I think humans tend to speak in absolutes. Like this one. And we use these absolutes to help form moral clarity.
We call things right and wrong. Good and bad. These are absolute and essential. They point directions, set up tensions, and organize our way of thinking. This is what absolutes are good at.
Absolutes do a poor job of revealing whole truths, which are often complex and multi-faceted. We discover that there isn’t just one way or another or two sides to every story. Life is three-dimensional and full of so many choices and variation.
We need to keep this in mind when dealing with Jesus’s teaching on forgiveness. He just keeps adding more layers. He goes from throw yourself into the sea to God goes after the lost sheep, to here’s a three-step process to bring someone back. This isn’t just a matter of one thing or the other: he’s framing the importance of forgiveness with depth and the messiness of human interactions.
To this, Peter asks how many times he should forgive someone and it comes back to him from Jesus as essentially, you’re never going to exhaust your co-pay. So the reader can read this and go OK, we all need to forgive every time. Which is not exactly the point, but is close enough to it we won’t fuss about it.
Another thing about absolutes, however, is that they are deeply impersonal. They are rules of order, not reflections of a robust reality. So the question is not what I do in a given scenario or what we do in every scenario, but about how are we doing as a people right now given the stuff that’s happening? Like, you and I have to live here, in this place, with this set of circumstances. Is it working?
Every act of forgiveness is part of a web of interactions which invite new forgiveness. We can focus on ourselves for a moment, yes, because we do have these personal situations. Do I have to forgive the guy who cut me off in traffic? Probably. But that also isn’t what Jesus is really after either. He’s trying to get us to see the big picture. And absolutes seem like the big picture, but they aren’t.
The point is not merely to get me to forgive, but that we all learn to forgive each other. Because it is never just that one thing that one time. Because we live in three dimensions with other people who drive home where some of us have someone to tell things to and some of us don’t. And some of us have someone we rarely talk to. And all of that is far more real and messy and central to what he’s getting at.
Forgiveness is for people.