I grew up hearing testimonies quite often in church. Someone would get on the stage with a microphone, then tell a story about how they hit rock bottom in life before Jesus saved them. I heard stories about drug addiction, poverty, disease, domestic violence, sexual abuse, abandonment, and all sorts of loss. Then they would talk about how these tragedies led them to make destructive decisions in order to cope, which only made their situation worse. Then, in the midst of all that struggle, they had an experience with Jesus. They discovered that they were deeply loved by Jesus and had a purpose in life.
I used to be jealous of these powerful stories since I was just a church kid and didn’t have life experiences as intense as these. My parents did, and so did many of their friends, but I never did. However, these stories enabled me to understand Jesus as someone who loves us at rock bottom and lifts us up.
A common problem in Christian communities that center these testimonies is the stifling behavior management the church enforces after these conversion experiences, which forces people to feel like they can only have a few rock-bottom moments before they no longer deserve grace. However, I always understood Jesus as full of grace and forgiveness at every turn in our lives, no matter what any hypocritical Christians had to say.
This message of grace and forgiveness is what attracts a lot of people to Christianity. Discovering a God that forgives you no matter what you’ve done or what you’ve been through can be incredibly transformative.
The nature of forgiveness is always excessive. Forgiveness always goes over and beyond to respond to great sin with greater grace.1
Jesus commonly forgave people after healing them and taught his disciples to forgive others generously, but contemporary Christians often describe forgiveness very narrowly. We typically understand forgiveness as pardoning someone for the harm they caused. This is an inadequate understanding of forgiveness.
Forgiveness can look like pardoning harm, but that’s like defining hospitality as inviting friends to your house party. Hospitality can look like that, but hospitality is clearly so much more than that. And it is out of a spirit of hospitality that you would invite your friends. So out of a spirit of forgiveness, you can pardon someone for harm they caused you, but forgiveness is so much more than that.
If pardoning harm is all Jesus meant by forgiveness, then Jesus would have gone around pardoning those guilty of the greatest harm. Jesus didn’t do that. Instead, Jesus went to those who had the greatest amount of harm done to them and forgave them.
We must see forgiveness with a wider lens if we want to understand what Jesus was doing.
The Jewish tradition informed the way Jesus and his followers thought about forgiveness. Judaism and early Christianity scholar Bruce Chilton explains that the Jewish conception of forgiveness is best understood as a release from the “incapacitating shackle” of sin.2
Sin constrains. Forgiveness releases.
Chilton goes on to say that the “current, weakened conception of forgiveness as merely overlooking or forgetting the harm one has suffered is a far cry from the Judaic sense of liberation from the consequences of one’s own deeds.”
Using this understanding of forgiveness, philosopher and theologian John Caputo also brilliantly explains, “Forgiveness is not an exercise of power but a forgoing of the exercise of power, giving up the power one has over the other.”3
It’s also important to understand that concepts like sin, forgiveness, and reconciliation were always understood as collective, not individual. Sin refers to the sin of the community, not the person. And the community desires forgiveness and reconciliation.
However, the guilt for the sin of the community commonly falls onto those who struggle the most to survive in that community. Throughout history, marginalized people have been scapegoated for society’s ills. Like rain gathering at the bottom of a hill, the guilt for the sin of society always rolls down toward the marginalized masses. In the same way that marginalized people today may be described as lazy, ignorant, and selfish, they were described in Jesus’s society as sinful, demonic, and spiritually unclean. Jesus befriends them. And he heals them. Then he forgives them, releasing and relieving them from the guilt and pressure of society’s sin.
Jesus did not go out of his way to forgive the individuals guilty of the most harm, such as kings and rulers. He went out of his way to forgive individuals who had the most harm done to them, such as beggars, enslaved people and lepers. These people were constrained by the sin of society and needed to be liberated from that burden.
The sick and disabled people Jesus healed were marginalized in every way. They were marginalized economically because of their inability to work, which is why many of the people Jesus healed were beggars or enslaved people. They were marginalized spiritually because people with diseases or disabilities were labeled ritually unclean and were prohibited from entering the Jewish temple. And according to temple law, touching someone who was ritually unclean would also make you unclean, so they were socially marginalized as well.
Sometimes Jesus healed people and then commanded them to go show themselves to the priests and to make an offering for their cleansing as a testimony against the priests who excluded them from the temple. Jesus’s healings were a direct challenge to the society that marginalized them.
After healing people, Jesus said, “Your sins are forgiven.” I’m sure these people committed petty misdeeds every now and then such as stealing, lying, and fighting. These are the misdeeds the poor often commit as they struggle to survive. However, this isn’t the shackle of sin they needed freedom from. The economic, spiritual, and social marginalization perpetuated by an unequal society is the shackle of sin people needed to be released from.
