As Christians, forgiving others may be the toughest thing Jesus has asked us to do. The author challenges us to start small and gradually learn to turn those who have hurt us over to God.
Some years back, I was on social media commenting on the cruelty of destroying lives and families at the border for the “crime” of not being able to speak English and do paperwork. It is an unpopular thing to say in some Christian circles, and my post sparked the following conversation with a brother Christian who thought refugees were getting exactly what was coming to them:
Reader: There’s a special place in hell for you.
Me: Forgive me for offending you.
Reader: Ask Jesus for forgiveness. You’ll get nothing from me.
It’s a novel form of Christianity that uses Jesus as a human shield for refusing to forgive people. Some, of a more progressive bent, respond to those like my reader with revulsion and, in turn, find it easy to want to cast such people out of all decent society and withhold forgiveness from them.
Both reactions illustrate something that I have come to deeply believe: Our culture has it all wrong in focusing on the pelvic issues as the big bugaboo of Catholic moral teaching.
I mean, I get it. Sex sells and it makes for exciting controversy. So it’s easy to buy the idea that the great barrier to Christian moral teaching is all the stuff about contraception, divorce, abortion, and LGBTQ issues. But in my experience if you really want to tap into deep subterranean magma wells of rage, remind people that Jesus commands us to forgive everyone who sins against us.
Everyone? Really?
Yes. Everyone. “When you stand to pray, forgive anyone against whom you have a grievance, so that your heavenly Father may in turn forgive you your transgressions” (Mk 11:25).
Note the completely unconditional nature of that demand. Not “anyone who apologizes” or “anyone who repents” or “anyone who has hurt you personally but not that jerk who hurt your best friend” or “anyone within reasonable limits but not those people who are obviously beyond the pale.” Anyone. Period.
This insistence on forgiveness likewise underscores Jesus’ teaching on the Our Father in the Sermon on the Mount. On a prayer that has literally had libraries of books written about it, analyzing every detail, Jesus has only this commentary to offer: “If you forgive others their transgressions, your heavenly Father will forgive you. But if you do not forgive others, neither will your Father forgive your transgressions” (Mt 6:14–15).
Yikes! That’s pretty forceful. Why would Jesus say something so hardcore? Because, as Flannery O’Connor observed, “When people are deaf, you shout.” Forgiveness is hard—crucifixion hard (as in the innocent Jesus hanging on the cross praying “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do”)—and so we don’t want to face our need to do it. That’s why I think the forgiveness of sin is the single most difficult teaching of Jesus.
To be sure, we love it for ourselves. But the grace with which it is given us by God can make it easy to forget just how costly that grace was for God. As C.S. Lewis observes, it cost God, so far as we know, nothing to create the world. But to forgive sins cost him crucifixion. And we get some inkling of that cost when we turn from the forgiveness of our sins to his demand that we forgive that monster over there who has never apologized for what he did to us, who laughs it off and calls us an over-sensitive snowflake, who never will apologize, and who continues to hurt us in this very hour.
Why It’s So Hard to Forgive
Yes. Forgiveness is, without any possible comparison, the most difficult thing Jesus calls us to do. I think this has a great deal to do with our supposing that forgiveness means pretending those we are called to forgive are not impenitent jerks, or that they didn’t hurt us, or that we have to go on letting them hurt us, or that we somehow had it coming, or that forgiving means letting them win or get away with it, or that the struggle we endure in striving to forgive makes God so mad at us that he sides with our abuser—as though we are the problem for being hurt.
But forgiveness doesn’t mean any of these things. Indeed, forgiveness necessarily presupposes that the person we forgive really has sinned against us. In short, the forgiveness of sin is not the same thing at all as excusing somebody. When the bus lurches and somebody accidently steps on our toes, they obviously could not help it. The laws of physics made it happen, not their willful malice or sinful neglect. So we excuse them. It’s when somebody deliberately stomps on our toes, or neglectfully fails to protect our toes from the bowling ball they carelessly left to roll off their seat and on to our foot, that forgiveness comes in.
Consider an illustration from the world of law. In law, a pardon does not mean declaring somebody innocent. On the contrary, a pardon means they are guilty of the crime—and that they are forgiven for committing it.
Forgiveness, likewise, does not mean God is saying to the victim, “You are the bad one for seeing that your abuser is abusive.” It means, rather, that God knows your abuser is abusive and that he is Emmanuel: God with you in your suffering. That is who Christ crucified is for us. He suffers what we endure with us and we with him. That means we can center our whole worth in the unconditional love of God as he stands between us and the diabolical act of gaslighting by the abuser. It means we can, by the power of the Holy Spirit, refuse and reject the lies of our abuser about what a loser we are, how we had it coming, why we are the real villain, etc.— and hand that person and those lies over to God. It means finding our identity in the love Christ has for us in creating us, in sharing in the abuse we suffered on his cross and, in rising from the dead, giving us the grace to see that those lies need not define us and that pain need not chain us anymore.
Breaking the Chains
In short, forgiveness is about our liberation, not about knuckling under to our abuser’s oppression. It’s not about letting them get away with it. It’s about walking away in freedom from their power over us.
