Forgiveness, an Attempt

how waiting for Christ fulfills us

This article is part of the Claritas fall 2023 issue, Stages. Read the full print release here.

By: PERRY LU

“Police Officer’s Life Comes to a Tragic End.”

Headlines the front page of the Times—a lazy euphemism for killing, murder, slaughter. Officer Robert E. Walsh was a father to four children who were likely asleep when it happened. He wasn’t even on duty, slipping into the seat beside his friend at a Queens bar. A drink and he’d be home.

Shot first in the shoulder, then helplessly languishing on the floor, he’s shot again. This time it’s lethal, hitting the soft spot between his ear and his right eye. Slaughtered from point blank range—“execution style.” [1]

At dinner with two housemates, the gunman was the subject of our conversation. Around the table, we became convinced that the answer for an adequate punishment lay at the center of a venn diagram combining Kantian retributivism and Hammurabi’s code. An eye for an eye didn’t sound bad at all. The stakes are raised each time we talk about the second gunshot, so the green-eyed boy in the powder-blue shirt eating across from me resolutely concludes: “Richard Rivera should be six feet under.”

His green eyes widen when I mention that Cornell pays Rivera’s salary. He is the Associate Director of Academic Reentry for the Cornell Prison Education Program that provides an education to prisoners like him. [2]

Richard Rivera is the plenary speaker in a lecture hall full of students eager to hear about the terrors of American prisons. He holds himself in a relaxed demeanor, cracking casual jokes and slipping into frequent rants about football. Between two long sentences, he reaches for, and drinks from, a water bottle at the corner of the table. Drumming his fingers on the stiff plastic, I struggle to disassociate those fingers from the ones that curled around a trigger in 1981, slaying Officer Walsh.

Then, he tells his story. Rivera didn’t know how to read or write when he was arrested, tried, and incarcerated. When he began living on the street at 4, his father had long been out of the picture. So, clutching the leg of his pregnant mother, they knocked on rows of doors, relying on the good will of strangers for their next meals. Wandering the streets of New York, he recalls tasting the rich broth of a chicken soup through his nose, forcing the aromas to be sufficient in filling his stomach.

Rivera’s not in school: his mom’s abusive boyfriend wants his time to be spent making money. He starts with drug dealing, which turns to stealing, eventually escalating to armed robberies. The boyfriend promises that this time, Richard’s blood-stained bills will be used for groceries. Richard sits in the stairwell, patiently watching: the boyfriend measures the distance between scabbing holes on the crook of his left arm. The groceries, like Richard, will have to wait; the boyfriend has found a spot to wedge another syringe into.

On one of the nights that the beatings gets especially bad, Richard picks up a shotgun, but misses the boyfriend’s skull by a few inches. The boyfriend is angrier now, and his blows land ever harder.

The lecture hall beckons questions of injustice. I’m still skeptical; surely some authority, perhaps the police or social services, must’ve known about his situation and attempted to step in. I’m only partially right. If the boyfriend is arrested, Richard and his mother would be back on the street, so the police are turned away at the door every time. Social Services, too, glance around the apartment and repeat a threat that is quickly getting old, the kids will be taken away if this happens one more time.

My mind is made up once again. This time I knew for certain: it’s not his fault. The institutions designed to educate, discipline, and nurture Rivera chose only to punish, relentlessly. The hand that feeds him hinges on a conditional of paid dues, so emptying cash registers into disposable grocery bags keeps his stomach full. He is a mere product of an abusive patriarch, an uncaring government, and an unforgiving society.

As the pendulum of my opinion swings, the dissonance of both poles leave me resolutely discontent. I’m not exactly sure what’s wrong, but I can approximate.

In one photograph, Rivera smirks with the right side of his mouth, his hair pulled into tight curls and combed back. He is seventeen. He knows his rights from wrongs, certainly he knows not to kill. He is seventeen; he knows these things. If I am to blame society, I would rob him of his agency, his ability to make decisions, diminishing him to a pawn that moves at the will of his surroundings. I want his actions to have consequences, because I know they do. Officer Walsh lies still in his grave.

But he didn’t emerge from the womb, gun in hand, shooting at everything that moved. Dismissing the negligence of the government, his mother’s boyfriend, and society en masse, in the upbringing of Rivera is foolishness. He came, shaped on the potter’s wheel of a merciless society. It birthed him without knowing.

We are told to love our enemies. [3] And I don’t know what that love means. Is he my enemy, the government who denied housing, food, and education to Richard Rivera? Or is he my enemy, the one who shot Officer Walsh in the head? And if I am to love the killer, how am I to love him? With a prison sentence long enough to make him confront his actions? Can a prison sentence even do such a thing?

