Forgiveness and Permission and our addiction to Eschatology

"A good many Christian theologians, even among those who know Greek, have managed to miss the point completely. Indeed, the first objection usually raised to letting evil be- let alone to forgiving it- takes the form of agitated moralistic hand-wringing: 'But if you simply tell people in advance that they're going to be forgiven, won't they just go straight out and take that as permission to sin? Don't we have to keep them scared out of their wits by continually harping on the big difference between forgiveness and permission? '

I have a number of replies to that. The first is, 'What big difference? In Greek, the same word is used for both.' The second is, 'There's no difference between them at all. If you're an utterly serious forgiver, and if you make your forgiving disposition known to a solid brass snake-in-the-grass, he will obviously play you for the sucker you are as often as he feels like it: what do you think the world, the flesh, and the devil thought about a Jesus who died on the cross instead of nuking his enemies?' The third is, 'What on earth are you talking about? God, in the act of creating you, gave you permission to do any damned fool thing you could manage to bring off. Forgiveness neither increases nor decreases the level of God's permissiveness; instead, it just fishes us out of the otherwise inescapable quicksand we so stupidly got ourselves into and says "There! Isn't that better!" ' My fourth and final reply, though, is, ' Of course there's a difference; and it's a whopping one. But since that makes no difference at all to either the farmer in the parable or to Jesus on the cross- or, for that matter, to any Christian committed to forgiving his skunk of a brother seventy times seven times- why harp on it?'

'...Oh, of course. I know that by now you are mighty tired of all this emphasis on the Divine Sweetness. You are just itching to remind me that at the harvest, the weeds are going to be bound up in bundles and burned in an appropriately eschatological fire. And so they are. And to finish off the text, so is the wheat going to be gatehered into the barn. But if I may try your patience just one minute more, let me ask you to consider the proportions of this parable as Jesus first tells it. The words that you have all along been holding your breath to hear constitute only two thirds of its final verse. The rest of the parabel- Matthew 13:24-30a- is entirely about the aphesis of evil, not about the avenging of it...

...the human race is hooked on eschatology: give us one drag on it, and we proceed to party away our whole forigven life in fantasies about a final score-settling session that none of us, except for forgiveness, could possibly survive'