Perhaps the one act that marks off being Christian (more than any other) is forgiveness.
In a very radical (as in the root) way, Christians (both corporately and individually) are marked as forgiven and forgiving people. At the beginning of Christian life, Baptism dramatically enacts God's forward-giving and -accepting of us into the very triune life. The past is "washed away". All our guilt and shame is removed. Or, more appropriately, the past is drowned and left behind, floating corpse-like in the water. In that way, baptism does what we humans can't otherwise do: It breaks the power of the past. So when we emerge from the water, there's a "new life", wholly open to a future with God's Kingdom.
Thing is, forgiveness isn't left in those waters. Each day, every moment, we're sustained by that very forgiveness. "Forgive us our debts!", the community prays at multiple points in the day. That's because we always need God's forgiveness.
So while we're baptized only once, we're constantly renewed in the Holy Meal. It's the Meal of Forgiveness. God's grace becomes the very food and drink of our lives -- grace is our nourishment, our real life.
To be sustained by forgiveness, that's what it means to be Christian. Nothing more, nothing less.
That's why the prayer Jesus teaches us to pray, has us praying daily: "Give us today our daily bread! Forgive our debts!" See, forgiveness is the opposite of getting what we deserve.
There are no "natural rights" in God's Kingdom.
Forgiveness is the opposite of restitution. It's not karma, or reaping what you sow.
All that's bad news. It may be how the world works. But it's not Christian. Being Christian is the opposite of any kind of moral legalism.
If you're looking for rules to guide your life, Christianity is a hard place to look. Because it's built on the very foundation of forgiveness.
Being Christian isn't about "making amends". It's the opposite of conditions, exchanges, or negotiations.
Forgiveness isn't restitution. It's unconditional pardon. The good news of Jesus' death doesn't gain its power from words spoken on the cross. The Gospel gains its power from a single word spoken at Easter: "Peace!"
Pax tecum -- Peace be with you! No revenge, no settling accounts, no moral calculus. Cancellation of all debts.
That's why forgiveness has two parts. (1) Both a recognition of the debt. And (2) the irreversible declaration that the debt no longer matters.
It's not a matter of undoing or forgetting the past. No, forgiveness is stripping the past of its power. "Death no longer has dominion."
Through forgiveness our past is transformed into something new.
That's what makes Christianity so incredible (unbelievable!) -- its radical reorientation away from punishment to hope.
The future is opened up in God's forgiveness. We're set in motion toward a future pregnant with hope and possibility.
That's the unique freedom of being Christian: The past doesn't necessarily always have to hold its power in defining our lives. We can stand forgiven in front of God, free in relation to our own past and in relation to God's future.
Which is all great news! If it'd just stop there. But the prayer continues: " ... As we forgive our debtors!"
This prayer means: "Set me free from the past, just as I release others from the chains of their past. Cancel my debts today, just as today I release others from the debts they owe me. Do not demand restitution for guilt from me, just as I refuse to demand restitution from others. Set me free from the need to make amends, just as I excuse others from this need. Forgive me unconditionally, just as I forgive without negotiation or condition".
That's what makes this prayer I pray everyday so radical. This prayer is something that shatters all my assumptions and expectations about the basic patterns of ordinary social life. In our world, you don't get anything for nothing. If you want something, you must pay for it; you must make some kind of exchange. But forgiveness overturns the entire economy of exchange -- in forgiveness, I give you something for nothing, without requiring payment or exchange, without demanding anything in return. In the economy of exchange, you are bound to me by various contracts and conditions -- but in the economy of forgiveness, you are set free from all bondage to me, unconditionally liberated from all indebtedness to me.
That's what makes forgiveness so shocking, so astonishing, so unexpected.
It lies outside the pale of cultural possibilities. It shakes up the world because it transforms it.
Christian life is life wholly undetermined by the past. My past has no power to define my future. Because I am forgiven, sure, but also because I am forgiving. Those are two sides of the same coin. You can't have one without the other. Forgiveness is an event that can never be anticipated in advance. It is an irruption of the ordinary. Until we have been shocked and astonished -- yes, even frightened! -- by the power of forgiveness, we have not yet even begun to understand what's involved here.
In other words, forgiveness is the first and quintessential miracle. In and of myself, I lack the capacity to forgive -- but as I receive the forgiving love of God in Jesus, I am empowered by the Spirit to become an agent of that same forgiveness. Because I have been forgiven, I can and must forgive. When I forgive a person who has wronged me, that person is truly forgiven -- she is liberated from the chains of the past and set free to participate in the life of God’s coming kingdom. So too, when this person forgives me, I am truly forgiven -- I am liberated from the past and welcomed into the life of the kingdom. Through the power of the Spirit, human society in all its forms can thus begin to glimpse and to participate in the life of the kingdom through this astounding miracle of reciprocal forgiveness.
That means forgiveness is personal, but it is also social and even political. It's the pregnant possibilities of a future world recreated by God's resurrection from the dead. In international relations and in domestic penal policy, it overturns the politics of vengeance. In social relationships, it overturns the demand for retribution and compensation -- the violent demand to be "given one's due" at any cost. Indeed, in the first century the early Christians interpreted Jesus' entire ministry as a liberating act of debt-cancellation: In Jesus, the Year of Jubilee had arrived, a time in which all debts were written off, so that the poor could be released from their financial servitude. This, too, is what forgiveness means today. This is what we are asking for when we pray: "Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors!" The prayer for forgiveness is thus a revolutionary act, a radical contradiction of the whole economy that underlies the accepted patterns of thought and behavior which drive our culture.
What's more: The the petition for forgiveness is identical with the petition for the coming of God’s kingdom: "Your kingdom come, your will be done; ... and forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors!" To live by forgiveness is already to participate in the life of God's coming kingdom. To practice forgiveness in all our day-to-day social interactions is already to show the power and the life of God's kingdom.
For the kingdom of God -- the kingdom that Jesus announced, the kingdom that is now approaching all history like a fast train from the future -- is a kingdom of forgiveness, a kingdom whose fundamental economy is one of unconditional, liberating love. To live in the power of this liberating love is the meaning of being Christian.