Years ago, I participated in a huge funeral for a young French priest. In South Africa. He was accidentally killed on the road with intent to burglary. Parents cannot be physically present. They did this in the most noble and poignant way: the bishop read to the audience the text in which they fervently forgave the murderers.
In the Bible, if there is a topic that comes back again and again, it is the topic of forgiveness. You always have to forgive. decor. Jesus himself, from the top of the cross, forgave his torturers.
But forgiveness is a miracle, as the philosopher J. Derrida himself, referring to religion. A miracle in the truest sense of the word. It is surprisingly impressive, as it transcends the law of simple justice. In the realm of pure justice, no one can be forced to forgive and no one can ask for forgiveness. Forgiveness is part of generosity, and forgiveness is part of grace: to forgive is to be blessed, to receive grace. Justice is important. Forgiveness invalidates the law of reckoning. Therefore, even in common language, referring to small offenses, the offended person will say to the one who apologizes: “Don’t bother, that was nothing!” The essence of forgiveness is the rescission of the account, exchange and exchange for a gift. Whoever offends is no longer in debt, because the offender has forgotten the debt, so the offense is not taken into account. And so, in truth, he did not forgive the woman who repeated every day to her husband, who had an “escape”: “Do not forget that I forgave you with all my heart!”
Justice in the most stringent does not include forgiveness. But without forgiveness, life becomes unbearable, because guilt is devoured by guilt, and the humiliator is gnawed with revenge.
After all, is there any basis for forgiveness? In the first place, we must consider the understanding of human weakness: if humans can tell their story from root to end—which would always be impossible, because we do not know our root and our end—how many would deny understanding? But above all, there is the law of existence, and it is a gift: before I give you anything – even forgiveness – you have already received, I must receive from the Source, who gives without asking for anything in return, and therefore, that’s it, he lives underground .
Also for this reason, even the Creator alone can forgive. In fact, an offense is a wound in the object, which the creature cannot, in the end, even if the victim forgives, repair it properly. Who will restore to a murdered young French priest the prospect of his eternal death? Only the Creator can do that. Thus the creature’s forgiveness cannot be separated from memory. Forgiveness does not coincide with forgetting. Even if the victim forgets, forgive, the offended must remember, so that evil will not be repeated again. Whoever forgives him is called to repentance and to a new life. As Kierkegaard said, “Everything is forgotten, but forgiveness is remembered.”
Concrete pouring. One of the situations in which man faces the limit is that of the executioner’s forgiveness by the dead victims, as evidenced in the story told by Simon Wiesenthal in a work on Auschwitz. As Jürgen Moltmann recounted, the Jew Wiesenthal was a prisoner in a concentration camp and was summoned to the deathbed of a Nazi leader who wanted to confess to him, the Jew, that he had participated in mass shootings of Jews in Ukraine. I wanted to ask her forgiveness so that I could die in peace. Wiesenthal told him that he could hear the killer’s confession, but he could not forgive him, because “no living man can forgive him for killing him in the name of the dead.” She cannot, because she has neither the right nor the power to do so. Wiesenthal was so shaken by the impossibility of forgiveness that he wrote to several European philosophers and theologians telling them his story, which he published with the answers in a book called: De Sonnenblum (The Sunflower).
The reason, in order not to succumb to prejudice, if it wants to be truly universal, cannot be a “holistic mind”, that is, it must be enlightened by the memory of the victims. And memory is necessary so that the tragedies that occurred are not repeated again.. On the other hand, who will do justice to the victims, so that the executioners can reconcile and find peace?
The Sufi is the one who walks with God and for God without leaving the night. It is not different from the believer and the unbeliever in whom we are at the same time with pain and suffering, because he has already been cast out of the night in which all men live immersed. Theologian Juan Martin Velasco wrote: “He has the distinction of having advanced far enough into the night that for him the night is ‘as beautiful as dawn’ (…), another form of light.” For many, nowhere in history is there such a mystical experience in which the experience of God has reached its climax, as it was in the cross of Christ, where, according to Christian faith, “God reveals himself in a definitive way, and is thus insurmountably mysterious.” There, precisely in the unbearable pain of his “absence”, in that dark night, God is infinitely present, listening to that prayer at the moment of despondency and confidence, which crosses the centuries: “Oh my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?, Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.”
Christians dare to believe that God raised this crucified one from the dead, who was brought up on unbelief and the uprising of the politically and religiously oppressed people.
In him God showed himself in eternal solidarity with all the victims.
Priest and Professor of Philosophy.
Write according to the old spelling