My wife and I are part of a ‘group’ which I suppose one could call an ‘emerging church’. We do not have a name, we meet roughly every second Sunday morning, and while we have a core group who come regularly there is no official membership, creed or leadership. Just the way we like it for the moment. (We have a collective blog at www.capeconversation.wordpress.com.)

As we were meditating on our own journeys of forgiving and being forgiven yesterday, I had a profound ‘revelation’ (well, I thought it was profound and a revelation.) As with all good revelations (or maybe I should say intuitions) it was more a feeling than a thought. Essentially it was this:

In God there is no forgiveness.

Again, as with all good intuitions, it was paradoxical. Although forgiveness is a synonym for the love found in God, it is in a certain sense a temporal concession. The feeling that I had was that in Godself the need to forgive and be forgiven falls away. It is only because of the conciousness of self versus other selves and God as ultimate Other, that we are aware of slights and sins against us, and ourselves as sinners. It is in the clash of the ego’s expectations and needs that we feel loss and pain at our needs going unmet.

God’s pathos at our missing of the mark is not, I believe, born out of God’s own sense of loss at unmet needs. That is far too anthropomorphic. However it does not mean that God is therefore implacable in the Greek sense of without emotion and change. Rather, God feels for and with us. It is our pain and loss that God experiences, even when God is the Other we sin against. He is sad and angry with us when we do not live as we were created to be, rather than burning with righteous rage at being let down, once again, by those pesky mortals.

Therefore forgiveness (I repeat, ‘in a certain sense’), is necessary for our sakes and not God’s. This idea of forgiveness as temporal prerequisite for reconciliation and unification with the Other, is confirmed by the root meaning of the word ‘reconciliation’ as used by Paul. In Greek it has the literal meaning of ‘exchanging place with the other’. In Christ, God exchanges places with us, identifies with us, in taking on the pain and consequences of victim and perpetrator, sinner and sinned against. God bears this suffering for and with us so that in unification with God we can transcend the need to forgive and be forgiven, to need and to desire.

There is another sense in which this is all nonsense, especially at a day to day, practical level, where we need to ‘feel’ God as righteous judge, outraged by injustice and evil in the world and where we need to walk the paths of hurt, loss and mourning as we struggle to forgive and be forgiven. We are self-bound for now. But there is something comforting to me in the idea that all this too will be transcended. And to the degree that we are liberated from the expectations that lead to suffering, forgiving becomes easier. We realise more and more: it’s not all about me.

In God there is no forgiveness. It simply isn’t necessary any more.