Reading through the accounts of Jesus’ life, there’s a lot of talk about forgiveness. Jesus taught about when to forgive, how to forgive, what it means to be forgiven — it was clearly a very important topic. Unsurprisingly then, with so much talk of forgiveness in different ways and different contexts, definitions can get muddy, and we can miss the point. However complex forgiveness can be, Jesus made some things very clear: forgiveness is necessary and costly, and forgiving and forgetting are two different things. Let’s take a look and quickly unpack that.
To illustrate forgiveness, Jesus tells the story of two people in debt. The first debtor goes to the king, to whom he is in debt, and explains his case. The king has compassion and forgives — he takes the loss on himself and completely erases the debt. But that first man, who just had his debt erased, happens to be owed money by a second man. When the second man comes to him unable to pay, the first man has no compassion and has him sent to debtors’ prison until the debt is paid in full, even though he was just spared from that fate himself. The king hears word of this and punishes the unforgiving man. So what are the takeaways? First, true forgiveness can be costly. It often means abandoning a desire for payback or retribution and calling things even when they aren’t. It’s hard. Second, we ought to be quick to forgive because, very frequently, we need to be forgiven ourselves.
So forgiveness is costly and necessary, but Jesus made another aspect of forgiveness clear to us as well — forgiveness is deliberate. We hear this phrase thrown around: “Forgive and forget.” Is that something Jesus preached? Well, not exactly. There’s this pretty powerful moment where Peter and Jesus are reunited after Peter has denied even knowing Jesus three times. In the middle of their conversation, Jesus gives Peter the opportunity to confirm his loyalty and love three separate times — once for each of the times he denied Jesus. You see, Jesus didn’t forget the wrongdoing, and he didn’t say, “Don’t worry about it; there’s nothing to forgive,” because there was. Rather than ignore the wrongdoing, Jesus made the space to specifically forgive and resolve it. He didn’t forget what Peter did, but he also didn’t hold it against him.
That’s often where forgiveness is warped into a tool for manipulation instead of one for healing and reconciliation. We’re told that to forgive is to completely forget, and that can turn forgiveness into a get-out-of-jail-free card — one that encourages bad behavior by making space for it. Jesus’ forgiveness is different. It doesn’t make light of the wrongdoing; it makes much of the reconciliation. His forgiveness acknowledges the wound, exposes it, and then pours an abundance of patience, kindness, and love on top of it so that the healing can happen.
**If you are in an abusive relationship, please seek help. Jesus’ call to forgive should not be wrongly used to manipulate people into staying in abusive relationships. Seek out safety first.
