The following excerpt is from "Somethingism: Exploring Our Sense of More" by Luke Cawley, published by The Good Book Company.

Picture Jesus’ bleeding body. Not many minutes of life remaining. Jagged shards of metal cutting into his wrists and ankles. Unexpectedly, amid his agonised cries and groans, he exclaims a prayer—“Father, forgive them” (Luke 23:34). It is far from the first time he has spoken of forgiveness, but it is perhaps the most striking; Jesus, when faced with people so antagonistic to him that they would have him die in excruciation, reaches not for vengeance but forgiveness. All he could hold against them he releases.

When people come together and one of them has been indifferent or hostile, it requires forgiveness. To forgive is not to endorse what another has done. Neither is it to minimise the problem and wave it away with a declaration that “It’s no big deal” or “I know you had some good reasons for what you did” or to recategorise what has occurred as a mistake or misunderstanding.[1] To forgive is to take a look at the whole ugly mess between the two of you and to determine that it will no longer play any part in how you treat the other. It is the renunciation of the right to retribution rather than a denial that the right exists, and it clears the path to reconciliation.

Forgiveness is simple and straightforward until you have something to forgive which is neither minor nor imagined. Then it wrenches your gut. It tears you apart to even release your grip slightly on your very legitimate opposition to the perpetrator. You have been wronged, and nothing can ever undo what has occurred. You can’t just shrug at injustice or brush it all off casually. When people say, “Why don’t you just forgive them?” you know that to do so will wound you deeply, even if it might also release you. Japanese author Kazoh Kitamori describes pain as an inevitable component of embracing those alienated from us—it costs us to remove the obstacle from between us.[2]

It costs Anne Warren, a character in the miniseries Time, who loses her husband, Bob, to a drunk driver.[3] He could have been saved, but the culprit, Mark, flees the scene, leaving him to die alone. At the trial she tells Mark that Bob “was twice the man that you are”—a line which eats away at him throughout his years of incarceration for manslaughter. So troubled is Mark that he plans to write a letter to Anne from prison. The letter never reaches her, though, as she refuses all correspondence from her husband’s killer.

Mark is eventually released, a humbled and penitent man, and a year later a meeting is arranged with Anne in a café on Southport Pier. Anne enters rigid with caution and refuses Mark’s offer of a drink but does slowly sit down. As their conversation proceeds, Anne can barely make eye contact, and when she says she’s heard about his letter, he slides it across the table—a single sheet of paper with the word “sorry” written repeatedly from top to bottom.

Between silence and sighs she turns the paper over, etches her address, and says, “If you do write again, I’ll read it”. As Mark stares in disbelief, Anne continues, “I want to forgive you, you see. I need to forgive you, but I can’t. I’ve tried, and I can’t.” Then she breathes deeply, restraining her tears, before adding, “But I’ll keep on trying; I promise you I’ll keep on trying. Maybe one day.” It’s a hauntingly truthful scene, powerfully reminding viewers that while forgiveness can help set one free, it is never cheap or painless to the one who forgives.

Envisage again Jesus’ torn, bleeding form, bruised and teetering on the edge of extinction. Here is a God who looks at his world—every misdeed, both towards him and others—and makes the arduous choice to forgive. “This is my body,” he said the night before he died, “given for you” (Luke 22:19). To look on the smashed body of Jesus is to glimpse what occurs when forgiveness is extended for all that will ever need forgiving. It fractures and snaps even God himself.

And it is Jesus broken. Not us. There isn’t a skill or effort asked of us to attain forgiveness. Jesus, shortly before his death, borrowed language from the slave market—potent imagery of a local location where those on display had no freedom or agency—and said that he had come to “give his life as a ransom for many”: a “ransom” being the price paid for the freedom of a slave (Mark 10:45). He wasn’t urging people to earn their own forgiveness or engineer their own reconciliation with God. Jesus would be the ransom. He is the one who removes the fences, levers away the wooden slats, and smashes the window panes, taking the injuries and pain which come about in the process. He bears the weight of reconciliation on his own shoulders so that our evasion, hostility, and all the accumulated grime of the years no longer need to come between us and God.

If Jesus shows us God, then our flair for playing the system—be it moral or religious—will not define our ability to know God. Nor will our high score; and we all have a system for ranking ourselves against others. God is not a mechanism we can master or manipulate nor a hidden object we must recover through great exertions, provoking in us either cockiness or despair. He instead comes to us as a person, Jesus, and demands not that we be broken for anything in our lives but, rather, announces his intention to break himself, enabling us to experience forgiveness and the possibility of reconciliation with him.

[1] Jesus, in this prayer says, “Forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing”. And few of us really know what we are doing when it comes to God, but it’s interesting that Jesus sees an unknowing self-distancing from God as still in need of reconciliatory forgiveness. This makes sense: we can all take actions which cause relational ruptures without being cognisant of doing so. It’s also notable that he doesn’t require us to fully comprehend him or ourselves in order to have forgiveness made available to us. “Forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing” expresses his stance towards all of us who understand (at best) very little of God.

[2] See: Kitamori, Kazoh. Theology of the Pain of God. (Eugene: Wipf & Stock, 2005).

[3] Time. 2021. Series 1, episodes 1-3. Directed by Lewis Arnold. Aired June 6, 2021, on BBC iPlayer. https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episodes/p09fs2qh/time.