Forgiveness can be as swift and easy as accepting a friend’s apology for being ten minutes late for lunch at the restaurant. Or it can be as grueling, as costly, as seemingly impossible, as forgiving a divorce or a business betrayal. What makes the latter kind of forgiveness particularly difficult is this: the other person may not care in the least. They may feel utterly justified in their mistreatment of you. They may even take pleasure at the injury they’ve caused you–or they may take no thought at all. Whether you forgive them or not means nothing to them because you yourself are of no consequence.
That’s the kind of forgiveness reflected in Jesus’s words “Father, forgive them, for they don’t know what they’re doing” (Luke 23:34). Father, they just don’t have a clue. No idea whatsoever. They’re prisoners of their ignorance, blinder than beggars and twice as poor.
Mercy and compassion toward those who showed him neither: that’s the extreme brand of forgiveness Jesus showed toward those who were killing him. Jesus didn’t pray “Father, forgive them” in order to set a lofty example; he prayed those words because he meant them. In his heart he longed for something far better for his persecutors than vengeance; he longed for them to one day see, and understand, and live.
What’s particularly important to note is, forgiving his executioners didn’t change Jesus’s immediate circumstances. The black iron spikes remained in his wrists and feet. The agony of crucifixion wasn’t relieved. Jesus still died a torturous, shameful death hanging naked on a post for all Jerusalem to see.
What changed was that the back of hatred was broken. It lost its self-perpetuating power–because the One who did know exactly what he was doing absorbed its worst blow and countered it with love for those who inflicted it.
Sometimes today we hear stories of that radical brand of forgiveness: The father who adopts his child’s murderer and raises him as a son. The college woman who, without minimizing the violence perpetrated on her, refuses to harbor bitterness against her rapist. The prisoner wrongly convicted who, when the truth is finally revealed, forgives those who took fifteen years of his life from him and far more besides.
For such people, forgiveness is no glib thing. It is big-ticket, and those who have been wronged are the ones who must foot the bill. Doing so may begin simply with this thought: “If I had the power to send those who have hurt me to hell…I would not.”
Forgiveness desires life, God-life, for the offender. It desires vision for the spiritually blind. It chooses–often against the forgiver’s own conflicting emotions–to pray for the release of those held captive by their own hate or sheer, selfish unconcern for the pain of others.
Forgiveness is not trite. It is not easy. It may even be miraculous. It is one choice followed by as many more choices as it takes.
If–no, when–we are deeply injured, may Jesus grant us his eyes to see clearly what the other person cannot see at all. May he give us the grace to pray from our heart, “Father, forgive them. Help them to see. Help them to know your love for them and for others. And grant them what you have so graciously given me: life–true, deep, powerful life.”