Forgiveness: What it is and isn't

There was a political columnist talking about whether George Bush really wasn't as bad as he has been made out to be. His upshot was that kind of thinking leads to forgiveness and he just wasn't going to forgive President Bush.

That's so sad for him, not the President. And it shows a basic understanding of forgiveness that is horribly wrong.

Most people consider forgiveness to be a moment to be the "bigger person." To show the offender that, gee, what you did is not so bad and let's just forget about it. Sometimes that is what needs to be done. Sometimes what we take as a horrible personal offense is nothing more than bad manner, an oversight or a complete accident. But that is not forgiveness. That is a matter of perspective.

Very specifically: Forgiveness is not for the person being forgiven. It is for the person doing the forgiveness. Let's look at this.

If you go through life harboring a slight, a grudge, or an offense, you carry that issue with you for the rest of your life. It affects the relationships you have with everyone else. Everything you do is colored by it. It can keep you from having the relationships or achieving the things you really want in life. But forgiving that issue means it doesn't control your life; that person does not control your life. Forgiving means taking back your life and moving on with it.

Forgiving does not mean saying what was done was OK. It is not absolution. Sometimes it means a severe restructuring of a relationship. Sometimes it means starting the relationship again, from scratch. But that stage is reconciliation, not forgiveness.

My pastor likes to say that forgiving someone doesn't mean trusting them. I can agree with that. To trust someone, you have to know them. If you don't know them, you don't know their capabilities or standards so you don't know what to expect. When you forgive someone, you essentially say that you really didn't expect that of them so you really don't know them. You can decide at that point whether to have a relationship with them. Sometimes you need than knowledge to begin reconciliation and establish a relationship. That way they can't offend you because you know what's coming.

But sometimes you know the person very well. You know that the offense was a lapse in judgement, a lack of knowledge or moral weakness. You aren't saying what they did was right, but you still want to move forward with the relationship. So forgiving the peerson allows you to get what you want, which is a relationship with the offender.

And that is exactly why God forgives us; why Jesus did what he did on the cross. He wants a relationship with us. He wants to be with us for eternity. Moreover, he wants us to be in relationship with each other. So he paid the price for every offense we did to him, and to each other, so we don't have to hold grudges and curtail our lives because of those offenses. In the end, God's decision to forgive us has a selfish motive. He just wants to love us and he wants us to love each other.