What did Jesus say about forgiving someone who hurt you?
Jesus taught forgiveness as something you do repeatedly rather than once, and he tied it directly to the forgiveness you are asking for yourself. When Peter suggested seven times as a generous limit, Jesus raised the number past the point of counting. He was clear that this is required, and equally clear that it does not depend on the other person deserving it.
What Jesus said
Peter asks how many times he has to forgive someone who keeps wronging him, and offers seven, which was already generous by the standards of the day. Jesus answers with a number so high the point is obviously that you stop keeping score.
Then he tells a story to explain why. A servant is forgiven an impossible debt, walks out, and immediately seizes a man who owes him a small one. The story is not subtle. The scale of what you have been released from is supposed to make what you are holding look absurd.
In the prayer he taught, the request for forgiveness is linked to forgiving others in the same sentence. He then comments on that one line specifically afterward, which he does not do for any other part of the prayer.
And on the cross, in Luke 23, he asks for the forgiveness of the people executing him while they are still doing it. Not after an apology. Not after they understood.
The hard part
He never says the other person has to apologize first, and he never says forgiving means the wrong was small. He also does not say you have to return to the relationship as though nothing happened. Forgiveness and trust are different things, and the gospels ask for the first without automatically requiring the second, which is easier to state than to live.
What this looks like today
- •Say the actual wrong to yourself plainly. Forgiveness that requires pretending it was nothing is not what he described.
- •Release the debt rather than the memory. You are not asked to forget, only to stop collecting.
- •Notice how often you are re-litigating it internally. That is the score keeping Jesus told Peter to abandon.
Matthew 18:21-35, Matthew 6:9-15, Luke 23:34, Luke 17:3-4
Go deeper: this comes up in the 40 days