The character of forgiveness

There is a reason Jesus spoke so often about forgiveness. He knew how easily resentment could become part of the human heart. In earlier chapters we looked at forgiveness as a test of character and as a response in the moment of being wronged. Here we ask what forgiveness looks like when it becomes part of who we are. Peter once asked:

Lord, how often shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? Up to seven times?

Peter probably thought seven sounded generous. Jesus answered, “I do not say to you, up to seven times, but up to seventy times seven” (Matthew 18:22). Jesus was not giving Peter a mathematical limit. He was describing a spirit of forgiveness.

We have been forgiven much

Jesus then told the story of the servant with an enormous debt, which we looked at in chapter 8. The king forgave the whole debt, and that same servant found a fellow servant who owed him a much smaller amount and demanded payment. Jesus ends the parable with a warning. The lesson is not that we earn God’s forgiveness by forgiving others. Rather, the person who has truly understood God’s forgiveness will increasingly become a forgiving person.

Grace received becomes grace extended. Mercy received becomes mercy given. Forgiveness experienced becomes forgiveness offered. Paul puts it as an instruction for the whole church:

Bearing with one another, and forgiving one another, if anyone has a complaint against another; even as Christ forgave you, so you also must do.

The father who ran

Jesus’ parable of the two sons shows forgiveness as character in a father. The younger son had taken his inheritance, left home and wasted everything. Scripture says that when he was still a long way off, “his father saw him and had compassion, and ran and fell on his neck and kissed him” (Luke 15:20). The father did not wait for a speech. He did not make his son earn it. He had been watching the road.

The older brother stood outside, angry, and the father went out to him as well. His forgiveness reached both sons: the one who had wasted his life and the one who could not forgive his brother. “It was right that we should make merry and be glad,” the father said, “for your brother was dead and is alive again, and was lost and is found” (Luke 15:32). That is the character of the One we are being made like.

What if I cannot forgive?

Sometimes forgiveness is not emotionally immediate. A deep wound may take time. You may still feel pain. You may still remember what happened. Forgiveness is not necessarily a feeling that suddenly arrives. It can begin as a decision. “Lord, I choose to release this person into Your hands. I will not seek revenge. I will not nourish hatred. I cannot change what happened, but I surrender my response to You.” That may be the beginning. Then, over time, Christ works deeper. The memory remains, but the poison begins to leave.

A true story: Corrie ten Boom

The principle of forgiveness becomes easier to understand when we see it lived out in a real human life.

Corrie ten Boom was a Dutch Christian who, with her family, hid Jews from the Nazis in the Netherlands. She and her sister Betsie were arrested and sent to the Ravensbrück concentration camp in Germany, where Betsie died in December 1944. After the war, Corrie travelled widely, speaking about God’s forgiveness. In 1947, after she spoke in a church in Munich, a man came forward. She recognised him as a former guard from Ravensbrück. He told her that he had become a Christian, and he held out his hand and asked her to forgive him.

Corrie later described the moment as one of the hardest of her life. The memories of the camp came back with force, and her hand would not move. She realised that she could not manufacture forgiveness by trying harder. She prayed for Christ’s help: she could lift her hand, she said, if He would supply the feeling. Then she took the man’s hand, and told him she forgave him. She wrote that she had never known God’s love so intensely as at that moment, and that she understood that it was not her love.

The value of this story is not that forgiveness is easy. It is that forgiveness can begin with surrender before the feelings catch up. Corrie’s experience illustrates the principle already taught in Scripture: Christ does not merely command a new character; He supplies the grace by which that character can be lived.

This story should not be used to suggest that forgiveness removes the need for justice, safety, boundaries or consequences. Rather, it illustrates the surrender of personal vengeance and the refusal to let another person’s evil reproduce itself in our own hearts.

Source: Corrie ten Boom, with Jamie Buckingham, Tramp for the Lord (Hodder & Stoughton, 1975 edition, pp. 217–218); and Corrie ten Boom, “I’m Still Learning to Forgive,” Guideposts, November 1972 (reprinted as “Guideposts Classics: Corrie ten Boom on Forgiveness”).

Forgiveness that refuses revenge

Jesus calls us to forgive as we have been forgiven. He ties the two together in the Lord’s Prayer and then explains it:

For if you forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you.

Forgiveness does not erase justice, but it releases the heart from the desire to repay evil with evil.