From Christ walking on water to healing the sick or raising Lazarus from the dead to his miraculous resurrection, sceptics insist miracles are a scientific impossibility while Christians buy the story wholesale. While a proof obsessed Western science world demands irrefutable proof of Christ’s alleged miracles, it overlooks others.
Christ’s teaching of forgiveness is a miracle that continues to be fed to the bosom of the West. Without this unusual idea, we would descend into chaos.
In the Gospels Christ was asked, “Lord, how often should I forgive someone who sins against me? Seven times? “No, not seven times, “but seventy times seven!” Before his imminent betrayal, he prays, “forgive us our sins, as we have forgiven those who have sinned against us” Finally, during his crucifixion, amidst tortuous suffering, he states “Father forgive them, for they know not what they do.”
We know not what we do when we overlook the miracle of forgiveness. Forgiveness has laid the foundation for a civil Western society. Human nature bends towards hate and tribalism. Euripides perfectly captured this in his epic tragedy Medea, when she exclaimed “hate is a bottomless cup and into it I shall pour and pour” It is truly miraculous that we have supplanted forgiveness into the social contract of a civil society. From an early age, our parents teach us to forgive. It stops us from constantly fighting and from murdering each other. It gives us the ability to agree to disagree, the ability to re-humanize instead of de-humanizing, and the ability to undergo psychological healing.
It is easy to understand the significance of forgiveness in the religious realm, but we would be mistaken to think that the symbols, rituals and ideals of this idea do not spill over into the broader society. They do with momentous force and we take it all for granted. What we have in the West is not common, nor is it to be taken for granted.
Our first step outside of the Hobbesian “state of nature” occurred the moment Christ uttered his teachings on forgiveness, a shift of seismic proportions occurred. It broke the chain of millennia of the manifest practice of an “eye for an eye.” From the dawn of time, murder, killing, and pillaging were the norms of human existence.
To forgive introduced a strange concept: Hate did not need to be met with hate. It shaped the Western narrative too, in a fallen world, the wounds of conflict could be healed by the creed of forgiving others, it acknowledged that we are fallen and with faults, but that we are also redemptive creatures too.
Our moral assumptions are inevitably Christian as Tom Holland has argued. It is only when we stray from the invisible moral parameters of Christianity that we see how violent and tribalistic we are to the very core. The leash that guards us against our lower nature is Christian. The automatic response of tribe against tribe was for most of our history ,brute force, violence, torture and murder.
Unveiling what lies beneath our society when stripped of the notion of forgiveness is a painful yet important lesson. In 2023, a UEFA football match between AEK Athens and Dynamo Zagreb after a confrontation between fans of the rival teams resulted in the stabbing death of a 29-year-old Greek man. While tragic, this death is tragically absurd, too. In the absence of forgiveness, human beings cannot walk away even from the pettiest of instinctual rages. Tribalism still sometimes wins the day.
That fans of a rival soccer team would feel the impunction to murder a rival team over support for a rival team is beyond comprehensible to the Western mind. Without Christianity, our differences would lead us to kill one another, to resort to tribalism at every turn. All of this comes from the lasting ancient ideas of a 1st century Jewish preacher.
Strangely, the notion of forgiveness is connected to other key principles of Christ’s teaching. To forgive, we need to admit inherent human dignity and to admit inherent human dignity. We concede that we have a redemptive nature.
Its power spills over into the secular West too. So potent is its reach that I would argue it keeps us from descending into homicidal fantasies and endows the individual and society with a moral wisdom unlike any other. Any parent would see the death of a child as the most painful thing in the world. If the death were the result of a reckless perpetrator then you can only imagine the depth of anger a parent would feel. In 2020, Danny Abdalla, A Father in South West Sydney tragically lost three of his children, Antony 13, Angelina 12 and Sienna 8 after a drunk driver hit and instantly killed three of his children.
While many if not most parents would be filled with feelings of revenge against the perpetrator, Abdalla stated “We’re still grieving, but it would have been so much worse if my shoulders were heavy with revenge and bitterness, now I understand the whole concept of the spirituality of forgiveness, because I’m actually living it” This and this alone is the answer to the critics of Christianity who dismiss the possibility of the miraculous.
Forgiveness is really the only thing that can bring transformative healing to grieving parents who have just tragically lost three of their own children.
It shouldn’t be the case that forgiveness can transcend the depths of human misery, but it does. You need not look for the scientific explanations for the transcendent power of the gospel accounts and ask questions like how is it scientifically possible that Christ walked on water because the West has experienced and still is the constant miracle of peace, freedom and civility.
Miracles exist, we just take them for granted.
The power of the teachings of Christ, whatever his ultimate metaphysical status as a man, pushes, pulls and invites the Western mind to undergo a sanctification through this process. Whether we attend church, whether or not we believe in Christ, we all believe in forgiveness. When we forgive, we are acknowledging the miraculous, so when we feel compelled to criticise Christianity, we should remember we too know it has a mysterious power over us.
