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Forgiveness
Is Forgiveness Incomplete If an Offender Rejects It?
Have you ever worked hard to forgive someone, only to be met by a blank stare?
Posted December 19, 2023 Reviewed by Michelle Quirk
Key points
- It can take time to forgive, and, when this occurs, many who forgive expect the other to be grateful.
- If the other is not grateful but resists the forgiving, this can be another forgivable situation.
- Because forgiving is an unconditional act, it is complete when the forgiver offers this mercy to the other.
It took a long time for Sofia to forgive her partner, Asher. She was annoyed with his seemingly constant criticisms of her. If they were late to a party, he would be sure to say why it was her fault. If he was tired, in his view, she obviously was contributing to this by not “pulling her weight” for the duties in the home. It seemed that, from Asher’s comments, she was always in the wrong and he was in the right.
Once these verbal digs began to slow, needless to say, Sofia was relieved. Still burning with anger, she decided to forgive him. It took several months for her to widen her view of him beyond the verbal accusations and to see that he came from a family that was highly critical of him when he was growing up. When she saw his wounds from childhood, her heart began to soften toward him. She began to see his worth as a person, which helped her to reach out compassionately toward him in forgiveness.
She even approached him one day, with a warm smile, and let him know gently that she was hurt by his criticisms, but it was behind her now and she forgave him. Asher's response was not what Sofia expected because he fell back into his accusatory mode. “I don’t really get it,” was his response. “When I was critical of you, I actually was doing this for your good,” he said with stern eyes.
Needless to say, Sofia was taken aback by this renewed verbal insensitivity toward her. She even had to forgive him for this. Yet, even with her hard work of forgiving, both for Asher's pattern of old and the new accusation, Sofia kept telling herself that all of her hard work of forgiving was not complete because Asher did not receive this gift of mercy. Until he “gets it,” she reasoned, all of her forgiveness efforts were somehow not enough. In her own mind, she did not pass the test of forgiving because of this. She felt as if she was letting herself down.
When Is the Moral Virtue of Forgiving Sufficiently Completed?
Was Sofia right to judge her own efforts of forgiving as incomplete?
One major goal of the process of forgiveness is to be reconciled with those who have hurt us by their unjust acts. If the ones who were unjust refuse to be grateful, refuse to change, and refuse to seek forgiveness and to reconcile, is the process of forgiving then incomplete? After all, if the goal is not accomplished, how complete can it be?
Here is an analogy to assist us in answering the question: If a person wishes to serve the poor and gets caught in traffic, which prevents him from going to the soup kitchen, one can hardly say that the service to the poor was accomplished. Yet, I think this analogy is not a strong one for this reason: Forgiving as a moral virtue is complete in itself when the person exercises that virtue. The exercise of that virtue is independent of others’ reactions to it. Not only did Sofia, as the forgiver, intend to perform a forgiving act but also she did so when she offered a cessation of resentment and some form of goodness to Asher. In our soup kitchen example, the well-meaning person had full intent to work in the soup kitchen but was not able to engage in the behavior of being fair to the poor. In contrast, Sofia did engage in the thinking, the feeling, and even the behavior of forgiving as she approached and talked with Asher about the injustices that she endured.
Offering Forgiveness Is Very Different From Reaching the Intended Goal of Forgiveness
All virtues are complete as virtues when exercised appropriately and do not require a specific response from another. To extend our soup-kitchen analogy, if the person shows up, cooks the soup, and stands there ready to dip the ladle into the pot, he has engaged in the moral virtue of justice even if no one shows up. In other words, he has done his part. The intended goal was not brought to completion and so we must distinguish between a completion of the virtue itself and a completion of an intended goal for the virtue.
An intended goal, at least in part of the process of forgiveness, is for the other to accept this heroic overture of mercy and then to reconcile. So, one can forgive and complete this as a moral virtue by one’s own thoughts and feelings about the other and one’s own behavior toward that person. At the same time, the other can spurn the forgiveness, in which case the intended goal of the process of forgiveness is not fulfilled.
Sofia, indeed, completed her heroic moral virtue of forgiving Asher, regardless of his response. She can go in peace knowing that she did the best that she could. It now is Asher's turn to understand the beauty of this gift and to humbly seek forgiveness so that they can reconcile on a deep level.
Distinguishing a Given Person’s “Completing” the Act of Forgiving and What Forgiveness Is on Its Highest Level
As one final point, when I use the word “complete,” I do not necessarily mean that Sofia has reached the highest essence of what forgiveness is. On its highest level, to forgive is to offer love (agape in ancient Greek, which is a love for the sake of the other, offered even when it is difficult and even painful to do so). Sofia may not be so practiced in the art of forgiving that she has this kind of love cultivated yet in her heart toward Asher. Even if her best efforts for now include committing to not harm Asher by her own negative words and also offering respect to him, her forgiveness, as far as she is able today, is complete in her case. Yes, she still can grow in the challenging moral virtue of forgiving, but she has completed her task, to the best of her ability, today.
