What is Forgiveness

I want to begin by saying that there are 3 types of forgiveness. Dr. Stephen Marmer, Psychiatrist at UCLA Medical School teaches that all of forgiveness can be boiled down to these three types. They are exoneration, forbearance, & release.

Full Disclosure, I borrowed heavily from his teachings on this subject. Lets dig into each of these types of forgiveness.

Exoneration

• Exoneration is the closest to what we usually think of when we say “forgiveness”.
• Exoneration is wiping the slate entirely clean and restoring a relationship to the full state of innocence it had before the harmful actions took place.
• Within this type of forgiveness, There are three common situations in which exoneration applies.
  • The first takes place when you realize that the harmful action was a genuine accident and you understand that no fault can be assigned.
  • The second is when the offender is a child or someone else who, for whatever reason, simply didn’t understand the hurt they were inflicting, and toward whom you have loving feelings.
  • The third situation occurs when the person who hurt you is truly sorry, takes full responsibility (without excuses) for what they did, asks forgiveness, and gives you confidence that they will not knowingly repeat their bad action in the future.
• In all such situations it is essential to accept their apology and offer them the complete forgiveness of exoneration. You’ll feel better and so will the person who hurt you.
• In fact, not to offer forgiveness in these circumstances would be harmful to your own well-being. It might even suggest that there is something more wrong with you than with the person who caused you pain.

Forbearance

• Forbearance applies when the offender makes a partial apology or mingles their expression of sorrow with blame that you somehow caused them to behave badly.
• An apology might be offered but it’s not what you had hoped for and might not be authentic.
• You should always reflect on whether you may have a part in the in the provocation, but if the relationship matters to you, this will be a time to practice forbearance.
• forbearance requires that you stop dwelling on the particular offense, do away with grudges and fantasies of revenge, but retain a degree of watchfulness.
• This is similar to “forgive but not forget” or “trust but verify.”
• By using forbearance you are able to maintain ties to people who, while far from perfect, are still important to you.
• Furthermore, in some cases after a sufficient period of good behavior, forbearance can rise to exoneration and full forgiveness.

Release

• Release is required when you are harmed by a person who hurt you and doesn’t even acknowledge that they’ve done anything wrong.
• They might give an obviously insincere apology, and/or make NO attempt at reparations whatsoever?
• This is when forgiveness is the most challenging.
• Release does not exonerate the offender. Nor does it require forbearance. It doesn’t even demand that you continue the relationship. But it does ask that instead of continuing to define much of your life in terms of the hurt done, you release your bad feelings and your preoccupation with the negative things that have happened to you.
• Release does something that is critically important: it allows you to let go of the burden, the “silent tax” that is weighing you down and eating away at your chance for happiness.
• If you do not release the pain and anger and move past dwelling on old hurts and betrayals, you will be allowing the ones who hurt you to live, rent free, in your mind, reliving forever the persecution that the original incident started.
• Whether you get there through your own efforts, through psychotherapy, through religion or some other method, release liberates you from the tyranny of living in the traumatic past even when the other forms of forgiveness, exoneration and forbearance, are not possible.
• forgiveness takes one person reconciliation takes two, and sometimes reconciliation is not possible and so we must release the harm that they have done us in order to move on with our lives.

So with that understanding in mind, I want to expand on this with some insights that I learned from Father Mike schmidtz, in one of his more recent podcasts.

He was telling a story about forgiveness and making the case that you cannot forgive without first loving. Love is the key to forgiveness, because love is not possible without first opening your heart to God.

See love is one of the theological virtues (faith, hope and love). The church fathers teach that we humans are not capable of producing these virtues on our own, they well up from inside us, and ultimately come from God. We can only have these virtues in our lives to the extent that we open ourselves up to God, and His will for our lives, and allow the holy spirit to work through us and into the those people in our lives and ultimately to the whole world.

So to forgive you must first love, but that love takes various forms and is manifested in different ways, aka exoneration, forebearance, and release. Those manifestations, bring about results and effects. Here is what Fr. Mike said:

“If you Love those that deserve it, that is justice.” “If you Love those that may or may not deserve it, that is charity.” “If you Love those that don’t deserve it, that is mercy.”

This is what forgiveness looks like in God’s kingdom, and this is the forgiveness that He is calling us to as well.

Love is the origin and source of offering forgiveness regardless of whether it is deserved. But this Love is really hard, and in the context of this world it does not always make sense, but we are called to it all the same..

But when we do…, we make the world better. Lets explore each of these effects in more detail.

