Does Forgiving Mean Forgetting?

How many times have we been taught the importance of forgiving?  It’s not just a fundamental aspect of our faith; it is widely recognized as critically important in mental health care, philosophy, family relations, pretty much everything. 

But is the concept of forgiveness truly consistent across faith and secular understandings?  Personally, I’m not sure.  In the secular world, the benefits of forgiveness lead to feelings of benevolence and empathy to those who may have crossed you or have done harm to you, but they rarely lead to trust, because in that world, forgetting isn’t an aspect of forgiveness.  It makes the concept of forgiving others one-sided… and a lot easier.  It never requires one to forget the harm done to them.  It may lead to some modest release of personal anguish, but it never quite gets the job done.  It is like a person on the high dive, standing on the edge of the platform, but not being able to make that last, tiny bit of movement pushing them off into space to experience the wonder of free fall into the refreshing water.

In our faith, we are sometimes like this, too.  I recall a minister preaching on this subject years ago.  In the sermon, he suggested that forgiveness did NOT necessarily mean forgetting the transgressions against us, but it was like granting a pardon.  Sounds like a safe message and one that I might easily put into practice.  But it isn’t the whole story, because when God forgives, we don’t just get empathy and understanding, we get true forgiveness.  God forgets our sin (Jeremiah 31:34 – “For I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more.”).  God washes away our sin as if it never existed, but let’s remember, forgiveness isn’t one-sided.

True forgiveness means the sin exists no more.  It doesn’t mean filing away the wrong done to us so that it might be pulled out time after time to be rehashed.  These bad memories will surface again, growing as a cancer, damaging everyone it touches.  I have a friend who holds some deep-felt anguish towards his parents.  He has never forgiven them, and every time we talk about family, the hurt from decades ago resurfaces as if it occurred yesterday.  I’m not sure he has ever shared his hurt with his parents, and I doubt they ever asked for his forgiveness.  Time, alone, can never heal his wounds.  The healing of forgiveness isn’t just stalled, it is absent, and the man remains broken.  I believe that will be the case until he gives up being a martyr to his memories and the control, they maintain over him.   He can never free himself from the bondages of distrust, of hurt, and of anxiety. 

What makes true forgiveness so hard for us?  Perhaps we ignore that with God forgiveness means the sinner also has a role, too, that of repentance.  Without that, complete forgiveness doesn’t happen.  We struggle with that final part of forgiveness, being able to discard the memory of the wrongs done against us, because the repentance never happens.   In Luke we read “If your brother sins, rebuke him, and if he repents, forgive him, and if he sins against you seven times in the day, and turns to you seven times, saying, ‘I repent,’ you must forgive him.”  Water down forgiveness by ignoring the “rebuking” and the “repentance” and we might never get to take that leap off the high dive.  I suspect this might be why that minister minimized what forgiving really means.  I’m sure he believed what he said.  I wanted to believe it, too.  

So, can we forget?  How can our memories be erased?  Maybe not, but perhaps they can be overwritten or appended to.  Instead of dwelling on the bad, we can choose to focus on the good of a relation.  We can look at the transgression differently, not as a reflection of the entire person, but as a single failure.  My friend has loving parents that gave the best years of their lives to him, and yet his memories of the good parts have gotten lost.  How much more joy would he experience if allowed the good to overwrite the bad?  Maybe some of the bad would eventually fade away. 

Forgetting is the part that allows us to start anew.  In the Lord’s prayer, we recite “…and forgive us our trespasses (debts) as we forgive those who trespass against us (our debtors)…” 

When I pass from this life to the next, I am thankful that with my repentance, God’s forgiveness means he has also forgotten my sins.-Matt Nuth   

When we are hurt, many emotions flood our being:  anger, bitterness, hatred, a desire to get even, etc. We do not simply get hurt. More likely than not, we feel betrayed. Thus, to forget is very, very difficult for us humans.  There is no question that God tells us that a fundamental part of forgiveness is to forget, but it is hard to do. You see, we need to then work backwards through all the emotions that came into play at the time of the inciting incident. We must not only forget the incident, but we must forget the anger that welled inside us; forget the bitterness we chewed on for weeks, months, maybe years; forget the hate we harbored—if even for an instant.

We are all the same. We take some pleasure in nursing a grudge, albeit that doing so only hurts us and not the person of our vitriol. I have great experience in this.  I once harbored a grudge against someone for over ten years, even after that person had died! How stupid! All it did was eat me up inside. I became an angry person, a bitter person. To what end? Finally, I let go with the grace of God and I was instantly freed. Less than a couple of months later, I also forgot about it. I can even laugh at the incident today because it was so insignificant in the annals of time.

What that taught me is that it is impossible to forget and often to forgive without bringing God into the picture and seeking His grace. Secondly, we must then walk back through all the emotions that inundated us so we can deconstruct them and send them into oblivion. When all that baggage is disintegrated, we are free!

By Wes Brustad