This essay is based on a sermon I preached several weeks ago. The video for the sermon is at the end of this post. I have continued to think about these issues, and I’m sure I’m not done thinking about them. Perhaps this way of approaching the subject of Christian forgiveness will be helpful to people.
To err is human, to forgive divine.
—Alexander Pope
There’s an episode of the TV show Blue Bloods called “Bad Company” (season 5, episode 18—find it on Disney+) that has an amazing scene, one that has stuck in my mind for years now. There’s a young woman named Sarah Grant who is angry at a man named Donald Berry. She has good reason to be angry. Donald Berry is in prison and will never get out because of what he did to Sarah’s family perhaps fifteen years earlier. I’ll let you use your imagination about the crime, or watch the episode. The scene I mentioned takes place in the prison, when Sarah visits this man, who wants to talk to her to explain that he is sorry, that he was diagnosed only in prison as a paranoid schizophrenic, that he has now found God, that he is a different person from what he was. He says that he has tried to end his life a number of times. And Sarah Grant’s response to all this is to say that if he’s really sorry for what he did, he should try suicide again and get it right this time.
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That’s the end of the scene and the storyline. We never hear from these people again.
I remember watching that scene for the first time, years ago, and thinking, “Wow! What are we supposed to get out of this? What were the producers of this show wanting to say?” And I’m not sure.
That scene reminds me of Natalie Maines.
Forgive, sounds good.Forget, I’m not sure I could.They say time heals everything,But I’m still waiting
Lloyd Vogel is a bit like Sarah Grant. He is angry at a man who treated his family poorly, and he doesn’t want to get over his anger. He has good reason to be angry, not as good as Sarah Grant has, but still pretty good. Lloyd is angry at his father, Jerry, because perhaps twenty years earlier, when Lloyd’s parents were married and Lloyd’s mom got sick, Jerry left, abandoned the family, couldn’t handle the pressure of family life, especially with a sick wife. Lloyd’s mom died when Lloyd was, I dunno, twelve years old maybe, and Lloyd spent the next twenty years pursuing his career and hating his father. I’m describing to you the backstory of the wonderful movie, A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood (2019), the one where Tom Hanks plays Mr. Rogers—which, by the way, is not a kids movie. After Lloyd Vogel developed a relationship with Mr. Rogers, and learned from him about dealing with anger, he had a dream of his sick mom, and he went up to her bedside, and she said to him, “I know you’re hanging on to this anger, this hatred, for my sake. You think your anger toward your dad is honoring me.” And she says to him, “I don’t need it.”
Look, I haven’t ruined the movie for you; you ought to watch it. And if you haven’t seen it in the past six months, you ought to watch it again. It’s good. You can watch it with your kids in the room; they’ll just be bored. But you won’t be.
Now I’m about to ruin the movie for you. Not really, because you knew it had to happen: Lloyd reconciles with his father. There is forgiveness. He manages to do what Sarah Grant could not do. Earlier Lloyd was angry, bitter, and when he manages to release that anger and forgive his dad, he himself feels liberated, joyful. What’s that that they say? —that holding onto a grudge is like drinking poison and hoping the other person dies. Letting go of the anger is good for you.
I can understand why Sarah Grant is angry, but I can also say that it’s bad for her, that she would be better off releasing her anger and forgiving this murderer. I don’t mean that they should be best friends, or even have any sort of relationship at all. But he asked for her forgiveness, and she should offer it.
That’s the Christian way.
Forgiveness and Reconciliation
But if Sarah Grant is not going to have a relationship with the person who harmed her family, is that really forgiveness? To what extent does forgiveness involve reconciliation?
I’ve got three answers, three buckets of forgiveness, three different categories by which to measure the relationship between forgiveness and reconciliation. Sometimes forgiveness entails a complete restoration of a relationship, and sometimes it doesn’t. The third bucket of forgiveness I’m not actually sure should be called forgiveness as the Bible talks about forgiveness, but we’ll get to that.
These are my buckets, not God’s buckets. I didn’t find these buckets in the Bible; I just devised them from observing life. I think it’s helpful to contemplate forgiveness in these three categories, but you could come up with a few—or even many—more buckets if you think about it enough. People are complicated, and there are all kinds of situations that don’t fit neatly into these three categories, but I think these three categories do cover a lot of the ground.
