Don’t Rush to Forgiveness

A staple characteristic of what it means to be a follower of Jesus is to be someone who forgives. Paul calls us to forgive because we have been forgiven (Col. 3:13) and we name this as an active part of who we are when we pray the Lord’s prayer, asking God to “forgive us our sins, as we have forgiven those who sin against us” (NLT, emphasis mine).

Forgiveness is a beautifully shocking event. In an eye-for-an-eye world, to experience or witness forgiveness play out can be quite incredible. It is an immensely healing and restorative act within a relationship, bridging a divide that may not be mendable with action. It can also be healing for a community, as relational rupture between individuals is felt and experienced within the community as a whole. Forgiveness is beautiful.

However, forgiveness can also be deeply harmful.

As beautiful of an act that forgiveness can be, we often rush to forgiveness in a way that is destructive, rather than redemptive.

What often is missed in the call to forgive “just as the Lord has forgiven you” (Eph. 4:32) is the qualitative nature of the command. Do as the Lord does, not what the Lord does. It is not simply a command to forsake your pain in order to forgive whenever an opportunity to forgive arises. If that were the case, then releasing the one who has harmed from their responsibility would matter more than the wellbeing and the healing of the harmed.

When we feel we must forgive before we’ve had the chance to acknowledge, affirm, and process the impact the act has had on us, we internalize that our pain and our process doesn’t matter. Instead, we must learn to “get over it” and take care of the one who has harmed.

This is made worse when a parent, a mentor, or a pastor dismisses the harm by encouraging forgiveness. There is such great betrayal in the wounded’s heart at the failure of a leader or friend to support and care for them in their pain — a failure to simply sit with them and affirm their experience of being hurt.

A survival mechanism in humans is to avoid pain and discomfort at all costs. When we are harmed, we rush to make sense of why it happened and often create a story that puts us at fault because we can change that. We tell ourselves that it’s not their fault they didn’t care for my needs, it’s my fault for having them. And so if I just learn not to need help, not to desire connection, not to long for love then I won’t be hurt or disappointed.

However, when we are hurt — feeling something has taken place that should not have — and we allow ourselves to seek the comforting care and wisdom of someone we trust, we give them power to help us make sense of the situation. And when they push for forgiveness at the expense of grieving with us in our pain, they affirm a narrative in which our feelings are wrong and so we are the one responsible for making things right.

Many treat forgiveness as a bandage solution for harm. That if we were to just forgive the other, then the issue would be solved and we could all move on. Many offer this encouragement benevolently, honestly hoping the one who is hurt will feel better through the act of forgiveness, while others recklessly call for forgiveness simply as a means to deal with their own discomfort with caring for another person’s pain. In any case, the one who is hurt hears that their feelings and experience aren’t worth the time to acknowledge, or even that their feelings are invalid.

Whether inviting someone toward forgiveness or inviting it within ourselves, we must recognize that in order to offer authentic forgiveness we need to hold space for our experience of the wrong that has taken place as well as the permission to name and know that it was wrong. You cannot ask someone to forgive before loving them in the midst of their pain; comforting them and reassuring them that they are valuable and worthy of love. Nor can the one who has been hurt offer authentic forgiveness without coming from a starting point of self-affirmation — knowing that they were wronged and justice demands recompense, yet, they choose to let go.

Forgiveness must come from grace and grace can only ever come from one’s capacity, not one’s deficit. It comes from an assuredness within yourself that you are worthy of love, care, and respect and from a firm belief that the harm that has taken place was not okay. That you were — and are — worth better. Only from here can forgiveness be restorative and healing. Only from here can forgiveness be authentic grace — a grace freely given.

This kind of forgiveness — a forgiveness that comes from an awareness of our inherent value and worth — is the forgiveness that Jesus embodies when we are called to forgive qualitatively the same way as him. Jesus knew who he was and what his inherent value was, which allows for him to forgive freely. This kind of forgiveness embodies Jesus’ command to “love your neighbor as yourself” (Matt. 22:39), which requires that you first know how to love yourself.

And this is precisely the danger of rushing to forgiveness: it destroys our self-love while keeping us from loving authentically.

When we rush to forgiveness because we either have been told to or we have internalized a Christian framework that elevates forgiveness over self-care, our forgiveness isn’t authentic — just as loving someone without having the capacity to love ourself isn’t authentic love. In both, we are not present: our pain, our wants, our needs, the things that make us “us.” Instead, our forgiveness, which is an expression of our love, becomes a product of self-suppression — the result of loving and forgiving because we have to.

What we prioritize matters. If forgiveness is more important than the impact someone’s actions have on us, then we will suppress our pain in order to offer forgiveness. We will learn to internalize that being treated with love and respect isn’t as important as forgiving someone when they treat us poorly. We hand over the power to define our value and worth to the people around us, waiting to see what they decide we are worth.

Yet, the Gospel offers us a different narrative. We are made in the image of God and we are, no matter what our life has held, vigorously sought after by the creator of the universe. Our value is inherent and unchanging and as we grow in our self-love, in our awareness of our worth, we become a people capable of loving and forgiving freely.

Because our worth is not dependent on how other people treat us or what other people offer us.

And the greater our self-love the quicker we are to offering authentic forgiveness.