Why forgiveness is plain absurd and why that’s important

Why is it that forgiveness is so hard? Why is it that letting go of an offence done against us, let’s say deliberately and unapologetically, is so darn difficult?

The tried and tested world’s wisdom around forgiveness suggests that if we don’t forgive, we continue to ingest what poisons only our own heart. In other words, the world’s wisdom—that I suggest a good many Christians subscribe to—is you forgive for your own sake.

Not only does this style of forgiveness not work (even though it sounds great), it isn’t biblical, and because it’s not biblical is the reason it doesn’t work.

At a level this worldly wisdom of forgiveness can work, because it’s very pragmatic — i.e. “don’t allow other people’s behaviour to destroy your heart.” This is very much what scholars call an ontological ethic, which is about doing the right thing, but not necessarily driven by the right motives. In effect, forgiveness done like this tends to be a cycle of forgiving and re-forgiving, which essentially isn’t forgiveness.

Forgiveness, or the letting go of a harm done to us, is done once, for all time. True forgiveness, that is. Most of the time we mortal human beings find it impossible to do that, and this is why forgiveness in its rawest form is quite utterly absurd.

But this observation in and of itself is crucially important.

We may ask why noticing that forgiveness is incredibly hard—that truthfully, it’s an absurd concept—is so important. We should ask why.

It’s feels absurd, because it is absurd. “What, let someone off the hook when justice should be done?” That’s the way our hearts feel.

This is where God enters the equation. I defy anyone to be able to truly understand the nature of grace in the act of God giving Jesus as a sacrifice for our sins. We accept this at the moment we ‘receive’ Christ, but we spend an entire lifetime coming to terms with what grace is, the mercy of God, and how practically we’re called to live out that grace to the effect of our relationships with others.

Compute this: God in Jesus forgave all humanity despite the abuses Jesus suffered mortally and despite the abuses God suffers from humanity eternally, and we’re commanded (woah, strong word!) to forgive just as God in Christ forgave us.

Imbibe that: at my age and stage of faith I’ve experienced the grace to forgive some absurd betrayals and yet there are other betrayals I’m still on the journey toward forgiving. (I’ve forgiven the people, but not the acts, for justice I still pray is on its way, so all may learn what I believe God wants us to learn.)

Try as we might, we cannot forgive anyone in our own strength. We can only find the grace to forgive someone if that grace is given to us by God. That WILL that cannot come from the selfish, justice-demanding human heart of ours, to let the offender off the hook. That WILL can come only as a miracle of God’s grace where we find ourselves letting them go. And it’s important that we receive this grace from God, for if we don’t, we will forgive and forgive and forgive and none of it will stick.

Don’t we see, that if our forgiveness is done purely to remove our pain—and not as an act of obeying God by imitating Christ—it either doesn’t work long term, or it works only as a pragmatic measure that needs work.

But the forgiveness that comes from God, because we sense the enormity in the grace we have received personally, is the grace outpoured on another sinner who just so happens to have set themselves against us.

Forgiveness from this viewpoint is absurd, because we’re willingly choosing to lose, just as God in Jesus chose to lose (his life). Somehow, however, in losing God came to win through the resurrection. It was the greatest turning-over the world had ever seen or will ever see. (And as a further benefit of our genuinely letting our offender go, we may well have a resurrection experience of our own.)

The only way forgiveness works is if we generously hand our offender their pardon.

I know, what about abuse? Just because we pardon our offender doesn’t mean there won’t be justice. We ought to always pray for and hope in expectation of the coming of truth.

But we can also know that we’re to forgive not to save ourselves pain—though that will be a benefit—but we’re to forgive because God commands us to, and because our Lord has made a way for us to do it, and that it is the only way we can live out peace within the lives God has generously given us.

As God set the tone for justice by forgiving us, we atone by forgiving others, leaving the justice to God in faith that God sees all and God will judge.

Photo by Priscilla Du Preez on Unsplash