I’ll name these off and then talk about them:
* Total Reconciliation
* Partial Reconciliation
* No Reconciliation
Buckets 1 & 2: Total Reconciliation and Partial Reconciliation
The common element for both of these categories is that the offender repents and asks for forgiveness. What distinguishes the two is the nature of the offense and whether it would wise for both parties to return to business as usual.
Bucket 1, Total Reconciliation. The person repents and asks for forgiveness, and you not only forgive and welcome the person back into a relationship, but there is a complete restoration of the previous relationship.
Bucket 2, Partial Reconciliation—or you could call this one: Forgiveness without trust. The person repents and asks for forgiveness, and you forgive and welcome the person back into a relationship, but there is not a complete restoration of the previous relationship.
The examples I am thinking of here have to do with the nature of the sin that the person committed. Maybe the person had been the church treasurer and had embezzled funds and gambled away the money. Forgiving the person does not mean restoring them to their role as church treasurer. Maybe the person sexually abused kids in the church. Forgiving the person does not entail asking them to babysit your kids.
Are there biblical examples of Bucket 1? The Parable of the Prodigal Son seems to me the most obvious. This is a picture of divine forgiveness. Literally. The Father who offers forgiveness to his prodigal son represents God. It’s a good message to us, and I think it means this: whenever God forgives, there is always total reconciliation of the relationship.
Are there biblical examples of one person forgiving another person in this way? I can’t really think of any.
Bucket 1 is difficult. Let me tell you why (as I think). We are perfectly fine forgiving people completely when it comes to rather minor sins, perhaps ones of which we were not even aware. Have you had the experience where someone apologizes to you for some offense, and you’re response is something along the lines of, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Person X has said something, or done something, and at the time it didn’t even register with you, but Person X soon feels bad about saying or doing that thing, and can’t sleep that night, and finally has to confess the wrongdoing. It bothered the offender but the offendee didn’t even know. And so the offendee is perfectly happy to say, “no problem, all is forgotten,” and the offendee really means it. In this case, there is a complete restoration of the relationship, but there was never really any offense to begin with.
When there’s really an offense, when someone says something really nasty that does register with you, or does something harmful to your career, or to your family, and you are very much offended, in this case it’s hard to act like the father of the prodigal son. You will offer forgiveness, but it’s hard to forget, and the relationship is not quite what it was. Trust has been lost; you are more guarded around this person.
Second chances. We do sometimes, in some contexts, offer second chances, but usually we think of a second chance as happening when the offendee is a boss or an authority figure, and the offender has messed up on some responsibility. “Please, give me another chance, I won’t let you down this time.” We can imagine this happening at a job, or in a sport, or maybe parent to child. Sometimes spouse to spouse. And we offer a second chance, and there is a full restoration of the previous relationship—sort of. The offendee in these cases is probably still a little wary for a while, on the lookout for the messup again. It’s hard to give second chances that entail full restoration.
God does offer us full restoration, second chance upon second chance, but he also doesn’t (necessarily) protect us from the consequences of our own poor choices.
There’s a lot to think through here. For people who ask for our forgiveness, we should repudiate the advice from Mr. Collins to Mr. Bennet in regard to Lydia and Wickham:
You ought certainly to forgive them as a Christian, but never to admit them in your sight, or allow their names to be mentioned in your hearing.
Leonard J. Vander Zee (pp. 119–20) tells a story about a baptism—that he cites from a story written by Ralph Wood and published in The Christian Century, Oct 21, 1992, pp. 925–26—involving a man imprisoned for sexually molesting his ten-year-old daughter, represented (by Vander Zee and Wood) as an isolated incident. The mother and daughter came to the prison to offer forgiveness, and this act of grace allowed the man emotionally to wonder whether God might forgive him, the initial step toward the baptism that is the point of the story. Toward the end of this narrative, Vander Zee quotes Wood’s article, reflecting on the trials before this new Christian:
The repentant molester may return to his old habits, destroying both himself and others. It will take careful and prolonged nurture in the faith to free him from such bondage. But I believe it wrong to insist—as many voices would insist—that this man’s family should never have forgiven him, that to do so was to sanction his violence, indeed to collude in rape. I believe that this mother and daughter brought a dead man back to life. Their act of forgiveness opened him to the one reality by which our common slavery to sin can be broken, the power of salvation in Jesus Christ.