New Testament scholar Richard Horsley argues, “By pointing to the forgiveness of God as directly available, Jesus was exposing the religious means by which the social restrictions on the people were maintained. Thus, instead of the people continuing to blame themselves for their suffering, they were freed for a resumption of a productive, cooperative life in their communities.”4
When Jesus forgave others, he was rehumanizing those who had been dehumanized. The people Jesus healed now had certainty that the injustice occurring in their lives was not their own fault. Perhaps Jesus’s declaration of forgiveness was undoing the psychological guilt that had worsened—or in some cases, even caused—their physical ailments. Jesus released them from the shackles of sin, which liberated them from endlessly looking inward for the causes of their suffering. They were now free to look outward at the society that marginalized them.
Every occasion of forgiveness in the ministry of Jesus was a revelation. It was a divine disclosure of God’s perspective of the world. From this divine perspective, the people Jesus healed were free from guilt. This is why religious teachers condemned Jesus for forgiving people, accusing him of blasphemy. Jesus’s forgiveness was a direct challenge to the way society placed all the guilt on the poor and sick. The alternative revelation that Jesus preached challenged the accepted social divisions of his day.
This is the power of forgiveness. Forgiveness releases us from the cycle of self-blame and shame that prevents us from noticing the ways we are abused and exploited by our society.
My friend C.J. is a therapist who works with people in low-income housing. In every session he witnesses the cycle of self-blame and shame in those who have been harmed most by the sin of society. After all, many people go to therapy to “fix themselves” because they’re already convinced that they’re the problem.
C.J.’s clients will often begin by talking about a personal struggle, but then briefly mention a larger societal issue as a small detail in their story. C.J. stops and encourages them to talk more about those details to allow them to see how much pressure those societal issues create in their lives.
One of C.J.’s clients was facing eviction and homelessness because her housing manager discovered her drug addiction and reported it to the police. C.J. and his client had a meeting with the housing authority to convince them that she wouldn’t violate the lease again by using illegal substances.
Drug addiction is a health issue. It shouldn’t be a criminal issue. And people shouldn’t be forced into homelessness because of a health issue. And homelessness shouldn’t be an issue at all when we can easily afford to house everyone in the country. This is the sin of society.
After the meeting, C.J. reminded his client that they’re working through the situation to keep her housed and to make sure she doesn’t break the rules that are in place. But then he expressed how much he wished she didn’t have to be in this situation, and how much he wished the world we lived in didn’t punish her for using drugs, and that her housing shouldn’t be in jeopardy because of that. “This is inhumane that you are being treated this way because you have an addiction problem,” he assured her.
This is the kind of forgiveness that Jesus gave. The sin of society always weighs on the poor and the sick. Jesus releases them from that pressure.
Forgiveness is excessive. It goes over and beyond. Forgiveness does not stop at releasing people at an interpersonal level. Forgiveness always moves outward to address the larger sin of society. It’s common to see forgiveness transform individuals. Rarely do we see forgiveness transform a society. That requires a particularly excessive forgiveness that dares to believe in the impossible.
To get a grasp on this radically transformative forgiveness, we need to turn to the remarkable imaginations of the medieval theologians and recruit the help of an eleventh-century Italian theologian and Benedictine monk Peter Damian.
Peter Damian wrote an open letter to a friend titled Letter on Divine Omnipotence in 1065 after an earlier conversation about a passage from the theologian Jerome. Jerome had said that God cannot make a woman a virgin again after she had lost her virginity. His friend agreed. Damian disagreed.
This question was a part of an older speculative discussion among many Christians and non-Christians over the centuries: “Is God able to act so that, after something has once happened, it did not happen?”5 Could God reach back into history and change the course of events? Could God erase events from history after they have already happened? This, of course, is not just a question about the power of God, but also about the mercy of God. This is a question about how much forgiveness can truly transform a situation. Could God’s forgiveness transform history itself?
We all have had the desire to travel back in time and change things, whether it be preventing a genocide or something as small as changing the way we responded in a past conversation, like Peter Damian was doing in this letter.
He says he left the conversation dissatisfied, particularly with the conclusion that the all-powerful God was unable to do something. He argued that if God does not do something, it is simply because it is outside of God’s will, but never because God is incapable. So he asserts that God is indeed “strong enough” to make a woman a virgin again.6 He even argues that God could make it so that Rome had never been founded if God chose to do so.
