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Forgiveness is not ours to manufacture. It is ours to proclaim.
A Necessary Caveat
When Christians discuss forgiveness, the conversation may seem oversimplified. Some wrongs are small – careless words, forgotten commitments, the slings and arrows of ordinary life. Others are unspeakable – betrayals, abuse, even crimes that leave scars for generations. To speak of forgiveness in this reflection is not to flatten these harms into one category. Nor is it to make light of wounds that may never fully close this side of eternity.
This reflection does not seek to redefine forgiveness or obscure its meaning in the gospel. It aims to explore forgiveness not only as a proclamation given by God, but as something that unfolds within our hearts and lives. Always remembering: forgiveness in the biblical sense is never mere sentiment, nor is it mere human willpower.
Forgiveness is God’s act.
Adam and Eve: Forgiveness at the Dawn
Adam is remembered as the man who hid.
When the serpent spoke, Adam stood silent. When Eve reached for the fruit, he did not intervene. When the Lord came walking in the garden, Adam slipped into the trees. And when confronted, he shifted blame onto his wife and even onto God Himself: “The woman whom you gave to be with me…” (Gen. 3:12).
Eve’s grief is harder to imagine, but no less real. She was deceived, yes – but she was also abandoned. Adam, her companion and protector, was absent. His blame deepened the wound.
What was it like for them after the garden? Did Adam ever seek forgiveness? Did Eve ever grant it? Scripture does not say. And yet, how else could their story have continued? They remained together. Adam named her “the mother of all living” – a word of hope in the ashes of Eden (Gen. 3:20). Through their union came children, generations, and eventually the covenant through which Christ would come.
Somewhere in the silence of Genesis, forgiveness began to stir. That is also Adam’s legacy.
This is not to excuse Adam. His failure is real. Humanity’s fall is traced through him. But there is an overlooked faithfulness here: Adam does not retreat into permanent hiding. He remains, however flawed, with his bride. That persistence – fragile, halting, imperfect – becomes a signpost toward the covenantal faithfulness of Christ, the second Adam, who will not abandon his bride, the Church.
We find in forgiveness layers of weight, which in God’s light are not hidden.
The Weight of Forgiveness
Forgiveness rarely feels easy. It is not a button to push, nor a transaction to check off. It is often something slower.
I once heard a mother speak on the radio. Her son had been killed, brutally and randomly. The sort of nightmare no parent can ponder. When asked about forgiveness, she said: “I don’t think I’ve forgiven him. I don’t know if I can.” And yet moments later, she described pouring her life into service, into something bigger than her grief. She spoke of peace that came through vocational loving of others, despair that returned only when she stopped.
And while she never used the word “forgiveness,” it seemed to me that forgiveness was already painted on her heart, growing like a vine. It did not spring up overnight. Forgiveness may grow slowly, from hidden roots. Even through ashes tainted with anger, its growth may meander, like a vine; sometimes it wraps around old wounds, sometimes it extends outward, and sometimes it bears fruit where we least expect.
Forgiveness – like the gospel itself, like the Lord himself – is alive.
Forgiveness, then, is not a flip of the switch. Yes, it is a proclamation given once for all in Christ, but it is experienced as an unfolding process in our lives.
But into the slow gospel of our lives, Scripture also gives us warning, and by it we can reflect God’s wisdom. When Jesus warns, “if you do not forgive others their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses” (Matt. 6:15), his words carry a weight that stirs what Scripture calls the fear of the Lord. Psalm 111 says, “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.” That fear is not mere terror, but reverent awe before God’s holiness and graciousness. It presses us into wisdom, and wisdom presses us – in and through Christ – into forgiveness.
Each step in forgiveness – faltering, partial, even hesitant – is part of life with our living God, stretching us in the likeness of Christ Jesus.
And in Christ, fear, wisdom, and forgiveness converge:
- He trembled in reverent submission (Heb. 5:7),
- He embodied the wisdom of God (1 Cor. 1:24), and
- He proclaimed forgiveness from the cross (Luke 23:34).
Let the soil, then, of forgiveness be fear – rightly understood – of God. Anger, hatred, and resentment – when they become the object of cultivation – always poison the root of the vine.
And our own bootstraps strangle it. We divide the vine of forgiveness, to its death, by casting lots for our own works.
Proclamation and Bach’s Illumination
In Lutheran theology, forgiveness is never our work. It is proclamation. It is divine absolution spoken into the hiding places of our hearts. “God does the verbs,” as we learn from 30 Minutes in the New Testament Host, Erick Sorensen.
That is why Jesus’ hard words about forgiveness in Matthew are not a threat. They are a diagnosis of our souls – a diagnostic snapshot. And the disease progression is this: withholding forgiveness closes us off to the mercy God has already given each of us. It hardens our soul. It enthrones our pain.