Look, the deal is, the guy was repentant, and because he’s imprisoned there is no option of returning the relationship to what it was—mom, dad, and daughter, all in the same house, a happy family—and it probably wouldn’t be wise to restore the relationship to what it was. But forgiveness was necessary, required by the Lord. I get that some people will say that such forgiveness enables abuse. But forgiveness doesn’t require naivete.
If you’re thinking of the Catholic sex abuse scandal, I am too. Perhaps a bit too much naivete there.
But let’s get to the third bucket.
Bucket 3: No Reconciliation
The person continues in his sin, without repentance and without asking for forgiveness. We might imagine a career criminal who waits until you’re at the beach before breaking into your house and stealing your stuff. He’s never caught. You have no idea who he is. Should you forgive him?
Or he is caught, but he makes no effort to reconcile with you.
What if it was a family friend who broke into your house? Or a cousin? Should you forgive that person?
What if your family was home, and this criminal harmed them? Should you forgive the perpetrator? Even if the perpetrator pleads not guilty and is convicted and serves time but never confesses and never asks for forgiveness? Does it change if the perpetrator pleads guilty but still won’t express to you any sorrow or ask for forgiveness?
What if the person who brings harm to you and your family is … no, I don’t want to use him, let’s change it up … what if it’s Joseph Stalin?—who, of course, never expresses any remorse.
Should you forgive?
This is Bucket #3. The offender does not repent, does not express sorrow, does not ask for forgiveness—and there can be no reconciliation. Should you forgive?
We have an example from Jesus. On the cross, he prayed for his persecutors: “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do” (Luke 23:34). I am aware of the textual problem with this verse, but I accept it as an authentic part of Luke’s Gospel, partly because of the good arguments I’ve read for authenticity by Bart Ehrman and Dirk Jongkind, and partly because it sounds so Jesusy. Earlier in the Third Gospel, Jesus had instructed his followers: “pray for those who abuse you” (Luke 6:28). There are also other Lukan parallels (Acts 3:17; 7:60).
So, Jesus asked his Father to forgive his killers at the moment that they were killing him. Of course, they had not repented. They didn’t want forgiveness from Jesus, not in that moment, and they didn’t think they needed forgiveness from God. They thought—or, at least, they told themselves—that they were doing God’s work.
Does this prayer mean that Jesus forgave his murderers (while the murder was happening)? The text doesn’t say Jesus forgave them; it says he prayed for them. Certainly Jesus didn’t hold a grudge. Is that the same thing as forgiveness?
I don’t want to get distracted by terminology.
This Third Bucket—I don’t know if it really counts as a bucket of forgiveness. But I do know a couple of things about a situation in which the offender does not repent.
* We should, for our own sake, let go of the hurt and anger and bitterness. We should not hold a grudge. We should follow the example of Jesus and pray for the person. We should be ready for a restoration of the relationship. Followers of Jesus do not hate people, anyone, no matter what they have done or to whom they’ve done it. Followers of Jesus do not seek revenge. We pray for our persecutors so that we may be children of the God who is good to the just and the unjust.
* There are passages in Scripture giving counsel about cutting people out of a relationship. I’m thinking specifically of Matthew 18:15–18 and 1 Corinthians 5:5, but there are others. Those passages must apply to some situation, and it seems to me that they would apply to situations in which an offender does not repent. So there are situations in which Jesus counsels us not to restore the relationship, not to accept a reconciliation. I mean, good grief, there’s a situation in which Paul says that the thing to do is to “purge out the old leaven” (1 Corinthians 5:7).
Is this forgiveness, this response I have described, letting go of the anger, praying for the person, but not restoring the relationship?
Do we call that forgiveness? I don’t know.
You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against any of your people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself: I am the LORD. (Leviticus 19:18)
I know some people who say that forgiveness is dependent on you and not on the offender, that you should always forgive whether the offender repents or not. I don’t think the Bible exactly addresses the situation, so I don’t know whether the term forgiveness applies to the response I have described, but I’m fairly confident in saying that the response is correct and godly and biblical no matter what term is used for it.
Edmund Dantes is a good example for us to ponder. I highly recommend the recent 8-part Masterpiece series on The Count of Monte Cristo. If the plot (of the book or an adaptation) is not fresh in your mind, sorry! You can skip this paragraph. Anyway, Dantes is a good example to ponder—and a very bad example to imitate. He should have let it go. But also those men needed to repent. It’s not like they did one bad thing and stopped. They did not stop; they continued to promote injustice. What was needed was to confront them and call for their repentance, even publicly expose them, to stop them from harming others and themselves. If motivated by love, one would go about this a very different way from Edmund Dantes. Would that be forgiveness? I don’t know.
