What Christian forgiveness looks like

At the memorial service for her murdered husband, with tens of hundreds watching and grief still raw, Erika Kirk spoke two words that stilled the gang, “I forgive.”

It’s fair to say the web didn’t quite know what to do with those words. Forgiveness is shocking in a world obsessive about vengeance. We know tips on how to be outraged, to call out, to cancel. Outrage gives us moral standing; it’s how we show we care. But it also traps us in a continuing good-versus-evil contest, even over the smallest things. Everyone’s attempting to prove they’re on the suitable side or that they’re the injured one who deserves to be defended.

And it’s exhausting. It shrinks our ability to point out grace, to overlook small wrongs, to reconcile. As Tim Keller put it, “Forgiveness is seen as radically unjust and impractical, as short-circuiting the power of victims to achieve honour and virtue as others rise to defend them.”

In a world of score-keeping and no grace, mistakes turn out to be everlasting. Our political tribes begin to feel like recent religions complete with saints and sinners, but with none hope of redemption.

Forgiveness can feel naive, weak, even mistaken. It appears like we’re saying the wound doesn’t matter. But the cross of Christ shows us something infinitely deeper … that forgiveness doesn’t erase justice; it fulfils it!

At Calvary, the world’s best mistaken was met by the world’s best love. The Holy One who was without sin bore the complete weight of sin (2 Corinthians 5:21) and in that moment, justice was not ignored, it was perfectly satisfied. 

God didn’t simply wave away our guilt; He carried it Himself. That’s what makes Christian forgiveness utterly different. It is faith, conviction, an act of trust to put justice into the hands of the Holy One, the just one who judges perfectly.

When we forgive, we aren’t pretending the hurt was small. When we forgive we may not feel that forgiveness, yet we decide to reveal it. We are saying, ‘I won’t take the place of God.’ We are echoing Christ, who, as Peter tells us, “when he was reviled, didn’t revile in return; when he suffered, he didn’t threaten, but entrusted himself to Him who judges justly” (1 Peter 2:23). 

Forgiveness begins internally within the quiet moments where we determine before God to not repay evil with evil, to release the need to get even. And that’s hard especially when the wound runs deep. Our world says forgiveness is therapeutic, something you do for your personal peace of mind. But true Christian forgiveness goes deeper … it seeks to honour God first.  He’s forgiven me, so I’ll honour him by forgiving others.

My dear friend John Mosey lost his daughter, Helga, within the Lockerbie bombing. An act of evil that shattered so many lives. 

Yet, John and his wife selected to forgive the person connected to the attack. Not since the loss was healed, not because justice didn’t matter, but because they knew the One who had forgiven them first. 

Their forgiveness wasn’t forgetting but foregoing revenge. An act of religion that said ‘we trust God with justice, we won’t repay evil for evil.’ 

And that’s the miracle of Christian forgiveness. It is the refusal to let bitterness define the longer term, the courage to provide the gift we ourselves received through the cross. As Paul says, “Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good (Romans 12:21).”

Because after we look to the cross, we see what forgiveness truly costs. Jesus absorbed the complete weight of our sin, bearing it on in his body (1st Peter 2:24). Forgiveness is sacrificial for us too – it costs us. 

As we recently marked Black History Month, we keep in mind that a few of the strongest revolutions in history began not with revenge, but with grace. From Martin Luther King Jr. preaching that love is the one force able to turning an enemy right into a friend, to Nelson Mandela walking free after twenty-seven years in prison saying, ‘’if I didn’t leave my bitterness and hatred behind, I’d still be in prison.”

In today’s culture wars, forgiveness is essentially the most radical type of resistance. Because it refuses to let hatred write the ending. That is what the cross makes possible: a love strong enough to forgive the unforgivable, not in our own strength, but through trusting God who judges justly.

Each decision to forgive is a declaration of religion in divine justice. The conviction that God will sooner or later set all things right. It’s not pretending evil doesn’t matter, but believing that it matters a lot that only God Himself is worthy to guage it! 

And that’s the message our divided world still needs to listen to. Vengeance is His (Romans 12:19). So we will decide to release our grip, not because we’re weak or because we aren’t affected, but because we trust the One who’s faithful and just and who forgave us.

Tim Farron has been the Member of Parliament for Westmorland and Lonsdale since 2005 and served because the Leader of the Liberal Democrat Party from 2015 to 2017. Tim can also be the host of Premier’s ‘A Mucky Business’ podcast, which unpacks the murky world of politics and encourages believers across the UK to have interaction prayerfully. He is the creator of A Mucky Business: Why Christians should become involved in politics.