The Radical Power of Forgiveness

      During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, a show on Apple TV became an unlikely hit series. Ted Lasso was born out of commercials to promote NBC’s English Premier League soccer coverage. Jason Sudeikis created the American-football-turned-English-football coach and built a world around him that included a Major League-type scenario where the football club owner wants to run the club into the ground to get back at her ex-husband. She hires Lasso as a big joke. The problem is, he’s successful. On top of that, he’s incredibly likable. Throughout the first season, you know at some point, the club owner, Rebecca, will have her scheme crumble. The truth will have to come out. When it does, how will Ted react?

      It all comes out in the penultimate episode. Rebecca is weighed down with guilt, and at the prompting of her friend, Keeley, she goes into Ted’s office and confesses everything. Here was, finally, the climax of the first season. At first, Ted looks hurt and angry. Then, he does something that shocks Rebecca and the audience. He stands, comes close to her, looks into her eyes, and says, “I forgive you.” Rebecca doesn’t understand. Forgiveness was the one thing she didn’t expect.

      Ted reasons that divorce makes people do crazy things. He was enduring his own throughout the first season. He knows what it can do to people. So, he forgives her. Shocking.

      I remember watching the episode while walking on our treadmill, and I couldn’t get over how profound the scene was. It wasn’t overly emotional. It wasn’t dragged out too long. It was just another moment in another day in the life of Ted Lasso. His heart was ready to forgive. It was prone to forgiveness. That went against the grain of every viewer's expectation. Why? Because we live in a culture whose heart is not prone to forgiveness, where forgiveness is rarely if ever granted. And if it is, it certainly doesn’t come that easily. Ted Lasso was suddenly a prophetic voice to a hurting society.

      The thing that makes Ted Lasso tick as a show is the kindness of the community. Ted is the driving force of it, bringing out the best in everyone around him. It is fitting, then, that in the most pivotal moment, Ted leads the way in cultivating the community. It could have all fallen apart, but it didn’t because Ted forgave.

      One lesson we can draw from this is that a true community cannot exist without forgiveness. The entirety of the show is filled with kindness and love amid the difficulties each character experiences. Ted is the leader of that compelling community. It would have been understandable if Ted had not forgiven, but we would never really understand him unless he forgave. When Rebecca’s sin threatened to destroy the community that had been built, Ted’s forgiveness assured it wouldn’t break. Forgiveness has that kind of power. His extension of forgiveness revealed his true heart, what he valued most. It’s the same with us. If we want true community, we need to be ready to forgive and ask for forgiveness. We cannot have any relationship without it.

      In a time when social media was filled with anger, blame, and outrage, here was a TV show capturing hearts with what is possible in this world. Shouldn’t the church be even more compelling? Shouldn’t the world expect at least the same kind of reaction from Christians?

      Forgiveness does not seem to us to be a missional strategy, but it is. It always has been. The felt forgiveness we experience from God should flow out through us to others. When we forgive rather than take offense, when our words are gracious and merciful instead of bitter and angry, when we go in for a hug when a punch is deserved, we put on display the kind of God we have.

THE PATH OF FORGIVENESS

      In a make-believe world like Ted Lasso, perhaps forgiveness comes easy. But in real life, it’s hardly so simple. That doesn’t mean, however, that it is impossible. There is a path of forgiveness that helps our hearts prepare to forgive. It flows from the forgiving heart of God. We start there. God, in Christ, forgives us of all our many trespasses against him. He does not ask for atonement from us. He accomplished that himself at the cross of Christ.

      From God’s forgiveness flows our forgiveness. Life in this world gets painful real fast, and we find ourselves faced with the need to forgive. We must forgive others as God has forgiven us, but how can we do that?

      Tim Keller wrote a book on forgiveness, and in it, he laid out the four elements of forgiveness.

      To forgive, then, is first to name the trespass truthfully as wrong and punishable, rather than merely excusing it. Second, it is to identify with the perpetrator as a fellow sinner rather than thinking how different from you he or she is. It is to will their good. Third, it is to release the wrongdoer from liability by absorbing the debt oneself rather than seeking revenge and paying them back. Finally, it is to aim for reconciliation rather than breaking off the relationship forever. If you omit any one of these four actions, you are not engaging in real forgiveness.[1]

      Corrie Ten Boom tells a story of her life that captures this idea so vividly. She lived in Nazi-occupied land during World War II. She and her family were sent to a concentration camp for hiding Jews in their home. Her father was killed. Her sister, Betsie, died in the camp. Corrie survived. One day after the war, she spoke on forgiveness at a church, and afterward, a former guard at the concentration camp came forward to greet her. Here’s what she said about that day.

