How Far is Forgiveness

This Sunday's psalm has a line in it I can't stop turning over: "As far as the east is from the west, so far has he removed our transgressions from us."

The psalmist didn't pick two directions at random. North and south have an end point. Walk far enough north and you hit an actual pole, a place where north runs out and every direction from there is south. East and west don't work that way. Keep walking east, forever, and you never arrive at west. There's no seam where one becomes the other. The distance between them isn't just large — it's endless, by design.

That's the claim the psalm is making about what happens to whatever sits between you and God. Not moved to a safer distance. Not filed away somewhere hard to reach. Removed to a place with no return address.

Most of us carry around a smaller, more manageable version of forgiveness than that. We picture a drawer. Something tucked away, handled, dealt with — still there, technically, but out of sight, and we tell ourselves that's basically the same thing as gone. The psalm isn't describing a drawer. It's describing a direction you can travel forever without arriving back at the thing you started with.

I don't have a tidy way to make that feel true in the body instead of just true on paper. I've sat with people who spent decades sure that some wrong they'd done, or some wrong done to them, was still sitting close by in a drawer, still findable. The psalm doesn't ask them to forget it happened. It asks them to believe the distance is real — that some things don't get filed. They get removed, the way east is removed from west, permanently, without a path back.

I'll be preaching on this Sunday's readings this week, and I'm not going to give away where the sermon goes. But I'd ask you to sit with this one verse before you get there. Say it slowly. Notice which two directions it picked, and why. See if you can tell the difference, in your own life, between something you've tucked into a drawer and something you've actually let travel that far.