Forgiveness is like other gifts. It must be received as well as given to be complete. If someone forgives me for being a fool, unless I not only am a fool but also know that I am, his forgiveness is without effect. I don’t appropriate his forgiveness, I don’t let it take root in my heart where it can grow and eventually choke out in me the folly that it is forgiveness of. It would appear that we cannot be forgiven for what we do not know we do or are.

Yet this is what Jesus on the cross prays for on our behalf — that we be forgiven something whose significance we do not or cannot fully understand. We understand some of it. As Christians we have two thousand years of preaching to remind us that we are all guilty of the death of Christ. We have it on good authority that we crucify him each time we add directly or indirectly to the world’s alienation. Jesus himself makes this clear in those words that have more terror in them than any in the Gospels: “Inasmuch as ye have done it … did it not … unto one of the least of these …”

All this we know. But Jesus asks God to forgive us for something apparently deeper that we do not know. Maybe it is not simply what we have done or left undone or are, but what we are not and yet might have been.

In Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory the fugitive priest, slipshod and semi-alcoholic, father of a bastard child, awaits in a Mexican prison his death the next morning before a firing squad. In the absence of a confessor, he tries to confess himself and pronounce his own absolution. It does not work very well, and suddenly

tears poured down his face: he was not at that moment afraid of damnation — even the fear of pain was in the background. He felt only an immense disappointment because he had to go to God empty-handed, with nothing done at all. It seemed to him at that moment that it would have been quite easy to be a saint. It would only have needed a little self-restraint and a little courage. He felt like someone who has missed happiness by seconds at an appointed place. He knew now that at the end there was only one thing that counted — to be a saint.

Perhaps this is at least a part of what Jesus means. Forgive them not just for their halfhearted complicity in killing me but for the halfheartedness that has kept them from being saints.

We are not given to know the might-have-been of our lives, but from his cross, Jesus gives us a glimpse. To see his pain is to see the pain that might have been our own. Not the suffering of death, but the suffering of love that says My Life for Yours, which is at the heart of a life lived fully. He forgives us for not being the saints that we do not know we have it in us to become. It breaks the heart, breaks it upon him the way a woman once broke open an alabaster jar of costly perfume upon him and bathed his feet with her tears.

Viewed from the standpoint of Roman politics, Jesus’s crucifixion meant another chance for Rome to remind everybody who was boss. If the spindly-legged one hanging up there is King of the Jews, that’s all to the good. See what Caesar does with would-be kings: he puts them up like billboards. That is what the cross was. An object lesson in power.

But there is another way to see the cross. It is to see the cross as a place where something of extraordinary importance happened. To understand what I mean you have to go back to the Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur in the Old Testament.

The people of Israel were bound to God in a covenant relationship. And the covenant relationship was predicated upon the people of Israel keeping the laws of God. To the degree that the laws were broken, so was the relationship broken. And coming out of that problem for Jews — when you violate the divine laws you’re out of relationship with God — emerged the sacrificial system. Sacrifice was the way that a relationship was restored with God.

Yom Kippur was the annual great day of sacrifice. It was the day when all the burdens of all the people of Israel were lifted. It was the day when all the burdens of all the people possibly related to Israel was lifted. It was the day when all the burdens of the people of Israel and those related to the people of Israel in all possible places in Israel was lifted.

If your heart united itself to the great sacrifices of Yom Kippur, all of your sin was lifted, and not only all of your sin, but all the sin you knew about and all the sin you did not know about. And not only that, but all the sins you committed accidentally, as well as those you did deliberately and in rebellion against God, they were lifted. More than that, all of the transgressions that are not even yet realized, that you have yet to act out, to perpetrate, all of those are lifted. Anything that estranges the people of God from God was lifted in the sacrifice, if their heart bound itself to the sacrifice.

The very dramatic moment of Yom Kippur was the moment when the scapegoat was let out. This was a goat, chosen by lot, to do an awful task. He was a most unfortunate victim, because on Yom Kippur this unlucky winner of the lottery was brought before the high priest. The high priest laid his hands on the head of the scapegoat and confessed into the scapegoat all the sins of the people of Israel. In fact the Talmud even tells us the exact words that the high priest said. With his hands on the goat’s head, he said, “O Lord God, your people, the house of Israel, has sinned. They have committed iniquity, and they have transgressed against you.”

They may sound to you like mere words. But in the Hebraic imagination, words are reality-making, words effect what they express. In the priest’s view and in the view of the people of Israel, the sins of Israel were actually going into the scapegoat, actually going into it. That’s why it was so awful to be the goat. When the sins were put into the goat, a relay of men led the goat little by little out to the desert, to a lonely place, and there the goat would die. There is a legend about that, the legend that the high priest would go and tie a scarlet cord to the tabernacle. And when the goat died, at the hour of the goat’s death, the scarlet cord would turn to white. Many Bible scholars believe this legend is what Isaiah had in mind when he said, “Though your sins be as scarlet as blood, they will be as white as snow.”

So off the goat went into a place alone, but a very public figure; out it went carrying the burden of sin, the sins of all Israel, of all people related to Israel, out it went into a desert to die. Eight centuries before the birth of Jesus, Isaiah prophesied about the Servant of God. Isaiah says that this Servant will bear the sins of many, he will be a human scapegoat, and he will look for a place to do his awful work, carrying the sins of people in a way that the animal sacrifice could not.

And so the cross becomes the desert, the forsaken place. The cross is the lonely place yet so public, so humiliating, so painful, and so terminal. The cross is a place for the holy dreadful work of God, the place to which all of your sins and all of mine, the place to which all of your burdens and all of mine, are taken by the scapegoat, by Jesus, to die in his death.

[Charles] Griswold tells us much about forgiveness, about the mental processes involved in it, and the way in which interpersonal relations are shaped by it. But he does not ask the question: what kind of a being is it that can forgive? Dogs don’t forgive, because dogs don’t resent. Forgiveness is unique to rational beings, and is a gift of metaphysical freedom. Only the accountable being, able to take responsibility for his own actions and mental states, can forgive or be forgiven, and this way of overcoming conflict has next to nothing in common with the peace of the “pecking order”, or the territorial settlements among badgers and bears. Of course, Griswold is aware of this, and insists on the place of responsibility in the logic of resentment. But at a time when the evolutionary biologists are producing one phoney account after another, designed to show that human societies are constructed from the same ingredients as the tribes of apes, and that “altruism” in people is just a later manifestation of the self-sacrificing instincts of the soldier ant, it is surely a duty of philosophers to point out that interpersonal harmony is achieved through attitudes and virtues that only a free and accountable being could ever exemplify, and that this means that no theory of animal society could ever be generalized to cover us. The study of forgiveness would be a good starting point from which to roll back the tide of debunking, and show the distinctness and the spiritual richness of the human condition. Of course, that would probably lead away from the “secular” approach that Griswold adheres to. But it would lead in a truthful direction.

Roger Scruton