Human desires are aimed at a picture, formed and nourished in the imagination—what we think the good life looks like. We will renew our minds only when our imagination’s picture of the good life aligns with God’s picture of the good life. How do we sanctify the imagination and thereby renew the mind? We do so by desiring what God designed us to desire; namely, his presence, his people, and his will. Such alignment is not a once a year thing like aligning the tires on the car, it is a continuum. We are always somewhere on that continuum, whether more aligned or out of alignment with God’s picture of the good life.
We were made for the good life found in communion with God. How tragic, then, that we are cut off from the good life by sin. Our separation from God is inherited from our first parents. Adam and Eve ushered in a wasteland and we happily maintain the acreage and we were cut off from that good life until Christ died and opened the door to communion again. This is the gospel! Our human capacity, while great, cannot extend past the limitations of sin. Spurgeon once said, “Christ has come that we might have life; if we could have obtained life without his coming, why need he come? …If life is to be obtained apart from the Holy Spirit, to what end does he work in the human heart?”
Sin is the primordial barrier to the good life, abundant life, so it will remain outside our reach until we pass through the twin doors of repentance and forgiveness. There are many means to abundant life, but they all come after repentance. Repentance is directional. In Greek, the word metanoia, repent, suggests a directional shift of 180 degrees. When we make this directional change, we find the doors of forgiveness and we enter the Land of Pardon. Here, in this land, we are at home with God. Abundant life cannot be found outside of the Land of Pardon, nor is that glorious land obtained by conquest. Entrance is always a gift because forgiveness is a gift. Forgiveness is a divine gift granted by Christ’s sacrifice. The people in our lives who grant us forgiveness participate in this divine act because they are God’s extension. By them we taste the nectar of God’s healing and they press us toward God’s vision of the good life; namely, communion with God.
The single greatest source of transformation and personal freedom in my life has come by way of forgiveness. When I did not confess my sin, when I fought repentance, the shell of my life squeezed around me. I was spiritually constricted and had difficulty breathing. Like the psalmist, “When I declared not my sin, my body wasted away through my groaning all day long. For day and night thy hand was heavy upon me; my strength was dried up as by the heat of summer” (Psalm 32).
I certainly pleaded with God for his forgiveness, but I did not confess to those against whom I had sinned. Fortunately, God knows me better than I know myself and he knows that there is no spiritual freedom for those who do not confess both vertically (to God) and horizontally (to our neighbor against whom we have sinned). I wanted the Land of Pardon without the cost of entrance. I wanted to carry my guilt on my back and still enjoy that beautiful land. God would have none of it. He pressed and hounded me, narrowing my confines until I had no choice but to confess. For this hounding I am eternally thankful because it pressed me through the gate. God knows that we are imaginative creatures, dependent upon pictures more than we will admit, and so he uses flesh and blood people to show us a picture of his grace.
The true story of Corrie Ten Boom is one that has always moved me. She survived the German internment camps, but her dear sister Betsy did not. Corrie was more petulant than Betsy and envied her sister’s ability to show grace in the face of brutality. Though she learned much from Betsy in regards to forgiveness, her greatest test came long after the war.
In 1947, Corrie returned to Germany with a message of God’s forgiveness: a difficult message, no doubt, but made all the more difficult by one encounter which she recounted later.
“It was in a church in Munich that I saw him—a balding, heavyset man in a gray overcoat, a brown felt hat clutched between his hands. People were filing out of the basement room where I had just spoken, moving along the rows of wooden chairs to the door at the rear.
“It was the truth they needed most to hear in that bitter, bombed-out land, and I gave them my favorite mental picture. Maybe because the sea is never far from a Hollander’s mind, I liked to think that that’s where forgiven sins were thrown. ‘When we confess our sins,’ I said, ‘God casts them into the deepest ocean, gone forever. …’
“The solemn faces stared back at me, not quite daring to believe. There were never questions after a talk in Germany in 1947. People stood up in silence, in silence collected their wraps, in silence left the room.
“And that’s when I saw him, working his way forward against the others. One moment I saw the overcoat and the brown hat; the next, a blue uniform and a visored cap with its skull and crossbones. It came back with a rush: the huge room with its harsh overhead lights; the pathetic pile of dresses and shoes in the center of the floor; the shame of walking naked past this man. I could see my sister’s frail form ahead of me, ribs sharp beneath the parchment skin. Betsie, how thin you were!
