In the Jewish tradition of Midrash, an imaginative elaboration of scripture:
I imagine the final reckoning to involve the grace of ultimate awareness. I will be given perfect sight, no longer blind. Terrible as it may be, everything that I have done and failed to do will be revealed to me; likewise, every thought and every rejected gift. In addition to this, I will be able to see the complex stream of harm that flowed out from these choices and feel what each individual felt as a result. I'll realize the freedom that I was given and have the opportunity to take full responsibility for whatever I was responsible for.
All this will happen in the presence of God's legitimate anger and hurt at my willful, selfish rejection of God's self-emptying love and at the harm that I've done to God's beloved children and creation. But at the same time God will make it perfectly clear that, in Jesus, the Godhead bore all these things and no longer holds them against me. The Trinity will never stop enfolding me in its love.
This is the ultimate act of grace, this rending of the curtain. Having experienced reality with every cell of my humanity I am now truly free to choose. Receiving forgiveness and the healing of my relationship to God involves acknowledging the awful reality that will be revealed at the final judgement.
Forgiveness is simply not complete until both parties see and feel the harm done and the hurt felt, and then humbly giving and receiving forgiveness as a way of choosing relationship over justice, mercy over sacrifice. Forgiveness can be offered by oneside, but the mutuality of the relationship between two free agents is not experienced until both acknowledge reality and choose relationship.
Example: The immense blessing received by many of the perpetrators in the "Truth and Reconciliation" hearings after the end of Apartheid in South Africa. The offender could receive exoneration for the most heinous crimes, but they must first come before the victim and tell the story of what they had done -- they had to re experience their crimes in the presence of the victim and thereby experience and acknowledge the horror. But then and only then did the perpetrator receive, not only a get out of jail pass, but a far more wonderful gift, the liberating catharsis of undeserved, gratuitous forgiveness from someone who -- as is now clear to the perpetrator -- has every right to demand that he be forced to experience exactly what he had done to the victim.
In the end many may persist in denying these realities but the God who is love will continue to hold them in love. No one knows what this will feel like, but we have all tasted the bitter pill of resentment and unforgiveness, and the unending pain of a broken relationship that follows the refusal to do the hard but beautiful work of deep reconciliation.
