When Dylann Roof shot and killed nine people attending a Wednesday night Bible study in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015, there were two causes for shock. Roof’s heinous act was the obvious one. The other was forgiveness. Within days of the murders, Nadine Collier looked into the face of her mother’s killer at Roof’s bond hearing and said through tears,
You took something very precious away from me. I will never talk to her ever again. I will never be able to hold her again. But I forgive you. And have mercy on your soul.
Collier’s words, along with those of others who similarly offered forgiveness, ricocheted around the world. They made headlines and were debated in opinion pieces, eventually becoming the stuff of documentaries and academic papers.
For all the concern about “cancel culture” in recent years, forgiveness hasn’t lost its power to captivate us.
Forgiveness Is Impossible
Why does forgiveness so capture our attention? I suspect it’s the same reason great sporting events do. In both cases, we’re watching an incredible feat of human courage and strength. In both cases, a great difficulty has been overcome at great cost. In both cases, we’re left with mouths ajar, asking, How did they do that?
Forgiveness hasn’t lost its power to captivate us.
Anyone who has been deeply wronged—and who hasn’t?—knows this viscerally. Forgiveness looms like an unscalable mountain, growing bigger the closer we get. Anger and bitterness cling like weights with every step. As 19th-century Anglican bishop B. F. Westcott wrote, “Nothing superficially seems simpler or easier than forgiveness. Nothing if we look deeply is more mysterious or more difficult.”
Sometimes, we try to make forgiveness easier by downplaying or even denying the wrong done. But it’s no use. We’re only kidding ourselves. There’s no way around the difficulty. As Chris Singleton said of forgiving Dylann Roof for shooting his mother: “I’ve realized that forgiving is so much tougher than holding a grudge.” Anyone can hold a grudge. But who can forgive?
It’s a relief to know that Jesus isn’t trite about forgiveness. He doesn’t sugarcoat it or sentimentalize it. He says it’s absurd. Impossible. We see this in his teaching at the start of Luke 17, just after his parable of the rich man and Lazarus:
“Pay attention to yourselves! If your brother sins, rebuke him, and if he repents, forgive him, and if he sins against you seven times in the day, and turns to you seven times, saying, ‘I repent,’ you must forgive him.” The apostles said to the Lord, “Increase our faith!” And the Lord said, “If you had faith like a grain of mustard seed, you could say to this mulberry tree, ‘Be uprooted and planted in the sea,’ and it would obey you.” (vv. 3–6)
Some translators and commentators wonder how these verses fit. The ESV and CSB, for example, split verses 1–4 from verses 5–6 with a separate heading, and one prominent commentator describes the connection between them as “imperceptible.” But it seems the disciples recognized a connection. What connects them is the impossibility of forgiveness.
It helps to know that the “mulberry” tree (perhaps a black mulberry or sycamore) had a reputation in the ancient world for its expansive root system. The Jewish Mishnah instructs its readers to plant such trees twice the distance from cisterns as other trees. Any closer and you risk losing all your water, since the roots will fan out and crack your cistern’s walls. These roots make uprooting a mulberry tree a fool’s errand. Don’t bother. Replanting it in the sea is downright impossible—like forgiveness. Hence the disciples’ response: “Increase our faith!” They know they’ll need more faith to forgive.
But why faith?
Faith Can Do the Impossible
Like a seed, if our faith is planted in the right soil, it has incredible potential. What gives faith such power has everything to do with its object. That explains the mustard seed. Why else, when they ask for more faith, would Jesus offer a seed famous for being small? It’s because he knows that, while more faith in the wrong object is ineffective, even the tiniest faith in the right one can work wonders. Jesus knows faith in God solves the impossibility of forgiveness—even seven times in a single day.
So what is it about God we need to trust? What can turn our hearts away from the easy path of bitterness to the painful path of love and mercy? As I’ve read the New Testament over the years, three aspects of God’s character stand out as especially important when it comes to forgiveness.
