Forgiveness is a tender subject for many of us because letting go of a grudge is easier said than done, especially when it’s a righteous grudge because the person who hurt you deserves your resentment and wrath. Forgiving them could be one of the hardest things you’ll ever do. I know people who’ve been cheated on by their spouse, abused by their sibling, robbed by their business partner, raped by their boyfriend, abandoned by their father, neglected by their mother, and misled by their church or their pastor. How do you tell someone in a situation like that to just forgive and move on?
Jesus knew that forgiveness was no joke. One time a group of guys carried a buddy of theirs to Jesus on a mat (Luke 5:17-26). Somehow he’d been paralyzed, and his friends wanted Jesus to heal him. When Jesus saw their faith, he said, “Take heart, my son…your sins are forgiven,” which must have felt like a letdown, you know? The poor guy needed a miracle, and all Jesus gave him was religion.
The super-religious guys who watched all this unfold were also disappointed, but for a very different reason: they knew that only God can forgive sins, so by forgiving this man’s sins, Jesus was making the claim that he is God. Responding to his critics, Jesus asked, “Which is easier: to say ‘Your sins are forgiven,’ or to say, ‘Get up and walk’?” (Luke 5:23)
To which every rational person would respond: Saying ‘your sins are forgiven’ is way easier than saying ‘get up and walk’! Why? Because there’s no way to prove the former, but if you say the latter to a paralyzed man, he’d better get up and walk!
To simple-minded people like me, fixing the man’s legs looks infinitely harder than forgiving his sins. But in this passage, Jesus suggested that the opposite is true: when it comes to healing bodies and forgiving sins, forgiveness is the far greater miracle.
A few years later, Jesus’ theory would be put to the test when, early one morning, just outside the walls of Jerusalem, he was nailed to a Roman cross by a bunch of soldiers who’d been torturing him for hours. Somehow in those unimaginable circumstances, Jesus found the strength to say, “Forgive them – they don’t know what they’re doing.” (Luke 23:34)
In these words, we can see the core character of Christ. Even though his pain was unimaginable and he could hardly breathe, he forgave the villains responsible for his suffering – and not in a passive-aggressive way, as if to prove his moral superiority, but with sincerity and empathy. He said, “They don’t know what they’re doing…” as if to say they had no idea about the severity of their sin and its consequences.
Never before or since has any group of people been more deserving of hate and condemnation than the soldiers who slaughtered Jesus. They humiliated and tortured a truly innocent man until there was no life left in him. So what does it mean that Jesus forgave the Roman soldiers? Even though in this world there are villains and victims – the oppressors and the oppressed – in God’s eyes, even the oppressors are oppressed, even the villains are victims, and even the merciless need mercy.
Think about the worst thing that someone has ever done to you. What did you say to them in the aftermath? What did you wish you’d said to them? What would you say to them now? In the heat of the moment, most of us say things to and about our villains that fall far short of what Jesus said about his.
To forgive is not to excuse bad behavior. Jesus never said what the Roman soldiers were doing was okay. He simply said, “They don’t know.” Lord knows it would have been easy for Jesus to let his disciples forever hate and condemn men like those soldiers, but instead he showed mercy. His words help us all remember that until you’ve walked a mile in a Roman soldier’s shoes, you really have no idea what it’s like to be them.
And the same goes for all the typical groups of people that other self-righteous groups of people love to hate these days. Even when it seems to us that they know exactly what they’re doing, they know not what they do is Jesus’ way of reminding us – “You don’t know what they don’t know. You don’t know what they’ve been through. You don’t know what they mean to me.”
Forgiveness is a miracle. It’s so contrary to human instinct. Only when you really hate someone for something they’ve done can you really understand the gravity of what Jesus did for those soldiers that day. They were guilty of the most heinous crime ever committed, but Jesus forgave them anyway.
It’s a miracle. It’s not of this world. Forgiving a person you love to hate is harder than fixing them, but by the grace of God, you can do it. And according to Jesus, you must do it, because from Heaven’s perspective, we’re really not that different from those soldiers. The easiest thing for us to say about someone else’s sin is, “I’d never do something like that.” But you don’t know what you don’t know. If you were born into different circumstances, into a different family, and raised with a different set of expectations and experiences…you would have walked a very different path than the one you’re on today.
That’s why Jesus taught his disciples to forgive as though their lives depended on it. Because as heinous and hateful as other people may seem, we’ve been every bit as heinous and hateful toward God at times. And when Jesus said, “Father, forgive them, they don’t know what they’re doing,” he wasn’t only talking about those soldiers. He was talking about us.
If you’re stuck in regard to forgiving someone who’s hurt you, I think it’s helpful to think about forgiveness as a three-step process.
First, acknowledge that God has forgiven all of your sins through the blood of Jesus Christ. Recognize the fact that, although you’re guilty of many sins, God has chosen not to punish you for the things you’ve done wrong.
Second, once you have absorbed God’s forgiveness, ask Him to reveal any unresolved resentment, contempt, or unforgiveness in your heart toward those who’ve hurt you.
Third, through prayer and by faith, choose to forgive those who’ve hurt you. This doesn’t mean excusing their past behavior, and it may not even mean reconciliation with them. It simply means that you no longer consider them to be in your debt.