He criticized those who get caught up in these speculative conversations about what God cannot do as “introducers of sacrilegious doctrine” and “secular boys” who, with their “dazzle of words,” “tripped themselves up” with “frivolous questioning.”7
These are age-old questions: “Could God create a stone so heavy that even God could not lift it?” or “Could God make a burrito so hot that even God could not eat it?” I imagine Peter Damian would respond to these questions by condemning them for a lack of faith and say, “Yes, of course God could lift that stone while eating that burrito.”
He wasn’t interested in trying to figure out what God cannot do. Jesus said, “for God all things are possible,”8 and Peter Damian believed it.
I’m fascinated with Peter Damian’s passionate argument, not because I am interested in defending the integrity of some all-powerful God. That’s not important to me. I’m fascinated because I also find myself believing in the impossible. I believe in a forgiveness so transformative that it can reshape the world around us, but like Peter Damian, I am often frustrated with those around me who have a severe lack of imagination for what can and cannot be done.
I’m sure you’ve felt this way too. We demand health care for all, or housing for all, or education for all, but the “secular boys” of our day “trip themselves up” with “frivolous questioning” about who’s going to pay for it. We demand the abolition of prisons and police, but they ask what we’re going to do with all the “criminals.” We demand an end to America’s imperialism, but they ask what we’re going to do if terrorists attack us.
Each of these questions is important to ask in order to have these discussions, but these questions are often inserted in order to shut the discussion down. Many people are not asking these questions sincerely. They ask these questions to cast doubt on a vision of radical transformation.
Like Peter Damian, I respond to these questions by declaring that all things are possible.
John Caputo is also fascinated with Peter Damian’s imaginative conception of forgiveness and speculates about the impact of what he calls Forgiven Time. He affirms that forgiveness “requires a past that ceases to be: in forgiveness it is to be as if it never happened.” This is different from revisionist history, which attempts to sweep the past under the rug, believing it’ll go away if we pretend it isn’t there. “Forgiveness must somehow strike a blow against the past itself,” he says. “The past would be somehow wiped out, annulled, or erased, so that, were it possible, it really would be the case that ‘it never happened.’ ”9
The type of forgiveness that literally erases events from history is impossible, and yet, this is the level of transformation we should strive for when we talk about forgiveness. This is the level of release from the power of the past we should strive for.
Take, for example, the power of the past of white supremacy. If we want reconciliation after centuries of white supremacist violence and discrimination, then we should strive to reshape our material relations in such a way that our everyday lives appear as if white supremacy truly was erased from history.
We observe how people treat one another all the time. We know what it looks like when a relationship is broken and needs to be reconciled through people’s subtle actions. But sometimes reconciliation has so transformed a situation that the relationship appears as if nothing happened.
Of course, there is an obvious difference between pretending nothing happened and restoring the relationship so much so that the relationship now flourishes as if nothing happened. Many of us have experienced the phony type of reconciliation where we are expected to pretend nothing happened, even though there is still harm being committed. Then, if you bring up the active harm, you are condemned for not “letting go” of the past like everyone else is trying to do.
This is often how people expect us to respond to centuries of white supremacy today. We are expected to pretend that the sins of the past never happened, even though the material relations of our everyday lives reflect a different reality. Then, when we acknowledge the ways that white supremacy still affects us, we are condemned for not “letting go” of the past. We’re accused of keeping white supremacy alive by continuing to talk about it. This is similar to an abusive partner who apologizes after an act of abuse but still continues to harm their partner. If their partner brings up the endless pattern of abusive behavior, then they are accused of being “unforgiving” and blamed for their abuser’s outbursts.
The most authentic reconciliation can occur only when the sins of the past are confronted and every wrong is made right. Often, it is impossible to achieve that level of reconciliation but that is what we should strive for, especially if we believe in the Christian story.
The New Testament speaks of history moving toward the restoration of all things,10 the reconciliation of all things,11 and the renewal of all things12 through Christ. So the mission of the body of Christ should be to strive for the same type of radical transformation in response to brutal injustice.
With God all things are possible, right? And whatever proves to be impossible should not be the result of Christians refusing to attempt the impossible. Radical reparation of an unjust world should be our goal if we believe in something as radical as Christian forgiveness.
We see this level of expansive reconciliation in Jesus’s classic parable of the prodigal son. In order to illustrate the kind of world he’s talking about when he talks about “the kingdom of God,” Jesus tells some stories about lost things being found. A shepherd with a hundred sheep loses one and leaves the ninety-nine to search until he finds the lost sheep, and then he invites his friends and neighbors over to celebrate. A woman with ten silver coins loses one and searches the entire house until she finds it, and then she invites her friends and neighbors over to celebrate.