“Now he was in front of me, hand thrust out: ‘A fine message, Fräulein! How good it is to know that, as you say, all our sins are at the bottom of the sea!’
“And I, who had spoken so glibly of forgiveness, fumbled in my pocketbook rather than take that hand. He would not remember me, of course—how could he remember one prisoner among those thousands of women?
“But I remembered him and the leather crop swinging from his belt. I was face-to-face with one of my captors and my blood seemed to freeze.
“ ‘You mentioned Ravensbruck in your talk,’ he was saying, ‘I was a guard there.’ No, he did not remember me.
“ ‘But since that time,’ he went on, ‘I have become a Christian. I know that God has forgiven me for the cruel things I did there, but I would like to hear it from your lips as well. Fräulein,’ again the hand came out—’will you forgive me?’
“And I stood there—I whose sins had again and again to be forgiven—and could not forgive. Betsie had died in that place—could he erase her slow terrible death simply for the asking?
“It could not have been many seconds that he stood there—hand held out—but to me it seemed hours as I wrestled with the most difficult thing I had ever had to do.
“For I had to do it—I knew that. The message that God forgives has a prior condition: that we forgive those who have injured us. ‘If you do not forgive men their trespasses,’ Jesus says, ‘neither will your Father in heaven forgive your trespasses.’
“I knew it not only as a commandment of God, but as a daily experience. Since the end of the war I had had a home in Holland for victims of Nazi brutality. Those who were able to forgive their former enemies were able also to return to the outside world and rebuild their lives, no matter what the physical scars. Those who nursed their bitterness remained invalids. It was as simple and as horrible as that.
“And still I stood there with the coldness clutching my heart. But forgiveness is not an emotion—I knew that too. Forgiveness is an act of the will, and the will can function regardless of the temperature of the heart. ‘… Help!’ I prayed silently. ‘I can lift my hand. I can do that much. You supply the feeling.’
“And so woodenly, mechanically, I thrust my hand into the one stretched out to me. And as I did, an incredible thing took place. The current started in my shoulder, raced down my arm, sprang into our joined hands. And then this healing warmth seemed to flood my whole being, bringing tears to my eyes.
“ ‘I forgive you, brother!’ I cried. ‘With all my heart!’
“For a long moment we grasped each other’s hands, the former guard and the former prisoner. I had never known God’s love so intensely, as I did then.”1
God pushed Corrie Ten Boom further than she could see. She thought she understood forgiveness, but it was to be revealed more vividly, more painfully, than she had previously imagined. God pushed her toward the door of forgiveness from one side and pulled on the door from the other. Forgiveness is the incarnation of divine, Trinitarian happiness. Each act of forgiveness is a small foretaste of the eternal Land of Pardon and a shadow of the magnificent forgiveness found through Christ. The blood of the Lamb is the key that opens the door guarding that beautiful land of forgiveness. That blood is our one and only claim to abundant life. As Charles Spurgeon said, “life is a matter of degrees. Some have life, but it flickers like a dying candle, and is indistinct as the fire in the smoking flax; others are full of life, and are bright and vehement like the fire upon the blacksmith’s forge when the bellows are in full blast. Christ has come that his people might have life in all its fullness.”
That light of God, that effulgence of eternal Beauty, is also a gift for those with eyes to see. Daniel Libeskind attempted to capture this power of light and grace when he designed the memorial for the victims of September 11, 2001. He designed a Freedom Tower that reached 1,776 feet into the New York sky with the sole purpose of capturing light and casting it onto Ground Zero. A wedge of light fills the site at the moment when the planes smashed into the buildings and the space would have no shadows on September 11th of each year between 8:46 a.m. and 10:28 a.m., the time covering the first and second building collapses.
The design has since been hijacked by political power-plays in an ongoing ideological conflict, but it provides an example of a man who tries to see as God sees and to express that sight in his architecture. Where there is darkness, there will be light. Light has come into the world and the darkness, once again, does not understand it. But Christians have a wonderful opportunity to be captivated by the light of Christ, to stare into the Son and then to see all things and all people colored by that light. The clarity of our spiritual gaze and how we express that gaze will reflect what we love and what has grabbed our imagination because “what you are in love with, what seizes your imagination, will affect everything” (Pedro Arrupe S.J.).