It was in a church in Munich that I saw him, a balding heavyset man in a gray overcoat, a brown felt hat clutched between his hands. People were filing out of the basement room where I had just spoken, moving along the rows of wooden chairs to the door at the rear.

It was 1947 and I had come from Holland to defeated Germany with the message that God forgives.

It was the truth they needed most to hear in that bitter, bombed-out land, and I gave them my favorite mental picture. Maybe because the sea is never far from a Hollander’s mind, I liked to think that that’s where forgiven sins were thrown.

“When we confess our sins,” I said, “God casts them into the deepest ocean, gone forever.”

The solemn faces stared back at me, not quite daring to believe. There were never questions after a talk in Germany in 1947. People stood up in silence, in silence collected their wraps, in silence left the room.

And that’s when I saw him, working his way forward against the others. One moment I saw the overcoat and the brown hat; the next, a blue uniform and a visored cap with its skull and crossbones.

It came back with a rush: the huge room with its harsh overhead lights, the pathetic pile of dresses and shoes in the center of the floor, the shame of walking naked past this man. I could see my sister’s frail form ahead of me, ribs sharp beneath the parchment skin. Betsie, how thin you were!

Betsie and I had been arrested for concealing Jews in our home during the Nazi occupation of Holland; this man had been a guard at Ravensbrück concentration camp where we were sent.

Now he was in front of me, hand thrust out: “A fine message, fräulein! How good it is to know that, as you say, all our sins are at the bottom of the sea!”

And I, who had spoken so glibly of forgiveness, fumbled in my pocketbook rather than take that hand. He would not remember me, of course–how could he remember one prisoner among those thousands of women?

But I remembered him and the leather crop swinging from his belt. It was the first time since my release that I had been face to face with one of my captors and my blood seemed to freeze.

“You mentioned Ravensbrück in your talk,” he was saying. “I was a guard in there.” No, he did not remember me.

“But since that time,” he went on, “I have become a Christian. I know that God has forgiven me for the cruel things I did there, but I would like to hear it from your lips as well. Fräulein”–again the hand came out–“will you forgive me?”

And I stood there–I whose sins had every day to be forgiven–and could not. Betsie had died in that place–could he erase her slow terrible death simply for the asking?

It could not have been many seconds that he stood there, hand held out, but to me it seemed hours as I wrestled with the most difficult thing I had ever had to do.

For I had to do it–I knew that. The message that God forgives has a prior condition: that we forgive those who have injured us. “If you do not forgive men their trespasses,” Jesus says, “neither will your Father in heaven forgive your trespasses.”

I knew it not only as a commandment of God, but as a daily experience. Since the end of the war I had had a home in Holland for victims of Nazi brutality.

Those who were able to forgive their former enemies were able also to return to the outside world and rebuild their lives, no matter what the physical scars. Those who nursed their bitterness remained invalids. It was as simple and as horrible as that.

And still I stood there with the coldness clutching my heart. But forgiveness is not an emotion–I knew that too. Forgiveness is an act of the will, and the will can function regardless of the temperature of the heart.

“Jesus, help me!” I prayed silently. “I can lift my hand. I can do that much. You supply the feeling.”

And so woodenly, mechanically, I thrust my hand into the one stretched out to me. And as I did, an incredible thing took place. The current started in my shoulder, raced down my arm, sprang into our joined hands. And then this healing warmth seemed to flood my whole being, bringing tears to my eyes.

“I forgive you, brother!” I cried. “With all my heart!”

For a long moment we grasped each other’s hands, the former guard and the former prisoner. I had never known God’s love so intensely as I did then.

And having thus learned to forgive in this hardest of situations, I never again had difficulty in forgiving: I wish I could say it! I wish I could say that merciful and charitable thoughts just naturally flowed from me from then on. But they didn’t.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned at 80 years of age, it’s that I can’t store up good feelings and behavior–but only draw them fresh from God each day.[2]

Forgiveness isn’t easy for any of us. But if Corrie Ten Boom can do it under those circumstances, can’t we follow in her footsteps? If God can do it in his holiness, can his power by the Spirit not enable us to forgive far less?

Forgiveness can change the world. So let’s go and be world-changers.

[1] Tim Keller, Forgive: Why Should I and How Can I?, pages 9-10.

[2] Corrie Ten Boom, “Guideposts Classics: Corrie ten Boom on Forgiveness” https://guideposts.org/positive-living/guideposts-classics-corrie-ten-boom-forgiveness/