Forgive the Sinner, Not the Sin

I think when we are having the hardest struggle to forgive, it’s because we don’t have a clear enough understanding of what or whom we are forgiving. When Christ healed the man stricken with palsy, He first said, Thy sins are forgiven thee. This consternated the scribes and Pharisees because only God can forgive sins. This was as true then as it is now. It is not our responsibility nor our right to forgive sins.Only God can do that. What we can and we must do is forgive people. Not forgive what they did to us but forgive them. Nothing they or we or anyone else can do can make right what they did to us. Only God can repair the damages we do to one another. But even if we can’t forgive the horrible things that have been done to us, we can forgive the angry, frightened, confused person who did them. God says He will forgive whom He will forgive. The sins of the unrepentant will remain unforgiven and will be answered upon the heads of those who committed them according to the demands of Justice. But we are not agents of Justice. It is not given to us to know all of the facts and extenuating circumstances and the thoughts and feelings and intentions of those who have committed sins. Only God can forgive sins, but of us it is required to forgive all men and women. As participants in and recipients of God’s Mercy, it is required of us to promote and extend and offer unreservedly and wholeheartedly forgiveness to everyone. We don’t need to know what they were thinking nor do we need to know whether their punishment will fit the crime. We just have to forgive everyone and let God sort everything out in His own due time. We must trust that God will mete out Justice and Mercy according to His infinite wisdom and goodness. If we are struggling with forgiving, we have to let go of the idea of forgiving the sin. The sin happened and nothing we nor anyone can do will change that. There is no amount of restitution that any mortal human can make to set things right. We just turn the whole matter of forgiving that particular sin over to the Lord and focus on forgiving the sinner because we have sat where they have sat, filled with guilt and remorse and anguish of soul, wishing there was anything we could do to make it right. When one person hurts another, they get tangled up together in this barbed wire of resentment and pain and misery and guilt and shame and scorn and judgment. If we don’t forgive the person who harmed us, then we are going to be stuck wrapped together with them, always cutting ourselves on those barbs of pain and resentment. Forgiveness cuts through those wires.The one who hurt us can’t cut the wires. Only we can do this when we forgive them. Once we’ve forgiven them and cut those wires, then Christ can help us disentangle ourselves from the wires and heal all of the cuts and scrapes, both ours and theirs if they repent.But no healing can start for us or for them until we choose to forgive.