Yes, God Will Forgive You

By Neil Earle

The very best words on forgiveness when up against crushing, debilitating feelings of sin and unworthiness are the Psalms. The Gospels tell of what Jesus said and did but the Psalms tell us how he FELT!

There’s nothing like the Psalms for sinners. But sometimes other words speak to us from within our culture almost as powerfully. Recently, at a UCLA English class I got a chance, forty years after my early undergraduate work, to formally study once again the religious poetry of the talented Anglican Dean of St. Paul’s, John Donne (1571-1631), and the English country parson George Herbert (1593-1633). Both wrote forcefully on divine assurance, the triumph of grace whereby the believer achieves certainty in the matter of personal salvation. Both Donne and Herbert did this by connecting “the sublime with the commonplace.”¹

It is Herbert’s poem Love III, however, that I find revealing of the most sensitive reflection on the doctrine of grace – the fact that God will forgive us and, beyond that, accept us. This one poem has helped me and my hearers through the years see the exquisite intimacy of the God-child relationship and the sense of creatureliness and alienation we feel when we need forgiveness. Perhaps it can help you. At such times feelings are all-important for they can conspire to sever the bond between creature and Creator and plunge us into the Lower Hell of abandonment and hopelessness.

Herbert’s simple-seeming yet deeply spiritual and invigorating meditation can help us.

It offers an antidote to the depression and unworthiness that Christians experience after sinful encounters. Here is my commentary – stripped of some of the class paper terminology.

Lord of the Banquet

Herbert was an English aristocrat, a respected leader at Oxford University, a dissenter from the war party in the English Parliament of 1624. In a compressed and thrilling metaphor of the Banquet analogy (one of Jesus’ favorites – see Revelation 3:20) he communicated his country parson’s understanding of God’s forgiveness.

Love bade me welcome: yet my soul drew back,
Guilty of dust and sin.
But quick-ey’d Love, observing me grow slack
From my first entrance in,
Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning,
If I lack’d anything.

In swift-moving 1600’s English style, Herbert opens his exquisite fifteen line meditation with an analogy most Christians conscious of personal sin can well understand. Note how the long line alternating with the short conveys the sense of caution, of guilty hesitation: “Will God accept me? Have I really blown it this time?”

“Love” here is obviously Jesus Christ in poetic guise as the Gracious Host or Lord of the Banquet (Luke 14:16). The invited one is hesitant to approach his perfect Lord but alert and “quick-eyed Love” spots this discomfort and guilt immediately. Love will accept no excuses. Love takes the initiative. She draws near “sweetly questioning,” an aspect here of the feminine principle, as are the two “my dears” later in the poem, Scriptural echoes of what some have named Lady Bountiful in Proverbs 9:1-5,

“Wisdom has built her house; she has set up her seven pillars…she also has set her table (the dinner party theme again). She has sent out her servants, and she calls…’Let all who are simple come to my house…Come, eat my food and drink the wine I have mixed.”

Herbert knew his Bible well. According to one source it was the poet/parson’s practice to read Psalm 31 and Psalm 32 daily and to often join in an ongoing communal group reading of the entire book of Psalms (George N. Wall, George Herbert: The Country Parson, The Temple). Yet Herbert was no stranger to “dusty sin,” an apt word picture to depict the hollowed-out feeling sin engenders. “Im unworthy to enter his presence let alone enjoy a divinely-prepared love feast.” In a sophisticated and admirably condensed few words of dialogue, Herbert states the problem crisply. The guest feels unworthy and must protest to the Host. Yet each argument is met with a superior, more elegant and gentle intelligent response – Grace in action! In reply to the question whether the guest lacked anything, Herbert picks up the exchange:

A guest, I answered, worthy to be here:
Love said, You shall be he.
I the unkind, ungrateful? Ah, my dear,
I cannot look on thee.
Love took my hand, and smiling did reply,
“Who made the eyes but I?”

“Who made the eyes but I?” is a gentle rhyme yet powerfully strategic at this point. It begins to turn the corner for the distraught guest. It also reveals who the Host really is – our kind and compassionate Creator who, said the Psalmist, knows us better than ourselves (Psalm 103:8-14).

The implied term Host here is important. Some think Herbert, as an Anglican minister, is implying a double-edged reference to the Communion bread, or Host, as some churches call it. That may be so, an example of the elastic suggestiveness and sublime spirituality of religious poetry at its best.

Blessed Reassurance

A major point at this juncture, however, is that there seems to be no final answer to Love’s astonishingly gracious reply in the second stanza. No answer merely excuses by the overwhelmed guest. Yet the Host’s tone is unfailingly serene, gentle, courteous, reflecting Herbert’s Protestant sense of a strong assurance of God’s unfailing favor. Literary scholar Helen Gardner has written of this kind of devotional poetry: “The image…is an image of a soul working out its salvation in fear and trembling. The two poles between which it oscillates are faith in the mercy of God in Christ, and a sense of personal unworthiness that is very near to despair.”²

Stanza two is suffused with the great Protestant doctrine of justification by faith. So why do we need another stanza? Ah, this shows Herbert’s deep understanding of the reality of sin and the psychology of sinners – of his own struggles against sin. Just one answer from God may not be enough! As an Anglican parson familiar with ordinary people confessing their stumblings, Herbert knew that even more assurance was needed. Thus his next four lines are vitally necessary to the argument. In answer to the question “who made those eyes” he has the guest protest:

Truth Lord, but I have marr’d them: let my shame
Go where it doth deserve.
And know you not, says Love, who bore the blame?
My dear, then I will serve.

Eyes marred with sin? Yes. Which Christian repenter has not felt that sting of conscience and the fear that, finally, this time, all is lost?

True Communion

An even greater theologian than Herbert, the German Reformer Martin Luther, summarized his pre-conversion depiction of the effects of sin upon the guilty mind:

“I did not love, yes, I hated the righteous God who punishes sinners, and secretly, if not blasphemously, I was angry with God, and said, ‘As if, indeed, it is not enough, that miserable sinners, eternally lost through original sin, are crushed by every kind of calamity by the law…without having God add pain to pain by the gospel threatening us with his righteousness and wrath.’ Thus I raged with a fierce and troubled conscience.”

Herbert’s two souls in communion in Love III is a much kinder, gentler reiteration of Luther’s much more graphic and forceful description of the sinner’s plight. Yet both are ultimately on the side of the repentant sinner. Herbert’s last two lines end the argument with his conscience and with the God who created it:

You must sit down, says Love, and taste my meat;
So I did sit and eat.

The final word picture depicts almost everything warm, kind and inviting to the wounded and the penitent soul – true Communion at last. Nothing could be more calculated to spell Assurance than sharing a meal with one’s Creator-Redeemer. In the guise of a patient, loving host, God invites communion with sinners. The banquet here referenced is in the Biblical mode of Jacob eating with Laban, the elders of Israel eating and drinking with the Lord God, Jesus breaking bread at the Lord’s Supper and the gracious Host knocking at the door in Revelation 3. It has been well-said that in ancient Middle Eastern cultures, whom you ate with was more important than whom slept with. The sharing of food here represents the triumph of grace hard-won after real and remorseful repentance.

Herbert’s message? Even dusty sinners can expect restitution at the hands of a God who has provided both the incentive and the mechanism for forgiveness of past wrongs. With such a Host sinners need have no fear. We have no fear. God will forgive us.