Then Jesus tells a story of a son who asks his father for an early inheritance, and then leaves to a distant country and squanders it all. Then famine strikes the country, so he sells himself as a servant and ends up starving as he craves the food he’s feeding to pigs. In this rock-bottom moment, he has a realization and thinks to himself: How many of my father’s hired hands have bread enough and to spare, but here I am dying of hunger! I will get up and go to my father, and I will say to him, “Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you; I am no longer worthy to be called your son; treat me like one of your hired hands.”13 The father could continue holding the past over his son or he could release his son.
The story continues:
So he set off and went to his father. But while he was still far off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion; he ran and put his arms around him and kissed him. Then the son said to him, “Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you; I am no longer worthy to be called your son.” But the father said to his slaves, “Quickly, bring out a robe—the best one—and put it on him; put a ring on his finger and sandals on his feet. And get the fatted calf and kill it, and let us eat and celebrate; for this son of mine was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found!” And they began to celebrate.14
When the relationship needed to be reconciled, the father released his son from everything he held over him. But, of course, he doesn’t stop there. The father seeks to right every wrong by transforming his son’s conditions in a way that wipes out the past. The father repairs that which was broken so much so that it appears as if the relationship was never broken.
If the prodigal son returned as a servant, he would be reminded by his daily living conditions of the brokenness of his past, while the father continued to live in wealth and comfort. In that situation, the father could claim that he’s forgotten the past, and maybe he would believe it himself, but the son’s daily life would reflect a different reality.
The kind of repair that Christians should strive for requires a radical collective imagination, as well as radical collective action, to transform our world so that the wrongs of the past are made right. The restoration of all things, the reconciliation of all things, and the renewal of all things are what drives us.
Christians who believe in this level of transformation have a duty to look around at the injustice in our world today and to seek the most radically expansive methods of repairing all that is broken. Rarely do we see Christians who have the radical imagination for reconciliation and repair to the extent that Jesus talked about.
We cannot talk about repair without addressing the call for economic reparations for Black Americans for the legacy of chattel slavery in the United States. Christians are called to commit to fulfilling this form of reparation as well, but it’s an uncomfortable conversation because we’ve been trained to accept the phony type of reconciliation in which we pretend nothing happened. This is obviously a much easier task for the most privileged of society than the underprivileged.
It is a lot easier for the descendants of those who have always been in privileged positions in society to ignore everyday signs of brokenness than it is for the descendants of those who have been historically underprivileged because the signs of brokenness are reflected in their life conditions.
When people demand reparations, those who don’t have a material need for reparations cannot immediately comprehend the needs of others. So often those with more privilege than others become angry and combative when people suggest any form of reparations because they foolishly believe they’re the ones being oppressed when others are finally given the same privileges they’ve always enjoyed.
This plays out in the rest of the parable as well. The father’s other son, the prodigal son’s older brother, stayed with his father while his younger brother was absent. The story continues:
Now his elder son was in the field; and when he came and approached the house, he heard music and dancing. He called one of the slaves and asked what was going on. He replied, “Your brother has come, and your father has killed the fatted calf, because he has got him back safe and sound.” Then he became angry and refused to go in. His father came out and began to plead with him. But he answered his father, “Listen! For all these years I have been working like a slave for you, and I have never disobeyed your command; yet you have never given me even a young goat so that I might celebrate with my friends. But when this son of yours came back, who has devoured your property with prostitutes, you killed the fatted calf for him!” Then the father said to him, “Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours. But we had to celebrate and rejoice, because this brother of yours was dead and has come to life; he was lost and has been found.”15
Any form of reparations feels unfair to white people who can’t see what has always been theirs. In a society that has historically favored white people, they must recognize that people of color are often fighting to have access to the same opportunities and freedoms that white people have always had access to. White privilege doesn’t mean that every single white person is born with more wealth and resources than every single nonwhite person. We all struggle, including white working-class people. White privilege just means that white people’s skin color isn’t one of the factors that contribute to their struggle to survive in this society that dehumanizes all of us.
In our situation Black Americans have always been cast out, and for no fault of their own, unlike the prodigal son. A reconciliation would be a form of unity that has never existed before. And in our situation, there is no father that can restore anyone or orchestrate our reconciliation for us.
Those with the power to act justly cannot be persuaded to save us. The problem is that the power to act justly rests in the hands of so few. The solution is not to persuade the powerful, but to transform our entire socioeconomic system so that power is more equally distributed among all of us. This is part of the ongoing work of reparation as well. Liberation is achieved when our communities have the power to fulfill our needs ourselves.
Liberation cannot come from above, only from below. The oppressed struggle for power to free themselves from oppression and within this struggle God chooses the side of the oppressed. Christians are called to embody the God of the oppressed in the world, struggling alongside the oppressed for liberation.
