Sucker God or Smart God

Somewhere in my childhood, I recall a scene from a mafia movie. A man enters a confessional of a church. He recounts his failings to the attentive priest. The priest then waves his hands and intones something that sounds now like, “go forth and sin no more”. The sinner is forgiven. We then see the penitent leaving the church and going to work where he kills people in cold blood.

While I have no idea if the Christian deity really does offer forgiveness in such cases, that story is not that different than comments that I used to hear from Jews about Yom Kippur. “Hey, I can do all the sins I want and then Yom Kippur comes and makes it right. What a great system!”

Huh?

Is God a sucker? Does He just forgive whenever we ask? What kind of god would do something so evidently stupid? Certainly not a god that could earn my respect.

In fact, in the Jewish view of God’s forgiveness, we must first make the necessary repair before we are forgiven. Such repair begins with a strong grasp of what needs to be done. This is why the prayer for wisdom precedes the prayer for forgiveness.

Understanding however is not enough. How many times have I intellectually understood the necessity of some action but failed to do anything with it. This is why we ask God for help in strengthening our commitment before getting around to forgiveness.

Once we get around to asking for His forgiveness, He goes well beyond that which we request. The prayer describes God as, “Gracious, and forgives in great measure”. Why is great measure needed? The answer is simple: as much as we may assume that we know why we sin, the more we learn about the human mind, the more we know how mysterious our thoughts are. The simple action of drinking a cup of water, for example, is not just about quenching thirst. There is often deeper story behind such a seemingly trivial activity. And when it comes to sin and forgiveness, it is the unstated motivations and needs that God, in His kindness and belief in us, for which we receive His abundant forgiveness.