What is Forgiveness?

Bob left a comment on yesterday’s post, “I've read that that true forgiveness entails treating the offense as if it had never happened. So while forgiving is not forgetting, forgetting can sure be a part of forgiveness.”

Whenever I teach a Sunday school class about forgiveness, this is the question that people ask. Is it really true that to “forgive is to forget.”?

First of all, what does it mean to forgive someone? I like, again, what Ortberg says about it:

1. When you forgive someone, you give up the right to hurt them back. You give up the sin of vengeance. We all know it, even if we only practice it in our minds. We imagine all kinds of scenarios in which the person who hurt us is hurt back. When we forgive, we let go of this kind of sin. We forget about vengeance. He goes on to say that this does not mean letting go of justice. Justice in itself is self-limiting – it is, at heart, a pursuit of fairness. Vengeance is not self-limiting. It is by nature, “insatiable.” If forgiveness always involved forgetting, then there would be no consequence to wrong-doing. The kidnapper would not go to jail, the abuser would never be stopped. We forget our desire to hurt someone else when we forgive them, but I’m pretty sure that we don’t forget the action of the person.
2. Ortberg goes on to say that the next stage of forgiveness is to develop a new way of seeing and feeling. I wrote about Philip Yancey’s view of forgiveness in his grace book (in this post). He talks about forgiveness involving a re-creation of the person we are forgiving. Can we understand that? Think about someone you are struggling to forgive. Don’t you think that when you look at that person, everything he does, everything he says, everything you say about him or think about him is influenced by the hurt he has done to you? Forgiveness means that when we look at that person, we forget our reaction to him. We allow him to be re-created in our view – we see him differently. Instead of only seeing the hurt, we see the person God has created. It’s hard. I’m struggling with that problem right now. Ortberg says, “We rediscover the humanity of the one who hurt us.”
3. Ortberg says that we have reached the third state of forgiveness when we truly wish for the best for the person who has hurt us. He says, “When you want good things for someone who has hurt you badly, you can pretty much know that the Great Forgiver has been at work in your heart.” We forget that we wished that the person would slip on a banana peel, hit his head, and all of a sudden realize the immense hurt that he has done, and spend the rest of his life regretting it. Instead, we look at the person, and see a child of God. We wish for that person to be close to God. We wish the best for him, and we will even pray for that person to receive God’s grace.

So does forgiveness involve – always – forgetting the sin? Ortberg says no. I think we would like for forgiveness to mean forgetfulness, because we would like for God to forget our sins. God does not have a memory problem. What God is able to do, has chosen to do, and what he will enable us to do through grace, is “to make our past sins irrelevant to his dealings with us.”

So I think Bob is right. Forgetting can sure be a part of forgiveness. As Ortberg says, we don’t have a memory problem. What we have is grace.