Part One of the “Motives of Christian Forgiveness” Series
And be ye kind to one another; merciful, forgiving one another, even as God hath forgiven you in Christ. (Eph. 4:32)
Introduction to “The Motives of Christian Forgiveness” Series
Motive is everything in the spiritual life.
Even on the natural level, it is motive that constitutes the difference between murder and manslaughter. Cain was a murderer because he intended to kill his brother. Cain himself, however, is believed to have been killed in a hunting accident (cf. Gen. 4:23–24). He was not murdered because there had been no intention to kill him, no motive.
So, too, it is for lack of the requisite motive on the part of her executioners that St. Joan of Arc is honored by the Church as a virgin but not as a martyr. To qualify as a martyr, one must have been killed out of hatred for the Faith (odium fidei), whereas the Maid of Lorraine was killed as a political prisoner.
Ultimately, it is motive and motive alone that determines how pleasing our actions are to God and how meritorious for ourselves and others. In Catholic spirituality, this emphasis on the why over the what and even the how is called “purity of intention,” and, according to Fr. Faber, it is synonymous with love:
The only important thing in good works is the amount of love which we put into them. The soul of an action is its motive. The power of an action is neither in its size nor in its duration, though both these are very considerable matters. But its power is in its intention. An intention is pure in proportion as it is loving. Thus, you see, what we want is not many actions, but a great momentum in a few actions. Momentum is purity of intention. Purity of intention is love. (Spes Nostra, 27)
It has been said — and truly — that you must forgive your offender because you are a Christian, and that is what Christians do. But if you decide to make the difficult choice to forgive simply because someone told you must, that would be a weak motive indeed. Thankfully, there are much stronger ones. And all of them distill down to love — the greatest motivator of the human will. If we truly understood how much we are loved by our good God and how little we have done to return that love, we would stop at nothing to make amends for our negligence.
That is why this series is so important. None of us is innocent. When we sin, ours is a triple affront to the Divine Majesty: we violate His rights as our Creator and Father; we spurn His love as our Savior and Brother; and we reject His goodness as our Sanctifier and Friend. It will be well to examine our conscience with regard to how we treat these Adorable Persons of the Blessed Trinity so that we will be moved to make amends by our own forgiveness of our fellow men. See, then, how strong are the motives behind our forgiveness as Christians!
For the Love of God the Father
That God as Creator and Father has rights that we His creatures — and especially once we are made His children by baptism! — are bound to respect is a truth evident in Holy Scripture.
God has the right to be worshiped when, where, and in the manner He chooses. Worship is the act of the virtue of religion, that virtue by which, in strict justice, we give God what is owed Him. While private worship is always encouraged, it is impossible to read the book of Deuteronomy, for instance, and imagine that God is indifferent to the manner in which we pay Him public homage. Do we children of the New Covenant faithfully observe the regulations our Father has put in place for our own good? Or do we miss Mass on Sundays and Holy Days of Obligation, or arrive late to Mass, through our own fault? Do we engage in unnecessary manual labor on these days which He has reserved for His own honor? Do we attend non-Catholic services as though the worship invented by men who disregard God’s precepts is just as acceptable to God as the Holy Sacrifice of His Son re-presented at Mass?
It was because King Solomon erected temples to the pagan gods of his wives that he ultimately fell into idolatry. His demise constituted a most just punishment, for his having put error on a par with truth was equivalent to making the devil equal to God. Can a more heinous crime be imagined? But do we realize how easily we may commit sins of idolatry ourselves when we allow any interest or hobby, anything outside our line of duty, to take priority in our life over God’s right to be worshiped?
God has the right to be obeyed. Conscience is your God-given sense of right and wrong, but this sense can be malformed or distorted. Do we educate ourselves on God’s laws, the laws of the Church, and the duties of our state in life? Do we conform our behavior to these commands and duties? Or do we presume that God will understand where we are coming from in our violation of His commands and our neglect of our duties, thereby deadening our conscience so that it permits us to behave however we wish? If we truly realized that our Heavenly Father only ever makes laws to protect His children from hurting themselves, how much more faithful we would be in complying with them!
God has the right to be trusted. Do we ever give into discouragement or despair? Do we doubt God’s love, or that He only ever does and permits what is for our greater happiness? Remember how severe was God’s displeasure with the Israelites who murmured against Him in the desert; having seen with their own eyes the marvels of His goodness, they nevertheless had the audacity to question His continued protection. How often do we, too, wound the heart of our Father by a lack of confidence?
God has the right to be loved. In the end, that which offends God in sin is an absence of love. If you love Me, He tells us, keep My commandments. And what is the chief and greatest commandment? Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with thy whole heart, and with thy whole soul, and with thy whole mind, and with all thy strength. But what is love? Love, according to St. Francis de Sales, is a movement of complacency in the good, a reposing in it. Which is why our loves can lead us astray: for not all things that we see as good are actually so. Abraham loved his son Isaac, rightly seeing in him the fulfillment of God’s promise that his seed should be as numerous as the stars of the night sky. But had his love for Isaac moved him to disobey God’s command to sacrifice the boy, that love would have been disordered and therefore sinful. Yet how often do we allow lesser loves interfere with our duty to love God first in our lives?
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It is to make amends for our frequent failures to love our Heavenly Father that we should forgive our brothers who have sinned against us. That He has allowed us to have been hurt by them should rouse our faith to exclaim with the author of the Imitation:
O just Father, holy and always to be praised, the hour is come for Thy servant to be tried. O Father, worthy of all love, it is fitting that Thy servant should at this hour suffer something for Thee. O Father always to be honored, the hour is come that Thou foresawest from all eternity: that Thy servant for a short time should be oppressed without, but always live within to Thee: that he should be a little slighted and humbled, and should fail in the sight of men; that he should be severely afflicted with sufferings and diseases, that so he may rise again with Thee in the dawning of a new light, and be glorified in Heaven. (Just for Today, Feb. 12)
Whoever it is that has offended against us, let us remember that Our Father created this person with a supernatural vocation to live forever with Him in glory. He fashioned Heaven to house him eternally and the earth to provide for his needs and to delight him with its beauty. Moreover, He created him in the image of the human nature of His divine Son, which image in us has been marred by Original Sin but may yet be restored by power of sanctifying grace. If our offender has been baptized, he stands in an even more elevated relation to God the Father Who is truly his Father, waiting and watching day and night for any show of reciprocal affection; craving the love of this creature, even as He craves and awaits our love. It is this Father Who has commanded our forgiveness as a proof of our love for Him.
Will we withhold what God Himself has already granted? In allowing His Son to suffer and die in order that this man may have full pardon but for the asking, will we insist that he still be punished? Will we, furthermore, undertake to punish him ourselves by our coldness, knowing full well that that if God were to hold our sins against us, we would inevitably be lost? If thou, O Lord, wilt mark iniquities: Lord, who shall stand it (Ps. 129:3)? On the contrary! The love we have for our Father in Heaven should move us to say to our offender, “I love you because your Heavenly Father loves you, and I love Him.”