Justice

• The world tells us that Justice means that you should get what you deserve, whether it is good or bad.
• But the Lord demands forgiveness regardless of whether it is deserved.
• This is scandalous! But forgiveness recognizes that not every wrong can be righted justly, and not every person can pay the price of their sins completely, thus God calls us to be generous with our forgiveness and move beyond what the Justice of this world requires.
• Jesus says in Matthew 5:38-48…
  • “You have heard that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’ But I say to you, offer no resistance to one who is evil. When someone strikes you on [your] right cheek, turn the other one to him as well. If anyone wants to go to law with you over your tunic, hand him your cloak as well. Should anyone press you into service for one mile, go with him for two miles. Give to the one who asks of you, and do not turn your back on one who wants to borrow. You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your heavenly Father, for he makes his sun rise on the bad and the good, and causes rain to fall on the just and the unjust. For if you love those who love you, what recompense will you have? Do not the tax collectors do the same? And if you greet your brothers only, what is unusual about that? Do not the pagans do the same? So be perfect, just as your heavenly Father is perfect.”
• "An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth" just brings about a bunch of blind people who eat mushy food.
• God is calling us to a higher form of justice. Where love is the rule that we are measured by instead.
• If your heart is pure, and forgiveness is achieved between the forgiver and the forgiven, then that is the “exoneration” that we talked about above. If Justice is getting what you deserve. then this is justice the way the world sees it, and it is also what God truly desires for all of us.
• But God also calls us to a higher form of justice…, and that is to “exonerate” ALL those that have harmed you, and that is very hard in this world, but it will be the only way in the next one.

That brings to the next effect…

Charity

• Forgiveness is not always deserved. But it is always a “gift” given regardless of whether or not it is fair.
• Jesus makes this point in the gospel of Matthew 18:21-22
  • “Then Peter approaching asked him, “Lord, if my brother sins against me, how often must I forgive him? As many as seven times?” Jesus answered, “I say to you, not seven times but seventy-seven times.”
• Jesus tells us that we are to forgive “not seven times but seventy-seven times.” and some translations instead say: “seven times seventy-seven times.” In either case it is many times.
• But charity requires that we offer it whether they know that they are wrong or not, whether they have apologized or not, whether they deserve it or not.
• It is a gift to the receiver, but also necessary for the giver.
• That is a high bar, but were are called to meet it.
• This is charity. It is a love that supercedes logic and reason, because it comes directly from God, And while it may or may not be deserved, we offer it anyway, and ultimately protect ourselves from future harm by practicing “forebearance.”

But sometimes people make impossible to love them, and in that case we must practice…

Mercy

• Forgiving those that dont deserve it is the hardest of all,
• When we suffer and die to our own needs in this world, and offer love where none is deserved, we align our will with that of God, and we change ourselves into miniscule versions of the love that is offered in the trinity.
• When you think about the pain and suffering that Jesus felt on the cross in exchange for the sins and hatred that we have poured out in this world, when you contemplate what that must have been like for Him, you will begin to understand what God’s love is like.
• Fulton Sheen once wrote that God paid a price he did not owe, because we owed a debt that we could not pay.
• And He did that for love… That is what mercy is, it is offering what is not deserved because love is a greater good than Justice.
• Peter Kreeft once wrote…
  • “When you stand before God at the Last Judgment, please don’t ask for justice, because that’s asking for hell. Ask for mercy, because that’s asking for heaven.”
• As Such, we should not wish for justice, but mercy! We would not like the justice we actually deserve.
• God does not judge according to strict justice, but he punishes far less than we deserve and forgives far more than we merit.
• And so we too must learn forgive even when it is not deserved. This is so that we learn to move on…, while at the same time not validate the harm that was done to us.
• This is outrageous, but this is the forgiveness that God offers us.
• f we dare to ask God to “forgive us our trespasses,” then we must also learn to “forgive those who have trespasses against us.”
• This is mercy! it is an undeserved act of love and sacrifice, and it is the only way to achieve the “release” that comes from forgiving those unrepentant sinners that have done us wrong.

Conclusion:

• Forgiveness is transformative. It helps us love more and hate less.
• It is a gift to the reciever, but necessary for the giver.
• But is also changes us to be more like Jesus.
• Peter Kreeft wrote in a commentary about forgiveness that:
  • “The only completely human heart is a heart that has been broken, that allows itself to be broken, that chooses to be broken. To love completely is to choose to be vulnerable.
  • And God’s love is not less complete than ours.”
• Remember God is a trinity, and Jesus Christ was a man and had a heart, and that heart broke more than any person on this planet could imagine because it broke for everyone of us and our sins. Kreeft Continues:
  • “How much sorrow does this cause in God? Well, take the sorrow it would cause in you if you knew that you will never see in heaven the person you love the most [in this world]. Now multiply that love by infinity and its pain by infinity, [that] is the difference between God and you, and you now have a description of the heart of God.”
• That is the same heart that He wants for all of us. To love and to be hurt, and then to forgive and be reconciled. Because it is only through that process that we come to know and understand God and His love for us.
• And when you do that, you will be able to approach reconciliation with Him, and ultimately spend eternity with Him forever in Heaven.
• It is a good deal, we should all take the offer. But the choice is yours, choose wisely, your eternity depends on it.