Canon Historian Jon Meacham: Forgiveness Is Not About Forgetting

“And in anger his lord handed him over to be tortured…. So my heavenly Father will also do to every one of you, if you do not forgive your brother or sister from your heart.”

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.

Not long before his death, Benjamin Franklin was asked about his religious beliefs. He was taken aback by the question; he had, he said, never been called upon to delineate his faith. Never one to shirk a challenge, however, the aged Franklin replied in a letter: “Here is my creed: I believe in one God, creator of the universe; that He governs it by his providence; that He ought to be worshiped; that the most acceptable service we can render Him is to do good to his other Children. And that the soul of man is immortal, and will be treated with justice in another life respecting its conduct in this….As to Jesus of Nazareth …  I think the system of morals and his religion … to be the best the world has ever seen, or is likely to see. But … I [have] some doubts regarding Jesus’s divinity: although it is a question I do not dogmatize upon, having never studied it, and think it needless to busy myself with it now, when I expect soon the opportunity of knowing the truth with less trouble.”

One hopes that things worked out for the old boy. Franklin’s profession of faith came to mind as I contemplated this morning’s gospel, one in which Jesus tells us that we are to forgive trespasses against us again and again and again—and then again and again and again.

There is much to admire in Jesus’s exhortation. Much to appreciate. And we can all agree that being forever forbearing would indeed be an element of what Dr. Franklin thought the best system of morals and religion the world has ever seen.

But admiration, appreciation, and agreement don’t necessarily lead to action. I know I am supposed to forgive, but I don’t do so seven times, much less seventy-seven times. Alexander Pope put it best in his Essay on Criticism: To err is human, to forgive, divine.

Well, like you, I’m not divine. I’m human. So where does that leave us? As with so much of the gospel—as with so much of American history—it leaves us to decide whether the ideal can in fact shape us as we are buffeted by the real.

Washington is a good place to ponder forgiveness and forbearance. This is a capital that runs on criticism, on the throwing of punches, on the scoring of points, on the launching of attacks, on the assumption of an air of superiority. An important stipulation: I have long been a part of this public life, and I have been guilty of hyperbole and hypercriticism. So these are thoughts coming not from someone affecting to be saint, but from someone who knows he is a sinner.

People in public life in our time face constant attack—and in this age, almost everyone is a person in public life. Opinions are rendered with little thought and much ferocity, which means that many of us can feel trespassed against pretty much all the time.

Politics and culture are largely governed by a machinery of perpetual conflict. Perspective, proportion, and generosity of spirit are early casualties of such machinery. No Internet figure or news producer wakes up in the morning, surveys the news, and decides, well, not much to talk about today; let’s just go quiet.

No, the show must always go on. The machinery needs fuel—and the quality of the fuel doesn’t matter. There are political, ideological, and economic imperatives to generate heat, by whatever means necessary. And that heat doesn’t incline its targets to forgive our brothers or sisters when those brothers or sisters are busy whacking away at us.

Yet we must try. In public and in private, in good times and in bad, in hours of triumph and in moments of fear, our lives can be informed and ennobled by recalling that our faith is founded on the most revolutionary of premises: That the last shall be first. That the meek shall inherit the earth. That the dead shall rise.

None of this is easy. If it were a simple matter to conduct ourselves with forbearance and selflessness and generosity—if it were a simple matter to love our enemies—then we wouldn’t have to be perennially instructed to be forbearing, selfless, and generous, and to love our enemies. Nor we would not have to gather, from age to age, to hear the old story anew.

Yet here we are, of a September Sunday morning, contemplating the injunctions of a Messiah as we make our way through what the Victorian novelist George Eliot called “the dim lights and tangled circumstance” of a fallen, frail, and fallible world.

Fortunately, history teaches us that we can find a path through that twilight. Like the gospel, the Declaration of Independence, with its assertion of innate human equality, offers us a goal to seek and a standard to which to strive. Like the instruction to forgive, it is an ideal we fail to live up to, but it is also an ideal that endures, at least giving us a course to follow, however easily we lose our way.

Think about those moments in which we don’t lose our way—in which we make the ideal real. From Seneca Falls to the Edmund Pettus Bridge, from Lexington and Concord to Gettysburg to Omaha Beach, America has nudged the world away from tyranny and toward liberty.

History tells us that we are our best selves when we act out of generosity, not greed—when we lend a hand, not when we clench our fists. And, yes, when we forgive, not when we harden our hearts and close our souls.

To forgive is to start anew. To forgive is to rise above, where God is. To forgive is to build, not to tear down.

But let us be clear: In the life of the nation, forgiveness is not about forgetting. Americans make this mistake all the time. With Huck Finn, we’d always prefer to light out for the Territories rather than do the hard work of putting our own lives and our common life in order.

We should resist that impulse. Remembrance is essential to our tradition. From the first Passover to the Last Supper, remembrance is why we are here. To remember is a sacred act—among the most sacred that you and I can undertake.

Forgetting is arguably a sin as consequential as hardness of heart. For it is only in remembrance that we can know what wrongs we must right—what perils we must avoid—and what injustices we must ameliorate.

To seek to forgive but not to forget is the narrow path we are called to trod. I wish it were a wider, smoother, more congenial path. But it isn’t. And so here we are, pilgrims and sinners, beginning the journey once more.

In that late-in-life letter he wrote about Jesus, Benjamin Franklin added this: “I see no harm however in it being believed [that Jesus was divine], if that belief has the good consequence, as probably it has, of making his doctrines more respected and better observed.”

May we devote ourselves to the business of respecting and observing the doctrines of love and forbearance. Only in such devotion—only in such effort—only in such remembrance—can good come.

Such is the lesson of our history, both sacred and secular—a history in which we turn, as a people and as a polity, from limitation to possibility.

A history in which we have chosen to heed not appetite and ambition but the importunings of the prophets and of the angels.

A history which we pray will end with our being ransomed, healed, restored, forgiven.