Living in the Light of What Is Possible

A Difficult Teaching

"If you don't learn how to forgive, your Father in heaven will not forgive you."

This line from Jesus might be one of the most difficult teachings in the New Testament. It hits hard. It sounds transactional. As if God's welcome, God's grace, even God's love might depend on our ability to be wise enough, mature enough, or healthy enough to forgive someone else. But that doesn’t seem to align with the story Jesus is telling, does it?

What if this isn't about transaction at all? What if it's about something deeper—something imaginative and formative?

Shaping Our Imaginations

Jesus offers this line in his commentary on the Lord's Prayer, a prayer that is anything but transactional. In fact, the entire prayer points us toward a world that is not yet fully realized: a shared family, a kingdom that is still arriving, daily bread for all, unrelenting forgiveness, and a desire aligned with goodness.

This means that forgiveness isn’t about earning our place in some divine economy. It’s about participating in the kind of world Jesus invites us to help bring into being—a world marked by healing and grace.

The Politics of Forgiveness

Theologian Stanley Hauerwas once wrote (paraphrased here), "To learn to have our sins forgiven—to learn that we are sinners needing forgiveness—is in itself to become part of the kingdom of God." But if we never learn to extend forgiveness in return, how can we genuinely be part of that new reality Jesus is shaping?

Forgiveness isn’t a crude exchange or a bargain. It is an act of resistance against the politics of pain. The world has taught us that the way to overcome harm is to pass it on—to make someone else suffer for what we've endured. But it doesn’t work. More pain doesn’t heal anyone.

Learning to Let Go

To be forgiven is to sit with the weight of our wounds and wrongs, to grieve them, to learn from them, and to let them go—not for someone else's sake, but for our own healing. Not because God withholds forgiveness, but because as long as we hold on to our hurt, we will struggle to know ourselves as already and entirely forgiven.

God isn’t in the business of passing pain around. God isn’t about perpetuating cycles of violence or vengeance. The cross is where God absorbs all of it—every ounce of suffering, including yours—and then says, "Come, live in the world that follows from this."

Moving Forward Together

So if we want to know ourselves as forgiven, if we want to glimpse a future where grace reigns, then we begin, however slowly and awkwardly, to forgive. Not because we must, but because it is good. Because it is freeing. Because it is the only way to live in the light of what is possible.