Until seven times?' Jesus said unto him,
'I say not unto thee, until seven times; but until seventy times seven.'_"
It is a vehement reply, in which a quiet note of scorn vibrates; not
scorn of Peter, but scorn of any kind of love that is less than
limitless. But whose love is limitless? Do we not commonly speak of
love as being outworn by offense or neglect? In the compacts which we
make with one another in the name of love, do we not specifically name
certain offenses as unpardonable? Thus one man will say, "I can forgive
anything but meanness," and another says, "no friendship can survive
perfidy"; and in the relations between men and women unfaithfulness is
held to cancel all bonds, however indissoluble they may seem. Now and
again, it is true, some strange voice reaches us, keyed to a different
music. Shakespeare, for example, in his famous one hundred and sixteenth
sonnet, boldly states that
Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove.
But who listens, who believes? Yet, if it should happen to us to be
placed in the position of the offender, we need no one to convince us
that a true love should be, in its very nature, unalterable. How
astonished and dismayed are we, when eyes that have so many times met
ours in tenderness harden at our presence, and lips which have uttered so
many pledges of affection, speak harshly! We do not deny our fault,
indeed; but we think we can discern reasons why it should be regarded
mercifully, why the very memory and sacredness of old affection should
make harsh judgment impossible; nay, more, why a deeply generous love
should even rejoice in the opportunity to forgive, and so should sanctify
our very shame with the healing touch of pity, and pour our tears into
the sacramental cup which ratifies a new fidelity.
It is so the sinner argues, his vision of what love ought to be growing
clearer by his offense against love. It is he alone, the sinner, who can
really sympathize with Christ's conception of love, for he alone feels
that this is the kind of love he needs. The elder brother does not
understand, Simon the Pharisee does not understand, because neither has
sinned in such a way as to be flung helpless at the feet of love. Peter
did not understand when he put his question to Christ. He spoke just as
the average man would speak, who has never sounded the tragic depths in
life, has never known the misery of weakness, and therefore has no fellow
feeling for the weak. Love as such men know it is less a passion than a
compact. It is a bond of mutual advantage, guarded from abuse by swift
penalty and forfeit. It is the reward of qualities, it gives no more
than it gets, it exists by an equal equipoise of service. If this
equipoise is disturbed its obligations are dissolved. It is easily
affronted, and under affront becomes resentful, bitter, even vindictive.
How oft shall I forgive my brother? Only as oft as a sense of duty shall
demand, only up to the point which is sanctioned by social custom, so
that I may save my reputation for magnanimity, always excepting certain
sins for which no pardon can be legitimately asked. But the hour was not
far off when Peter himself was to commit the very sins for which
customary love has no pardon. He was to be guilty of those offenses
which just and good men say they cannot forgive--meanness, cowardice,
perfidy, denial. That bitter hour revealed the true nature of love to
Peter. He knew that in spite of his sin against Jesus, he still loved
Him, and since love was unalterable in him, he expected an unalterable
love in Christ. It was the seventy times seven forgiveness that he
needed then; and how sweet to recollect in that hour that Jesus had
taught a love that knew no limit. "_Lovest thou Me_?" was the one word
his Master uttered when they met in the quiet morning light beside the
sea. "_Thou knowest all things, Thou knowest that I love Thee_," was the
swift reply. Storms disturb the sea but the central tides run on. Peter
found with equal astonishment and gratitude that not even perfidy was
able to separate him from the love of Christ, for that love was
unalterable as the morning star which hung above the lake, and cleansing
as the soft waves that lapped its shore.
The self-righteous man will never understand these things. Men and women
of meagre natures, with whom love is a compact, not a passion, will
vehemently disapprove them. People of smooth lives, ignorant of strong
temptations, will refuse even to discuss them. Jesus was well aware of
their implacable indifference or cold hostility, and boldly said that for
such people He had no gospel. His mission was not to the whole, but to
the sick. The Gospel of Jesus is in truth not designed for people of
comfortable lives. He has little to say to the children of compromise,
whose emasculated lives attain the semblance of virtue by the cautious
exercise of niggard passions. They can take care of one another, these
righteous ones, whose very righteousness is a negation.
But Christ's Gospel is for a tragic world. It is for the disinherited,
the weak, and the strong who have become weak; for those who have been
wrecked by folly and passion, and too much love of living; for those
whose capacities for good and evil, being both rooted in passion, are
equally a peril and a potency--it is to these Christ chiefly speaks. To
them the Gospel of unlimited forgiveness and unalterable love is the only
vital, because the only efficacious Gospel. The man whose very virility
of nature makes him the easy prey of murderous joy; the man shut up in
prison, who hears from the lips that once spake love to him, the sentence
of inexpiable disgrace; the outcast from honour, gnawing the bitter husks
of hated sin in far lands, and tortured in his dreams by the sweetness of
recollected happiness; these, and all like these, will understand Jesus,
for it is to them He speaks. Their very sin interprets Him. To their
forlorn ears the love He teaches will sound not strange, for it is the
only kind of love that can redeem them; nor foolish, for it is the only
love that dare stoop low enough to lift them up. These will not fail to
understand what conventional righteousness finds so difficult; these, and
also all good women who have had acquaintance with either deep love or
real grief, because it is a loving woman's sweet prerogative and divine
disposition to forgive, and to draw from her grace of forgiveness a more
tender and maternal power of loving.