1. Trust God for justice.
Trust God’s justice. When the greatest wrong in history was perpetrated against the greatest person in history, how did Jesus respond? Was he vindictive? Did he look for payback? Did he nurse a grudge? No. First Peter 2:23 says that “when he was reviled, he did not revile in return; when he suffered, he did not threaten, but continued entrusting himself to him who judges justly.”
Notice Peter doesn’t say Jesus entrusted himself to the One who created everything, or who loves him, or any other perfectly fine way of describing God. Peter says Jesus entrusted himself to the One who judges justly. Certainly Peter of all people knew what it was like not to trust God under trial. In contrast, Jesus knew God could be trusted to do what was right with what’s wrong.
Now we must ask ourselves something: Was Jesus disappointed with his decision to trust God with this injustice? He wasn’t. Jesus has never once regretted it. He has never thought, Gee, I wish I had insulted them after all. God brought everlasting good from the evil done to Jesus. In this, the cross proves for all time that the same God who could be trusted with the worst evil done to Jesus can be trusted with the worst evils done to us (Rom. 12:19). Jesus proved for all time that the path of forgiveness really is traversable—not just for him but for us.
2. Trust God for mercy.
If God’s justice provides a foundation for forgiveness, we might say his mercy provides the motive. It does this, in part, by providing crucial perspective.
It’s often the case that the more personally offended we are by something, the more likely we are to lose moral depth perception. This is especially common in close relationships. Few people can hurt us as deeply and effectively as family. When they hurt us, we often fixate on the offense, replaying it over and over in our mind. When we tell others, we’re likely to exaggerate our innocence and inflate the offender’s wrong. In all this, we lose moral perspective.
If God’s justice provides a foundation for forgiveness, we might say his mercy provides the motive.
This is a major point in Jesus’s parable of the unforgiving servant (Matt. 18:21–35). For the servant to treat his fellow servant’s debt of 100 days’ pay as unforgivable, when he’d just been let off the hook for roughly 200,000 years’ pay, is contemptible. It exposes grandiose callousness and makes a mockery of mercy. It’s like Jonah being angry that the Ninevites were saved when he’s just been saved himself from drowning. As Richard Bauckham explains, “People who can’t forgive others are people who can’t admit they need forgiving themselves.”
The flipside of this is that anyone who recognizes the price tag of God’s forgiveness is transformed by receiving such a costly gift. His gift makes us want to show love and mercy. This is what Jesus says about the woman who washed his feet with her tears and dried them with her hair: “Therefore, I tell you, her many sins have been forgiven—as her great love has shown. But whoever has been forgiven little loves little” (Luke 7:47, NIV). There’s an inseverable link between our willingness to receive forgiveness and our willingness to extend it. In John Chrysostom’s words, “he who considers his own sins is more [inclined to pardon] his fellow servant.”
Those who trust God for the mercy they desperately need will find they have it in stock when asked of them.
3. Trust God to be God.
Refusal to offer forgiveness is always downstream from refusal to receive it. The question God asks when we do this is essentially, Who do you think you are? To treat another person’s sin as unforgivable is ultimately to put ourselves in God’s place and playact his part, as if we are suddenly the most offended party.
Reconciling with an offender will depend on his or her repentance, and the contours of reconciliation will differ depending on the type of offense. But a complete lack of interest in any reconciliation may mean we think the sin is too great to forgive or that we’re too important to offer it. We’ve forgotten that God is always the most offended party in any sin (Gen. 39:9; Ps. 51:4).
When we see this, when we let God be God, it lifts the awful burden of trying to fill his Judge’s robes. We also realize he’s not unfair for asking us to forgive others. As theologian Stephen Holmes writes, “Precisely because God has borne the cost of forgiving us, he can ask us to bear the pain of forgiving one another.”
For many of us, forgiveness seems impossible. Alone, it is. But with God, all things are possible.