To forgive is to proclaim what God has already declared: “In Christ, your sins are forgiven.” This is not a human negotiation. This is not a transaction of moral bookkeeping. This is a proclamation echoing the Word made flesh. But how does this proclamation sound in human experience?
Forgiveness is not a dramatic escape from sorrow into joy. It is light shining through sorrow, transfiguring it without erasing it.
Here, music can help.
In Bach’s minor works – and Bach was a devout Lutheran – something remarkable happens. Unlike composers who pivot abruptly from minor to major, Bach allows the light of the major key to shine within the minor itself. The sorrow remains real, but it is illuminated from within.
A living, growing forgiveness – whether glimpsed in the vine analogy or across the whole arc of Scripture – works in the same way. The wound is not erased. The sin is not trivialized. But the light of Christ seeps in, weaving through the pain. It does not deny the hurt but suffuses it, illuminating it with mercy. Forgiveness, then, is not a dramatic escape from sorrow into joy. It is light shining through sorrow, transfiguring it without erasing it.
The Old Adam and Our Idols
Why, then, is forgiveness so hard? One reason is pride. Another is idolatry. Unforgiveness can become its own idol. We enthrone our pain. We become the judge. We say, “I will not let go – because I hold the power now.”
In that moment, we are trying to be God. Luther reminds us that the “old Adam” clings fiercely in each of us. The old Adam resists forgiveness – both giving and receiving it. And sometimes, what makes forgiveness hardest is not the other person, but ourselves.
There is another obstacle: our tendency to inflate small slights into deep wounds. Paul speaks of the armor of God: the helmet of salvation, the shield of faith, and the breastplate of righteousness. This armor does more than protect us from evil. It also equips us with discernment, so that we don’t mistake every inconvenience for harm.
Without such discernment, we keep a tally sheet of wrongs – like the character in the film Rain Man who obsessively noted every perceived offense in a notebook. If we live that way, we will always feel wronged, always demand an apology, always bind others to a debt.
That is not forgiveness. That is pride.
Through the life of faith in Christ, we are freed from tally-keeping.
Memory, Justice…and the Hardest Forgiveness
God’s needle threads through Scripture. The yearning for justice is woven across the psalter. And as with any tapestry, we may misperceive and build illusions. There is a myth: “forgive and forget.” But true forgiveness is not erasure. It is transformation.
Psalm 103 says: “As far as the east is from the west, so far does he remove our transgressions from us” (Ps. 103:12). In Isaiah, God says: “I will not remember your sins” (Isa. 43:25).
This is not amnesia. It is covenant. God always sees, but chooses to see us through mercy rather than condemnation. So too in our lives. Forgiveness does not mean we lose the memory of what happened. It means the memory loses its grip. The event is not erased but re-centered in the mercy of Christ.
But what about the unforgivable? History and personal life alike confront us with wounds so deep the word “forgiveness” feels offensive. Genocide. Tyranny. Abuse. The evils that never repent. Here we must be honest: forgiveness cannot be cheap. It does not mean forgetting, excusing, or silencing. Forgiveness is not a substitute for justice. It does not erase the need for accountability.
God alone can bear memory without distortion and enact justice without vengeance.
A just society applies just punishment. But for our innermost hearts, Paul helps us in Romans: “Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave it to the wrath of God” (Rom. 12:19). Some wrongs will not be set right until the end of all things. Until then, forgiveness may look like release: “God, this is too heavy for me. You carry it.”
This is not a shallow reconciliation. It is a refusal to let despair and hatred consume us. In Christ, forgiveness does not deny memory nor dissolve justice – it reshapes both. God alone can bear memory without distortion and enact justice without vengeance.
Christ the Forgiver
The story that begins with Adam’s hiding ends with Christ’s unveiling. Adam hid, Christ revealed. Adam abandoned, Christ endured. Adam shifted blame, Christ bore not only blame, but the fullness of our sins.
On the cross, Christ proclaimed: “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” Forgiveness, then, is not ours to manufacture. It is ours to proclaim. It is ours to live into. It is ours to unfold – because Christ has already spoken it once for all.
What does Christ proclaim to all humanity in his death and resurrection?
“I forgive you.”
Forgiveness is proclamation. It is also an unfolding process. It is illumination within wounds, memory transformed, and burdens released to God. In the already-and-not-yet kingdom, forgiveness remains the Word. Spoken by God. Lived through us. Fulfilled in Christ.
Closing Devotional
A curving in
fosters the offense,
dashes self-made hopes down.
Forgiveness, when
in our Christ commenced,
takes flight and touches not ground.
It is love, then,
unconquerable sent—
God, for us, the old Adam drowned.
And reborn—
forgiven—
for creation, threaded through Christ’s sound.
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