Refusing to Forgive
What is clear from Scripture is that Christians forgive the penitent. There’s no such thing in Scripture as a follower of Jesus withholding forgiveness from someone who seeks it.
Of course, we’ve seen it. And we can imagine it. And Jesus tells that wonderful and troubling parable about it, the Parable of the Unforgiving Servant. And we recall the ending of the Lord’s prayer in Matthew 6:14–15.
For if ye forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you: but if ye forgive not men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses. (Matt 6:14–15)
Reflecting on that passage makes me want to be very liberal in my forgiveness of others.
We can ponder all kinds of terrible situations. What would I do if it had been my kid abused by those Catholic priests, or by someone in church leadership here? Would I sue the church, something explicitly forbidden by Paul (1 Corinthians 6)? Or would I say, “There but for the grace of God, go I”? (John Bradford) Could I say that about my child’s abuser? Could I, in that moment, think about all the people whom I have wronged and from whom I have sought forgiveness? But I never abused anyone, certainly not children! So, I’m better than the child abuser? Is that what I want to stand before God with?
Back to that episode of Blue Bloods with which I started. I find it hard to blame Sarah Grant for feeling the way she did, though I also recognize that her response is not a Christian response. It’s a human response.
The Christian response is seen in Charleston in 2015, or from the Amish (here, here), or from the family of Botham Jean.
Maybe Sarah Grant wasn’t ready.
They say time heals everythingbut I’m still waiting.
I’m not sure if “in that moment” is the right time to demand forgiveness, but the Christian way does demand it. I am reminded of Anita Bryant getting a pie in the face (1977, Des Moines), and her man (I don’t know who the man was) telling her immediately to pray for the forgiveness of the perpetrator, before she had time to process.
I recognize that the man who pied Anita Bryant didn’t repent—indeed, he was defiant—and yet she and the man she was with her offered forgiveness. I think the same is true for some of the examples I mentioned earlier: Charleston, the Amish. But whatever, I think this is a semantics game, and the point is that they released the hate and anger, as all Christians should.
Still, sometimes it takes some time to be ready for that. If we’re not ready, we ought to pray to God to prepare us to release the anger and hatred, to get our hearts ready to offer forgiveness.
But, God does not need a moment.
Divine Forgiveness
A few quotations about God’s capacity for forgiveness.
When deeds of iniquity overwhelm us, you forgive our transgressions. (Psalm 65:3)
We do not have to make God willing to forgive. In fact, it is God who is working to make us willing to seek his forgiveness. (Richard Foster, Celebration of Discipline, ch. 10 (“Confession”)
For a biblical example of this quotation from Foster, think about the Ninevites in Jonah 3.
God never tires of forgiving us; we are the ones who tire of seeking his mercy. Christ, who told us to forgive one another ‘seventy times seven’ (Mt 18:22) has given us his example: he has forgiven us seventy times seven. (Pope Francis, Joy of the Gospel, 3)
What blocks forgiveness is not God’s reticence … but ours. (Philip Yancey, What’s So Amazing about Grace? 52)
Conclusion
A friend of mine asked me how to spell the phrase “you are the man” in Hebrew, because he wanted to get the Hebrew expression tattooed on his arm. Why? Because that sentence, “you are the man,” appears in a famous story in the Hebrew Bible—2 Samuel 12, when the prophet Nathan confronts David about his sin with Bathsheba and her late first husband, Uriah. Read 2 Samuel 11–12 if you need to refresh your memory about the details of the story. When Nathan came to David in chapter 12, David ended up trying to blame someone else, but Nathan and David both knew that David was the responsible party—he was the one to blame. The sins Nathan was describing to David were David’s sins. David realized—at least by the time the parable had ended—that God had come for judgment. And he thought, hoped, that he would be the one to decide on the judgment. But Nathan said to David: “You are the man.” The sin is yours.
When we stand before God on Judgment Day, and if God asks us, what do people deserve who do not fully obey my word—how shall we respond? Maybe we would be tempted to respond like David: such a person should die and pay back four times as much! And perhaps God will look at us: you are the man!
Better to ask God to be merciful. Better to be merciful now.
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