Let me try at an answer. In a still courtroom, I play the role of the servant and I owe the man in front of me lots of money. [4] He’s been cast as my master. It’s my big scene, I know the lines. By now, you and I both know that I won’t be able to pay it off, so I promise him that I will. The debt I owe to him is large–this much is clear. The penalty for my unpaid debt is greater still. We’re approaching the climax now and he’s ready to deal the killer blow. He’s thought this through, and he tells me that I will be imprisoned–my wife and children too–and all that I own will be sold. I plead, plead.

He goes off-script. All is forgiven, he says. In his mercy, my debt is canceled in an instant. All is forgiven.

Except, I’m still not happy. I continue as though the script has been carved into stone. As though his words haven’t reversed my fortunes. Illogically, wrongly. I turn to my own servant, to whom my money was lended. His debt to me isn’t much but I don’t care, he is unable to pay it back. Like me, he pleads and pleads, but this time, I’m the one without answers, with a script to follow. His pleas don’t do anything to lessen his debt so I don’t forgive him. The script remains unchanged. Draw any single reason out of a hat, I just can’t forgive him.

Let me try again. I am the elder brother and he is the younger. In a flash, he’s gone, shoving an assortment of treasures into the jaws of a suitcase and walking out the door. I stand in the field with my father’s hired hands, drawing crop from the earth, and he must be so happy, off in a distant country, arms open to all the pleasures of the world. And then he has nothing.

Let’s skip ahead to the moment of resolution. Late summer ushers in a gust of good news: a thin silhouette of my brother at the end of the road. It is like a scene from a dramatic television show, where the violins braid a forgiving melody of arpeggiated ninths, ignorant to dissonance. My father runs unrestrainedly, smothers his son’s fragile frame, wraps a ring around his finger and drapes a robe over his shoulders. He is in the arms of the loveliest father in the world. A fattened calf is killed and a celebration feast thrown and I don’t attend.

Somehow, it is all still not enough. My father tells me: “We had to celebrate and be glad, because this brother of yours was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found.” [5]

I hate him so much. I have never seen a love so beautiful.

I don’t want to be the stupid servant that forgets about forgiveness or the spiteful brother that begrudges his kin. Outside of this complex geometry of metaphors and parables, I know that I am both. I think I have a vague answer to the paradox of forgiveness, but I still don’t know what to do with the felon in front of me.

I know that the answer isn’t to forgive Richard Rivera. I don’t think that anyone but Officer Walsh’s family has that right. Doing so misses the point. We still fall short of the mark if we only forgive people whom we sympathize with. There are a million objections and none of them tell me the answer.

In punishment theorist Richard Dagger’s philosophy of retribution, peace in society only exists as a result of people obeying the law. [6] Everything is wrong for the same reason: unfair action. When I sin, I have acted unfairly against society by not contributing to the maintenance of social order, but I have also taken advantage of law-abiding citizens for my own benefit.

I’m inclined to believe that God’s justice could be interpreted in a similar way. “For all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.” [7] Sin is sin. It doesn’t operate in intervals. Imperfection is imperfection. God is a just God who punishes sin, but He is also a forgiving God, abundant in mercy for those who acknowledge the reality of sin. 

So here’s my best estimate: it’s all a foregone conclusion. My failures, his forgiveness, how I fail again, how he forgives again. Again, again. An irredeemable cycle of failed attempts at perfection on the one hand; an unstoppable cascade of undue grace–a predictable ending–on the other hand. It reads like a cheap “and they all lived happily ever after” ending, except it’s everything but cheap. Nothing I can do will ever add up to the sum of perfection. I am forgiven every single time.

But that’s not all. The other servant—the one who owes me debt—is staring me in the face. And if not him, my prodigal brother is. I know what is asked of me and I know I am to give it to him. I know that my debt, far greater than anything owed to me, has already been forgiven. So I’ll give forgiveness my best shot. I’ll fail and I’ll add a mark to my ever-accumulating tally, I know. But I’ll give forgiveness my best shot because I’m so unfairly forgiven—every time. That is the short answer. And also the long answer.

[1] McFadden, “3 Are Guilty in Slaying of Off Duty Policeman in ’81.”

[2] “About Us - Our People.” Cornell University. Accessed December 12, 2023.

[3] Matthew 5:43–44 (ESV)

[4] Matthew 18:21-35 (ESV)

[5] Luke 15:11-32 (ESV)

[6] Dagger,  “Playing Fair with Punishment.”

[7] Romans 3:23-24 (NIV)