Every time we say the Lord’s prayer, we speak of forgiveness. Whether we learned to say our debts, our sins, or our trespasses, as we pray, saying the words the Lord taught us, we lift up our need to receive forgiveness and to give it. We pray “give us this day our daily bread” and in the same breath we pray for the one thing we need just as much as bread— forgiveness. The words we recite in prayer teach our hearts to know that just as bread sustains us physically, forgiveness sustains a community where bread— and therefore life— can truly be shared.
For most of us, however, it is easier to break bread with a stranger than to share forgiveness with a friend. “Thank you” and “I’m sorry” are among the first words we learn as children, but saying “I’m sorry” seems to get more complicated, more difficult as we get older.
Vengeance and retribution are easy, we can rely on our instincts and simply let the waves of our emotions carry us: Drive me into a corner and I’ll snarl like an animal. Threaten me and I’ll roar. Hurt me and I’ll hurt you back. Forgiveness is not an instinctive reaction; it’s more like a seawall against the storm surge of instinctive responses. In Mere Christianity, C. S. Lewis wrote,
I said in a previous chapter that chastity was the most unpopular of the Christian virtues. But I am not sure I was right. I believe there is one even more unpopular. … Every one says forgiveness is a lovely idea, until they have something to forgive.[1]
I don’t know what’s harder, to forgive a person who has wronged me or to acknowledge that I have offended or hurt another and ask for forgiveness. It’s easy for me to think of situations and relationships where there’s been a breach or where old hurts have festered, and you probably don’t find it hard to call those to mind either. Most of us know the heart’s yearning for resolution when a relationship is stuck in tension; most of us know the deep desire for a way to leave the hurt behind and move toward healing. We love the idea of forgiveness, but we don’t always find the courage to practice it.
We marvel at stories like that of the children of a State Trooper who was shot dead during a routine traffic stop. The killer was caught and brought to justice. While in jail awaiting the end of the trial, he was visited by the children of the victim. The young woman and her brother wanted to meet him. They wanted to look into his eyes. They wanted him to know how their father’s violent death had hurt them. And they wanted to tell him in person that they forgave him for killing their father. Months later, after the man had been sentenced to death, they wrote a letter to the governor petitioning him for clemency— they didn’t want to add more pain to a situation already steeped in pain.
Stories like theirs connect to depths of mercy that seem impossibly hard to reach. Had the two asked for front row seats on the day of his execution, I wouldn’t have been nearly as surprised. Stories like theirs— of people who have lived through depths of chaos and pain most of us will never have to face— such stories give forgiveness a glow of heroic exception, when in truth it is an unexceptional dimension of simply living with others, be it at home, at school, at church or at work. Henri Nouwen writes,
Forgiveness is the name of love practiced among people who love poorly. The hard truth is that all people love poorly, and so we need to forgive and be forgiven every day, every hour increasingly. Forgiveness is the great work of love among the fellowship of the weak that is the human family.[2]
Forgiveness truly belongs with daily bread among the things we cannot be without. Little annoyances may seem trivial, but they can grow like kudzu and choke a relationship. How do we deal with that? What do we do with the small offenses, intentional or not, that quickly drain warmth from a relationship? Words spoken carelessly, promises broken, impulses poorly controlled, gifts unnoticed or unacknowledged— it’s so easy to come up with everyday examples. And in each case, it’s equally easy to recognize that forgiveness is critical to healing what is broken— easy, that is, as long as we ourselves are not involved. We are wise, caring observers, and our advise is solid, when it comes to others; recognizing the need to offer or receive forgiveness ourselves, and acting on it, is a different story, though.
I can’t tell you how often I don’t want to forgive, and I know it’s because few feelings are as perversely rewarding as righteous indignation. Let him take the first step— why does it always have to be me? If she wants to talk to me, she knows where to find me. He should know that that was just totally inappropriate; how can he not know that he crossed a line? I can talk to myself in my head like that for hours and days, trying to justify my own inaction, and I don’t let the fact that none of us are mind readers get in the way of enjoying those quiet moments of moral superiority. Forgiveness is a lovely idea, and my proud heart can do a lot to keep it that way.
Our brother Peter asks how often followers of Jesus ought to forgive. Seven times perhaps? In a world where second chances are hard to come by, seven seems quite generous. And the number itself, given its connection with the holiness of the Sabbath, carries connotations of completeness like a halo. But Jesus responds, “Not seven times, but, I tell you, seventy-seven times.” Or perhaps the words should be translated seventy times seven times.
I don’t think Jesus is suggesting that we need to get even better at keeping score, way beyond the second chance or the third strike. Forgiveness, according to Jesus, isn’t something that can be counted like entries in a ledger. Saying “seventy-seven times” is like saying, “Stop counting.” Stop thinking of forgiveness as a series of holy acts, each adding another stripe to the sleeves of your heavenly robe. Think of forgiveness as a practice, a habit, a way of life. Think of it as responding, again and again, to a call to move out of stuckness, a call to a future not bound by the past.
Jesus tells the unsettling story of a king settling debts with his servants. One owed the monarch 10,000 talents. One talent of silver is equivalent to about 6,000 denarii, with a denarius being a typical day’s wage for a laborer. Thus, this servant owed about 60 million denarii or what one laborer would earn in about 150,000 years. Perhaps you want to do the math in your head: your annual income times 150,000. The debtor fell at the king’s feet and begged for more time, but instead of an extension or better terms he received a complete remission of his debts.
I don’t know how the man was able to get up from his knees after that announcement, but he did, and he left with a whole new life available to him. Soon it became apparent, though, that the king’s marvelous economy of jubilee had touched the man’s books, but not his heart. Approached by a fellow servant who owed him some money— think of it as about three times your monthly income— he harshly insisted on full payment without delay. The king’s extravagant forgiveness had opened to this man a whole new life, but he didn’t live it, he didn’t participate in it, he didn’t extend the king’s radical new terms to his own debtors. And so the king said, “If it’s the old life you want, there you have it.” It’s a disturbing story, but it reminds us that mercy wants to flow.
In Jesus, God became a human being, exposed to the human capacity to touch, caress, comfort, and hold, but also to betray, abuse, mock, and abandon one another. In Jesus, God, in human flesh, entered the space where our desire to control reigns— where sin destroys trust and friendship and all that is sacred between us— and ended up as the one judged, condemned, and executed. Everything ended there, in the darkness of Friday. Everything ended in that loveless, God-forsaken darkness, with the world stuck in the all-too-familiar ways of power politics in the governor’s palace, the temple, and the street. Everything ended but God’s mercy and faithfulness. And God made the first move by raising Jesus from the dead.
Forgiveness is not merely a lovely idea. It is the character of God. It is the word God speaks to remove the burden of our sin and renew all of creation. It is the healing river flowing freely from the heart of God into the barren deserts of our love-starved lives. Forgiveness is not our doing, but our living in that flow and our being transformed by it until we freely give what we have received. There’s nothing there that could be counted. There’s only the deep memory of God’s mercy and our trust in its power to carry us. And so when somebody has wronged us, or we have wronged them, we begin at the beginning, again and again: We take a step. We take a breath. We speak. We listen. And we let ourselves be renewed.
[1] Mere Christianity (New York: HarperCollins 2001), 115.
[2] Quoted at Debie Thomas https://www.journeywithjesus.net/essays/2748-unpacking-forgiveness