Forgiveness begins with God. That was the gist of last week’s sermon which looked at the key affirmation in Exodus 34:6, 7 that the nature of God is loving and forgiving, not wrathful. Genuine and complete human forgiveness starts from the fact that we are forgiven by God.
This week in Genesis 50:15-21 we look at how our forgiveness not only begins with God’s forgiveness of us, but is empowered and furthered by God’s work and activity in our lives, God’s place in our human interactions.
After Jacob’s death, in verses 15-18, Joseph’s brothers come fearfully begging forgiveness for their treatment of him, afraid that Joseph had held back while his father was alive but would now seek revenge. Joseph’s answer in verse 19, “Do not be afraid! Am I in the place of God?”, displays for us one of the ways in which God’s “place” in forgiveness. As we read over and over in the New Testament, it is God’s place to judge and exact punishment for sin, not ours.
While it is not ours to judge, as Paul writes so clearly in Romans 14:1-12, ending with, “So then, each of us will be accountable to God,” it is ours to offer forgiveness to each other. It is out of a complete assurance that God will hold all accountable that we can freely offer forgiveness without fearing that sin will go unreckoned or unpunished. So by refusing to put himself in God’s place of judgment Joseph was able to forgive his brothers and reassure them.
All this does not mean that forgiveness is a matter of pretending that a wrong has not been done. It’s not like being bumped in a crowded concert hall or hearing a friend make a remark that could be taken as an insult but wasn’t meant to be. In those cases we wave our hand or shrug it off with the knowledge that no real harm was done. That’s not forgiveness.
Implicit in the idea of forgiving is a proper fixing of blame. If I were to hear my wife or a friend say to me, “I forgive you,” I would be entirely correct to wonder what offense I’ve committed. There cannot be forgiveness without a charge of offense. It is our place in forgiving to make that charge. What is not ours, but God’s place, is to follow up that charge with judgment and punishment.
This balancing of proper blame versus improper judgment is a difficult thing. We will often err to one side or the other. Yet we can only hope to reach real forgiveness if we remember, like Joseph, that we are not in the place of God.