In this week's installment of Sacred Frames, our dear friend Greg Garrett, who is a gifted author, professor, and speaker, brings us a message about the forgiveness of God through the lens of the movie Magnolia.
Garrett describes Magnolia as a beautiful, hard, and true film that in its second act leaves you feeling like you are at the bottom of the ocean and will never know light or warmth again. But then God moves, and grace flows and we see as God sees, with a sympathy for the brokenness which enters into every human life. We see God makes the showers to fall upon the just and the unjust, and we discover how God is right there with us as we try to live into the toughest parts of being human.
Live Teaching Podcast
Scriptures & References
“One way I think about forgiveness is that it’s the judgment love renders. I think we tend to think of forgiveness as undoing wrong, as erasing it somehow. But in fact to say ‘I forgive you’ is to imply that there is something that needs forgiving. To say, ‘I forgive you,’ is also to say, ‘you have wronged me.’ But in rendering that judgment, forgiveness tries to figure out what loving the wrongdoer would look like.”
— Matthew Ichihashi Potts, Forgiveness: An Alternative Account
Matthew 5: 43-48
43 You have been taught to love your neighbor and hate your enemy. 44 But I tell you this: love your enemies. Pray for those who torment you and persecute you— 45 in so doing, you become children of your Father in heaven. He, after all, loves each of us—good and evil, kind and cruel. He causes the sun to rise and shine on evil and good alike. He causes the rain to water the fields of the righteous and the fields of the sinner. 46 It is easy to love those who love you—even a tax collector can love those who love him. 47 And it is easy to greet your friends—even outsiders do that! 48 But you are called to something higher: “Be perfect, as your Father in heaven is perfect.”