The world has been talking a lot about for forgiveness lately after the tragic deaths at the Amish schoolhouse. So many are amazed in particular at the humility of the grandfather of one of the girls who was killed.
But I’m not really surprised or amazed at all. Because I recognize the power of forgiveness and the freedom it has brought me in my own life.
People often think of justice first, forgiveness second. Forgiveness without justice seems unfair to people, even impossible. And forgiveness without justice also just seems unfair.
We can usually think of 100 reasons not to forgive. They probably sound something like this: He should learn a lesson. I don’t want to encourage irresponsible behavior. She needs to learn that actions have consequences. I was wronged - he needs to make the first move. He needs to ask for forgiveness. How can I forgive if he’s not even sorry?
We can usually think of 100 reasons not to forgive before we remember the one good reasons to forgive: because we have experienced the ultimate forgiveness through Jesus’ death and resurrection.
In the New Testament, the most common word translated as forgiveness means, literally, to release, to hurl away, to free yourself. On the flip side of that is resentment. It means, literally, “to feel again”: resentment clings to the past, relives it over and over, never allowing healing.Philip Yancey wrote this in “What’s So Amazing About Grace?”: “Not to forgive imprisons me in the past and locks out all potential for change. I thus yields control to another, my enemy, and doom myself to suffer the consequences of the wrong.”
What that Amish grandfather demostrated is really a very simple truth: our lack of willingness to forgive only hurts us.
“The first and often the only person to be healed by forgiveness is the person who does the forgiveness…..When we genuinely forgive, we set a prisoner free and then discover that the prisoner we set free was us.” Lewis Smedes in “Shame”
