"The Heart of the Matter" begins with a phone call the singer did not want. A friend tells him the woman he lost has someone new. He says he is learning to live without her. Then he admits what he is really trying to do. He wants to get down to the heart of the matter. His will gets weak, and his thoughts scatter. But he thinks it is about forgiveness, even if she does not love him anymore.
The verses wander from the breakup to the world. These times are uncertain. He wonders how love can survive in such a graceless age. He also admits his own part. Pride and competition cannot fill his empty arms, and the work he put between them does not keep him warm. The more he knows, the less he understands. He tells himself that people let you down and hurt your pride, and that carried anger will eat you up inside.
The chorus never moves past I think. By the end it has shifted only slightly, to I'm thinking about. The forgiveness is identified. It is not yet performed. The song is a man standing at the door of forgiveness, naming it over and over, unable to walk through.
Scripture tells the story of a prophet who stood at the same door. He knew the answer better than anyone. He had received the mercy himself. And when God extended it to someone else, he asked to die, then sat down outside the city to sulk.
The Song and the Writers
The music came first. Mike Campbell of Tom Petty's Heartbreakers had written the track for Henley's "The Boys of Summer" a few years earlier. He cut another track at home and played it for Henley, who brought in his old friend J.D. Souther to help with the words. It appeared on Henley's 1989 album The End of the Innocence.
Both lyricists were coming off broken engagements. Souther said they had both broken up with their fiancees within the last year or so. A breakup like that, he said, "first focuses the mind and later expands its range". He added that he could not have come to that place in his twenties.
The forgiveness chorus was Henley's idea, and Souther did not grasp it at first. The first time Henley sang it over and over to him, he didn't get it. Then it sank in that it was the point of the whole song. Campbell recalled Henley telling him the lyric was something he had been trying to write for a long time.
Both men have explained the theme in practical terms. Souther called forgiveness sacred and said the first one to benefit is the one who forgives. Henley has said the song keeps resonating with him "because we always need forgiveness from somebody".
Those two remarks point in different directions. Souther speaks of giving forgiveness. Henley speaks of needing it. The song itself holds only the first. Scripture joins them, and it puts them in a particular order.
Doest Thou Well to Be Angry?
Jonah ran from God and ended up in the sea. From the belly of the fish he prayed, and his prayer ends with the whole of what he had learned. "Salvation is of the LORD" (Jonah 2:9). The fish put him on dry land. He had been rescued and given a second chance.
Then he preached in Nineveh, the capital of Israel's cruelest enemy. The city repented, and God spared it. Jonah was furious. His complaint is one of the most honest prayers in Scripture, because it admits why he ran in the first place. "I knew that thou art a gracious God, and merciful, slow to anger, and of great kindness, and repentest thee of the evil" (Jonah 4:2).
Jonah knew the answer. He could recite it. It was the very mercy that had pulled him out of the sea. He simply could not bear to see it given to the people who had hurt his people. So he asked God to take his life.
God answered with a question. "Doest thou well to be angry?" (4:4). Jonah did not reply. He went outside the city, built a shelter, and waited to see what would happen. God grew a plant to shade him, then sent a worm to kill it. Jonah grieved the plant. God asked again whether he did well to be angry, and Jonah said he did, even unto death.
The book ends with God still asking. He had pity on a vine that grew up in a night. "And should not I spare Nineveh, that great city?" (4:11). There is no answer from Jonah. The last word in the book is a question left hanging, the way Henley's chorus is left hanging on I think. Both men have named the mercy from outside the city, and neither has gone in.
Even as I Had Pity on Thee
Peter once asked how often he had to forgive a brother who sinned against him. He offered seven times, which sounded generous. Yeshua answered, "Until seventy times seven" (Matthew 18:22). Then He told a story to explain why.
A king settled accounts with his servants. One owed him ten thousand talents, a sum no servant could repay in many lifetimes. The man fell down and begged for time. The king did better than that. He "was moved with compassion, and loosed him, and forgave him the debt" (18:27).
The same servant went out and found a fellow servant who owed him a hundred pence. He took him by the throat and demanded payment. The fellow servant fell down and begged with nearly the same words the first man had used. He was thrown into prison anyway.
When the king heard, he called the first servant back. "O thou wicked servant, I forgave thee all that debt, because thou desiredst me: Shouldest not thou also have had compassion on thy fellowservant, even as I had pity on thee?" (18:32–33). The story ends hard. The man is handed to the tormentors. Henley's verse describes the same thing from the inside, anger carried until it eats a person up.
The parable answers the question Henley and Souther circled. Souther was right that the forgiver benefits. Henley was right that everyone needs forgiveness from somebody. Yeshua puts the second truth underneath the first. The servant could not forgive a hundred pence because he had already forgotten ten thousand talents. The mercy he could not extend was the mercy he had stopped remembering. Scripture does not treat knowing about mercy as the same thing as giving it. Remembering, in Scripture, is more than recall. The servant could have named the sum he was forgiven. He did not let it change him.
Even If You Don't Love Me
The last chorus changes one line. The singer's will gets weak in the earlier choruses. Now it is the flesh that will get weak, and the ashes that will scatter. He is thinking about death, and about how little time there is to settle this. Yeshua said something close to it in Gethsemane, to friends who kept falling asleep: "the spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak" (Matthew 26:41). The singer has the willing spirit. He knows what he ought to do. What he lacks is the strength to do it.
Scripture's answer is to look at where forgiveness came from. Joseph's brothers sold him into slavery. Years later, with their lives in his hands, they begged him for mercy. He wept and said, "Fear not: for am I in the place of God? But as for you, ye thought evil against me; but God meant it unto good" (Genesis 50:19–20). Joseph could forgive because he had seen God at work in the very wrong done to him. He did not have to be the judge.
The song's hardest line is its condition. Forgiveness, even if you don't love me anymore. It is the right condition, and it is the one Scripture says God met first. "But God commendeth his love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us" (Romans 5:8). He forgave people who did not love Him. On the cross Yeshua prayed for the men driving the nails: "Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do" (Luke 23:34).
Paul ties the two together in one sentence. "Be ye kind one to another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, even as God for Christ's sake hath forgiven you" (Ephesians 4:32). The words even as carry the weight. Forgiveness given flows from forgiveness received, and it runs dry when the first is forgotten.
Henley wondered how love could survive in a graceless age. His own lyric holds the answer, though it stops short of the source. Love survives where grace has been received. What the man at the door of forgiveness needs is memory. He needs to remember the ten thousand talents.