Then Peter came to Him and said, "Lord, how often shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? Up to seven times?"
Jesus said to him, "I do not say to you, up to seven times, but up to seventy times seven."
—Matthew 18:21-22, New King James Version
But the four hundred and ninety-first time they sin against you, to hell with them?
Only the most literal-minded Christians suppose that Jesus was providing a hard numerical limit in this quote. We understand that "up to seventy times seven" means something like "over and over and over again."
This need to forgive over and over again should be easy enough to understand if you've ever truly loved another person, imperfect as we all are. We know we'll be hurt by the ones we love, and we'll forgive them. We know they'll hurt us again, and we'll forgive them again. Just as we will hurt them, and they will forgive us, again and again.
Most people have their limits, of course. For instance, it is rare for a person to forgive a loved one for nailing them to a cross, even the first time! Nevertheless, we can recognize that on some level, repeated forgiveness is an unavoidable part of any long-term loving relationship.
This was not always the case. The raw human impulse is to escalate. These days, when people say, "An eye for an eye," they are usually expressing a desire for maximum vengeance. But when that rule was first set in stone, it was common enough to take both eyes in retaliation for one. "An eye for an eye" was mercy. To go so far as to forgive even once was unheard of.
Hence, Peter thought he was being pretty woke to forgive all the way up to seven times. But that wasn't nearly enough for Jesus. And though any relationship might eventually hit its last turn on the carousel of forgiveness, we civilizational heirs to Jesus' teachings have learned not to count how many rounds it takes to get us there.
Even so, I believe there is an underappreciated kind of forgiveness that this mathematical analogy fails to reach. But to explain it, I'm afraid I need to bring in a few ideas from calculus...
Calculating the area of a rectangle is pretty much the easiest kind of area to calculate, just multiply the width by the height. Formulas for other shapes often consist of breaking them up into rectangles.
But imagine I ask you to take a piece of paper and draw a squiggly line from the left edge to the right edge, without doubling back. What is the area between that curve you've just drawn and the bottom of the page?
One way we can estimate that area is to draw a vertical line through the center of the page. Draw a horizontal line from the left side of the page to where the curve crosses the center line, then draw a horizontal line from the center line to the point where the curve hits the right side of the page. The result will be two rectangles.
The area of two rectangles is really easy to calculate! It might still be quite a bit off from the area under the curve that we're actually looking for, but that's why we call it an estimate. We can improve this estimate by repeating this process with each half-page, adding two more vertical lines to create four rectangles.
This is still easy to calculate, though a bit more labor intensive, and it's closer to the actual area under the curve. Divide all these sections again to get eight rectangles, and we're closer still.
Do this over and over and over again, and eventually we get close enough to the area under the curve to have a satisfactory answer for any practical purpose.
Of course, since mathematicians don't like to settle for practical purposes, they've worked out formulas for repeating this process to infinity to get the actual exact area under the curve.
I'm fudging a bit on the details, but in general that process of chopping the curve up into infinite rectangles is known to mathematicians as integration, and the resulting value is called the integral of the curve.
Ok, that should be enough calculus to do some theology.
When we think of the need to forgive over and over again, we usually think in terms of time moving forward. Your loved one hurts you today. Tomorrow you forgive them. The day after that, they hurt you again. The day after that, you forgive them again. But what if, instead of adding days in this progression, we start dividing a single day?
Your loved one hurts you in the morning, and you forgive them. This happens again midday, and before bed. But it also happens mid-morning and mid-afternoon, and between morning and mid-morning, and between midday and mid-afternoon, and at supper and elevensies and don't forget second breakfast. It's the same over and over again, but squeezed into one day. It happens often enough that, for all practical purposes, they are constantly hurting you, and you are constantly forgiving them. Since theologians don't like to settle for practical purposes either, let's keep carrying this idea to infinity. The result is a continuous state of perpetual forgiveness—the integral of forgiveness.
This, too, should be a familiar enough experience for those who have loved. We all have flaws that will simply never go away. Our loved ones may encourage us to be better, and we may strive to be better, but we are unlikely to change. There comes a point where we just love one another as the flawed human beings that we are. We suffer from the flaws of our loved ones knowing they will never overcome them, and we forgive them anyway, knowing that they are doing the same for us.
To reiterate, this is not to say that people do not or should not have their limits. Rarer than forgiving the person who crucified you is forgiving the person currently crucifying you. There are important discussions to be had about protecting ourselves with reasonable boundaries and not enabling bad behavior, even as we forgive. But there would be so much less love in the world if we couldn't forgive hurtful conduct until it stopped—if we couldn't integrate our forgiveness.
I think this comes into play the most when we can't quite agree on the right thing to do in the first place. One person believes in a rule because they see the harm of breaking it, but another sees the harm of following it. Must they find one another unforgivable? Without the ability to integrate forgiveness, we would be precluded from loving anyone without first agreeing completely about right and wrong. The integral of forgiveness spares us from such ideologically-driven isolation.
Theologians can have a difficult time recognizing this as the blessing that it is. They see the integral of transgression easily enough, calling it "living in sin" and insisting that the transgression must cease before forgiveness can occur. But where is their concept of "living in forgiveness?" For all that they can wrap their heads around the notion of God forgiving us over and over again, they stumble on the notion that this can be a continuous state of being, that we might actively persist in our imperfections and nonetheless be fully forgiven by God. We mere mortals can integrate our forgiveness in this manner. Is God any less capable than we are of such throat baring love?
Not according to my calculations.
I don't intend for my use of math to imply any sort of logical rigor to my point here. I don't really think theology can be reduced to math, and I'm sure both mathematicians and theologians can find plenty to criticize in what I've written. I'm definitely being sloppy in my overview of calculus, theologians have written volumes on forgiveness that I have not read, and I'm admittedly playing fast and loose with definitions to be clever. My only intention is to make an analogy to describe an aspect of my experience of the divine that I think is widely shared but scarcely discussed. As far as I'm concerned, it's the experience that matters.
For years, I've told myself that if I ever resumed writing about God on the internet, my first essay upon return would be about forgiveness. Now that I've written this, I do not know when I might write more. But for the mathematicians asking, "What about the plus C?" and the theologians asking, "Yeah, what about Him?", that will have to wait for another day. God Bless.
I figure if I can learn to forgive myself by being aware each day, that same extention should goes to others whether they understand or not. Please give me the patience to listen. I'm trying to listen to leadership - still finding it difficult to listen to that ... but i try.
That's really beautiful. Well said.