Family Discipleship - Forgiving Others - Head

by Dave Rueter on October 13, 2021

Forgiving Others

Gracious and forgiving of the faults and wrongs of family members.


Head

A way to visualize this process of both receiving and sharing forgiveness can be to imaging a multi-tiered water fountain like you might have in your backyard or see in a garden. The water flows into the top tier and when that tier fills it pours into the next tier. When that tier fills, the water cascades into the next tier, then the next tier, and then the next tier, and so on from the top of the fountain to the bottom.

Looking at forgiving others this way, helps our children to get their heads around the relational transactions taking place. Forgiveness begins with God. He initiates and teaches us how to forgive. Without our Lord’s initiation of forgiveness, we would lack a model from which to both experience forgiveness and learn how to forgive others.  As our children learn through the experience of their own forgiveness, they learn the joy and grow in their desire to share that joy with others.

Initially, it is easier to extend forgiveness to those closest to us. We know them and have the strongest relationships with them. When our children are able to experience the joy shared between family members when forgiveness is extended and relationships are restored, they are taking another step in their understanding of how forgiveness works in the maintaining and restoration of relationships generally.

The next natural step is to help walk our children through this same process with their friends. As noted above, our children are going to experience the hurt of disappointment in their friendships. A part of the maturing process is learning how to let go of hurt and extend forgiveness. As our children are able to gain experience in forgiving their friends, they gain a deeper understanding of forgiveness through the restoration of their friendships.

Flowing from this step, we are then able to encourage our children to learn and experience the forgiveness of our neighbors. In this context, we are not merely talking about our next-door neighbors, though they are included. When we consider the context of the parable we know as the Good Samaritan, we begin to come to understand God’s view of what it means to care for our neighbor. In the setup for the parable, Jesus is asked by a lawyer what he needs to do in order to inherit eternal life. What is interesting, but way too often be overlooked, is the very phrasing of the question. Do we really need to do anything in order to inherit something? Typically, an inheritance is ours by virtue of who we are in relationship to the one from whom we are to inherit something. The very phrasing of the question points to its answer, but an answer that we shall see that the lawyer was truly not aware of.

Jesus’ reply summarizes God’s law in the love of the Lord our God and the love of our neighbor. Amazingly, the lawyer responds with an additional question, inquiring who his neighbor is? It would seem that this lawyer was seeking to limit who he was responsible to love in order to secure his eternal inheritance. This sets up the telling of the parable by Jesus.

A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and he fell among robbers, who stripped him and beat him and departed, leaving him half dead. Now by chance, a priest was going down that road, and when he saw him he passed by on the other side. So likewise a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. But a Samaritan, as he journeyed, came to where he was, and when he saw him, he had compassion. He went to him and bound up his wounds, pouring on oil and wine. Then he set him on his own animal and brought him to an inn and took care of him. And the next day he took out two denarii and gave them to the innkeeper, saying, ‘Take care of him, and whatever more you spend, I will repay you when I come back.’ (Luke 10:30-35)

Once the telling of the parable is over, Jesus turns back to the lawyer to ask him who he believed was the neighbor in this story. Tellingly, the lawyer is unwilling to speak the answer, unwilling to identify the neighbor as the Samaritan. Instead, he simply answers that “The one who showed him mercy” (Luke 10:37a) was the neighbor. Jesus concluded this encounter in Luke 10:37b by instructing the lawyer to “Go and do likewise.”

The implication for our purposes is clear. First, we cannot limit our neighbors to those who are socially acceptable to love. The context in which Jesus told this parable was such that the lawyer, a good Jew, was uncomfortable identifying the neighbor as the Samaritan due to the deep cultural divide between Jews and Samaritans. Second, when we work with our children to understand forgiving others, we need to apply this broad understanding of one’s neighbor in the process. Loving our neighbor as ourselves as noted in Luke 10:27, includes extending forgiveness to all those who could be considered our neighbor, and that list is long.

Now comes the more challenging part. In Matthew 5, Jesus explores what it means to love your enemies. This can push us past the love and forgiveness of neighbors, even neighbors who we might otherwise be tempted to culturally think less of. An enemy may well be a former friend who has so fractured our past friendship that we can no longer bring ourselves to consider a full restoration to friendship. It is fair in some circumstances to allow for the reality that some hurts might not be overcome fully enough for relational restoration to take place. Yet, to fully understand forgiving others, we need to understand what it means to forgive even our enemies.

Notice that this time, I did not focus this on your child quite yet. It is my belief that this challenge needs to take shape in our own understanding as parents first. If we are not able to gain our own understanding of what it means to forgive an enemy, we are not likely to be able to walk our children through that learning process. However, if we have been able to find a way to gain that understanding and we have forgiven even our enemies, we can truthfully sympathize with our children as they protest the difficulty of such an act. For this is no simple feat. The hurt that we might carry, causes us to desire to hold on, as we have noted previously. But if we and through our learning our children are able to gain an understanding of the freedom that we are able to grant to both our enemy and ourselves when we extend to them forgiveness, they will have truly learning what it means to forgive others.

Previous Page