Why Forgive?

The scandal of forgiveness confronts anyone who agrees to a moral cease-fire just because someone says, "I’m sorry." When I feel wronged, I can contrive a hundred reasons against forgiveness. He needs to learn a lesson. I don’t want to encourage irresponsible behavior. I’ll let her stew for a while; it will do her good. She needs to learn that actions have consequences. I was the wronged party - it’s not up to me to make the first move. How can I forgive if he’s not even sorry? I marshal my arguments until something happens to wear down my resistance. When I finally soften to the point of granting forgiveness, it seems a capitulation, a leap from hard logic to mushy sentiment.

Why do I ever make such a leap? I have already mentioned one factor that motivates me as a Christian: I am commanded to, as the child of a Father who forgives. But Christians have no monopoly on forgiveness. Why do any of us, Christian or unbeliever alike, choose this unnatural act? I can identify at least three pragmatic reasons, and the more I ponder these reasons for forgiveness, the more I recognize in them a logic that seems not only "hard" but foundational.
First, forgiveness alone can halt the cycle of blame and pain, breaking the chain of ungrace. In the NT the most common Greek word for forgiveness means, literally, to release, to hurl away, to free yourself.

Resentment literally means "to feel again" resentment clings to the past, relives it over and over, picks each fresh scab so that the wound never heals.

This pattern doubtless began with the very first couple on earth. "Think of all the squabbles Adam and Eve must have had in the course of their nine hundred years." wrote Martin Luther. "Eve would say, "You ate the apple," and Adam would retort, "You gave it to me."

Two novels by Nobel laureates illustrate the pattern in a modern setting. In "Love in the Time of Cholera," Gabriel Garcia portrays a marriage that disintegrates over a bar of soap. It was the wife’s job to keep the house in order, including provision of towels, toilet paper, and soap in the bathroom. One day she forgot to replace the soap, an oversight that her husband mentioned in an exaggerated way ("I’ve been bathing for almost a week without any soap"), and that she vigorously denied. Although it turned out that she had indeed forgotten, her pride was at stake and she would not back down. For the next seven months they slept in separate rooms and ate in silence. How can a bar of soap ruin a marriage? Because neither partner would say "Stop. This cannot go on. I’m sorry. Forgive me."

Forgiveness offers a way out. It does not settle all questions of blame and fairness - often it pointedly evades those questions - but it does allow a relationship to start over, to begin anew.
What would happen if every child bore grudges against his or her parents, and every family passed down feuds to future generations?

Not to forgive imprisons me in the past and locks out all potential for change. I thus yield control to another, my enemy, and doom myself to suffer the consequences of the wrong. We forgive not merely to fulfill some higher law of morality; we do it for ourselves. As Lewis Smedes points out, "The first and often the only person to be healed by forgiveness is the person who does the forgiveness...When we genuinely forgive, we set a prisoner free and then discover that the prisoner we set free was us."

Extracted from "What’s So Amazing About Grace?" by Philip Yancey