Forgiveness has to do with handing our abuser over to God, desiring their ultimate good, and then walking away from their abusive control. It does not mean refusing to call the cops when they have committed a crime, or not calling the liar out when he lies, or not fighting back if he tries to hurt us again, or not telling anybody else what our abuser did. Indeed, it may well be that the sin they have committed is also a crime that needs to be punished. If so, it is not unforgiveness to, for instance, testify in court against them, particularly if they remain a danger to others. That is love for others and even for the sinner.
But the key is to hand them over to God and seek his mercy for them, not because they are not sinners, but because they are. It is to release the sinner into the hands of God. To not carry them anymore. To be free of them. To no longer let them control our lives. To grow past them and let the love of Christ control our responses, not their dominating, wounding will. And that process, precisely because it is about our liberation and rooted in the love of God, does not at all depend on whether our abuser says they are sorry. If it did, we would be chained in bitterness to the memory of every impenitent or dead person who ever sinned against us. But God is not chained. He breaks chains.
Starting Small
The good news is that God knows our weakness and starts small with us. Most of the sins we endure are small ones in ordinary life, and we can start practicing the forgiveness of sins there rather than instantly demanding seven Herculean feats of ourselves. The guy who missed the lunch date. The fender bender. The irritating chatterbox at work. The toilet seat left up. The dirty dishes left on the counter.
This principle of practicing forgiveness in small things so as to train like an athlete to forgive big things is something Jesus is getting at in his parables when he says, “The person who is trustworthy in very small matters is also trustworthy in great ones; and the person who is dishonest in very small matters is also dishonest in great ones. If, therefore, you are not trustworthy with dishonest wealth, who will trust you with true wealth?” (Lk 16:10–11).
Note, for instance, how often Jesus relates the forgiveness of sins to the forgiveness of debt, and how often our culture battles to forget that relationship. Some translations of the Lord’s Prayer say, “Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors.” Jesus again and again illustrates the demand to forgive in economic terms, as when he defends the sinful woman he forgave by asking who will love more: the one who has been forgiven a small debt or a huge one? (cf. Lk 7:36–50). He tells the parable of the unmerciful servant who is forgiven a gigantic debt, yet who refuses to forgive a trivial one (Mt 18:21–35). We are, of course, quite right to spiritualize all this language to apply to moral, emotional, and spiritual debts we owe and are owed us.
But here’s the thing: We are not to pretend this does not apply to economic debts as well. For instance, when the bishops call for student loan debt relief in order to ease the staggering burden of school debt on graduates who are trying to start families and buy homes, do we respond like the unmerciful servant and demand “Pay me what you owe me!” while refusing to forgive the relatively trivial tax burden it will cost us so that our children can prosper? Or do we respond generously like the king who forgave the unmerciful servant a gigantic debt?
In short, forgiveness of economic debt is, in a minor key, the same as forgiveness for the debt of sin. And Jesus warns us that if we are cheapskates with forgiveness in small things like money, we are not going to suddenly be spiritual giants of mercy in big things for the same reason that couch potatoes do not suddenly jump up and run the Boston Marathon. We have to train ourselves to be merciful just as we have to train for distance running.
Accepting God’s Forgiveness
Another aspect of the forgiveness of sins is that, while it is freely given us by God, it does us no good if we do not open ourselves to the love who is God who gives it to us. That is the real reason that Jesus warns that if we do not forgive, we will not be forgiven. When God tries to hand you a gift, even he cannot give it to you if you refuse to unclench your fist. If you refuse to forgive the sins of others, one of the paradoxes of the spiritual life is that it is highly likely you will refuse to forgive yourself for similar or related sins. And if you refuse forgiveness, God does not force you to accept it, and you live in that unforgiveness till you open yourself to his love. But that openness has to include your neighbor, whether you have sinned against him or he against you.
This is why sayings like “When people bring up your past tell them that Jesus has dropped the charges” can be a double-edged sword. It is a very good thing to have the strength of grace to withstand the accusations of the enemy about sins for which God has forgiven you.
But it is also vital to ask ourselves, “What if the victims of my forgiven sins still do live in the past because of trauma I inflicted on them?” Forgiveness of our sins is a glorious thing, and we should praise God for it. But what goes with it is the grace to, as far as it lies in our power, make things right for those we hurt. To walk away from those we hurt saying, “My sins are forgiven. I don’t live in the past. Too bad for you!” is not repentance, contrition, or a firm purpose of amendment, but simply feckless narcissism. It’s a way of telling your victim that God is on the side of their abusers and it is, in the final analysis, a form of taking the name of God in vain.
One final point: It is easy to forget that the instructions in the New Testament about forgiving sins are generally for Christians dealing with other Christians in their own communities, not for shiny, happy, perfect, sinless Christians suffering only at the hands of evil unbelievers. Dorothy Day warned that the Church is the cross upon which Jesus is crucified. Yes, there are real saints who are living sacraments in the Church, and we ignore them and focus only on the bad at great peril to our souls. But those who are deeply and intensely wounded by their fellow Christians need also to be heard and not shouted down. It is a pattern going all the way back to the apostles that the worst pain somebody attempting obedience to God faces is not from those outside the communion of Christ but from those within it who hate, abuse, betray, abandon, neglect, and backbite.
This is why Jesus commands the Church’s members to practice radical forgiveness of one another. I stink at all this, of course. It is a struggle every day for me. But Jesus says it is nonetheless the Way. It is hard, hard work to get there. But it can be done if we choose to receive the grace to do it. And the fruit it bears is freedom.