What are we really working toward? Are we working toward the kind of transformation that Jesus talked about? Are we working toward a complete release of everything held over the oppressed? Are we working to repair our world to reflect a new reality?
Or are we settling for a phony reconciliation that demands people reconcile with their enemies while they are still being abused and exploited by them?
Are we working toward the type of forgiveness that empowers us to resist unjust institutions? Or are we settling for a cheap forgiveness that suppresses our resistance?
On May 25, 2020, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, George Floyd was murdered by police when Officer Derek Chauvin pressed his knee into Floyd’s neck for nine minutes and twenty-nine seconds. The next day, protests began and gradually spread throughout the world within a week. Multiple protests in the United States lasted several months, night after night.
A couple of weeks after protests began, the popular right-wing evangelical worship leader Sean Feucht brought a worship team to hold a concert and outreach event at the site of George Floyd’s murder where protests were taking place. They sang worship songs, preached, prayed for people, and baptized people in big plastic containers. All this took place a few yards away from the mural at the site of George Floyd’s murder.
When I saw the videos online, all I could think of was the scripture Amos 5 where God uses the prophet Amos to tell Israel: “Away with the noise of your songs! I will not listen to the music of your harps. But let justice roll on like a river, righteousness like a never-failing stream!”16 It’s common in the prophetic books of the Hebrew Bible for God to condemn Israel for prioritizing worship over justice. This sin is more prevalent than ever today.
One of the musicians praised the event for helping people turn to forgiveness in Jesus and understand that Jesus—not a protest— is the answer. The obvious implication was that the protest was the real problem, and that the solution to the unrest would be for protesters to forgive the police by forgetting about the injustice around them.
The only type of forgiveness many Christians are interested in is pressuring oppressed people to release the resentment they may hold over oppressive institutions. The type of forgiveness I’m interested in is America releasing the oppression they hold over everyone struggling to survive state violence. That necessarily means reparations. And the type of reparations I’m talking about includes the abolition of institutions that were built to sustain the oppression we claim to have ended centuries ago. That includes the abolition of prisons. That includes the abolition of police. That even includes the abolition of capitalism, which was only made financially viable in the United States by importing a working class from Africa through slavery.
This is why it’s necessary we talk about forgiveness as release.
To forgive someone is to set them free to live beyond what was held over them. Forgiveness could look like releasing someone from the resentment you held over them as we commonly think of it, but it also can look like releasing someone from a debt you held over them, no longer requiring payment. The important part is the release, and forgiveness functions as a cycle of release.
Reconciliation occurs when forgiveness so transforms a situation that the oppressor releases the victim from their mistreatment and the oppressed releases the oppressor from their resentment. Reconciliation occurs when both parties are released. Until both parties are released, reconciliation cannot be achieved.
If you want oppressed people to release the resentment they hold over their oppressors, then release them from their oppression. How could you forgive a friend for pressing their boot into your neck if your friend still hasn’t lifted their boot? You could say that you’ve forgiven and forgotten it, but it won’t really matter until the oppression stops.
In Matthew 18, Peter asks Jesus, “Lord, if another member of the church sins against me, how often should I forgive? As many as seven times?” Jesus replied, “Not seven times, but, I tell you, seventy-seven times.”17
Biblical scholars argue that the reason Jesus told Peter to forgive seventy-seven times in Matthew 18 is because the writer, Matthew, was making a correction on an evolving Christian teaching on forgiveness. Both Luke and Matthew document this Christian teaching on forgiveness separately. Luke 17 records Jesus saying, “And if the same person sins against you seven times a day, and turns back to you seven times and says, ‘I repent,’ you must forgive.”18 This was likely a common teaching among the early Christian community that taught people to forgive people seven times as a way of making the point that we should endlessly forgive. Then what likely happened is that people took this teaching literally and began teaching that we only need to forgive people seven times and no more after that. So Matthew corrects this misunderstanding by writing this story about Peter asking Jesus if we should forgive seven times, and Jesus responds, “Not seven times, but, I tell you, seventy-seven times.”
This is what we often do with radical teachings such as this. We find a way to avoid its excessive nature and create rules and restrictions to avoid following the teaching beyond what’s convenient. We cling to the safety of our familiar worldviews to avoid the challenge of radical change.
And yet, the restoration of all things, the reconciliation of all things, and the renewal of all things require nothing less than radical change.
In Luke’s version of the story, the apostles respond to Jesus’s teaching on forgiveness by saying, “Increase our faith!” May we be humble enough to also pray for an increase of faith as we commit to transforming the world in such a radically expansive way.