When I Was Losing My Marriage, Jesus Taught Me to Forgive
Seven months pregnant with our second son, I sat at the desk in our living room, devastated by the letter I had just read. My husband didn’t want to be married anymore.
I remember standing on the patio of the home my husband had purchased with his portion of our divided assets, months after we separated. I was bouncing our eight-month-old on my hip and keeping my eye on our two-year-old while he showed me all the things he was finding at daddy’s new house. Hot tears spilled. My throat tightened. I loved this man. I wanted our family whole. But instead it was broken, and I felt my heart could literally be bleeding out of my chest.
In that moment I remember looking up at the clouds, feeling the heart of God. I prayed, “Lord! You bore so much pain to love me!” It was as though the Holy Spirit was there letting me experience just a taste of what Christ experienced on the cross when he cried, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do” (Luke 23:34).
During this painful time in my life, I began to learn what it means to forgive, and my new understanding made me love God all the more.
Forgiving Connects Us to the Weight of God’s Love
The central tenet of the Christian faith that Christ died and rose again to forgive sins and make us right with God may remain simply a theological framework until we experience the cost of forgiveness for ourselves. Once we experience some of the pain that comes with forgiving someone, the framework takes on flesh. Forgiveness is no longer an idea—it’s a feast at the table with Jesus.
Even apart from the Christian faith, the world recognizes forgiveness as a healthy principle to live out. Forgiveness is held up as good for our mental health. But forgiveness is more than a good idea. Forgiveness connects us to God through the weight and beauty of his love demonstrated for us in Christ. When we experience the pain that comes with forgiving we get a taste of Jesus’s sacrifice for us, which deepens our understanding of our Savior’s love for us.
Jesus told the religious folks who looked down on the woman worshiping Jesus with her tears and hair at his feet, “Therefore I tell you, her sins, which are many, are forgiven—for she loved much. But he who is forgiven little, loves little” (Luke 7:47). To paraphrase this another way, Jesus is saying that the one who is forgiven much, loves much. This woman was experiencing being forgiven much by Jesus, and her love for him reflected this. But I wonder if Jesus was also saying, “If you want to enter into this kind of worshipful, loving relationship with me, like this woman, you’re going to have to experience the pain of forgiving another.”
The Cruciform Tension of Forgiveness
Suffering when someone hurts you doesn’t save you or anyone else. But walking through this suffering with Jesus brings a miraculous change in our lives because of the blood of Christ which does save us. It’s the love of Christ that compels us to forgive others. As we look at Jesus and what he has done at the cross—bearing our unjust acts and wicked thoughts—his love grows in us and empowers us to forgive rather than begrudge.
When looking to Jesus, we find ourselves not wanting to make the other person pay. We also find the strength to acknowledge our pain rather than acting like everything’s fine. We don’t dismiss the wickedness that was done, but rather we begin wanting God to have mercy on the person who’s hurt us.
We see this in the story of Joseph and his brothers. After they were reunited with Joseph and he revealed himself as the powerful ruler who had rescued them from famine, Joseph’s brothers feared his retaliation. Joseph’s response expels the idea that forgiveness winks at injustice:
But Joseph said to them, “Don’t be afraid. Am I in the place of God? You planned evil against me; God planned it for good to bring about the present result—the survival of many people. Therefore don’t be afraid. I will take care of you and your children.” And he comforted them and spoke kindly to them.” (Gen. 50:19–21 CSB)
Forgiving, through the power of Christ, stretches you out in a cruciform tension of desiring to do good to the one who has wounded you, while at the same time not shrinking away from calling the evil they have done exactly what it is—evil.
God Suffered to Forgive
We often think of God’s forgiveness as expected. God is big, so it should be no big deal for him to forgive. But the scriptures show us something different.
There’s blood splattered all over the book of Leviticus. Blood from sacrificed animals flowed out upon Aaron and his descendants and covered the entrance of the tent where people met with God. Entering into a relationship with God is bloody. Something has to die. And in Christ we see the blood of God spilled for our forgiveness. Jesus said, “This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins” (Matt. 26:28). Paul said, “In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses” (Eph. 1:7). And the author of Hebrews writes, “Without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sins” (Heb. 9:22).
To bleed is to suffer. To hurt. To be drained of life. God knew this kind of suffering. Our big, strong God who created the universe.
The whole sacrificial system is foreign to the modern western mind. We don’t slaughter goats to enter church on Sunday. Like the book of Hebrews says, we have not experienced the shedding of blood in our struggle against sin in this life (Heb. 12:4). But as I walked through the pain of my husband leaving our marriage, I began to taste what Christ experienced when he bore in his body every way in which I have betrayed God. I began to understand that part of forgiveness means bearing the pain the other person deserves to bear.
God bore the pain we deserve to bear.
Without the Spirit, We Shrink from Forgiveness
Jesus said it’s essential to our faith that we forgive others without counting how many times we’ve done so. Peter was mortified by Jesus’s impossible call to forgive someone seventy times seven because forgiveness is hard (Matt. 18:21–22).
To forgive someone who has betrayed your trust, taken from you, or hurt you with their words or actions, isn’t instinctual. Apart from the Spirit of Christ, we shrink away from forgiving. We bend towards protecting ourselves with bitterness, vengeance, or enabling. But to forgive another is to love them. And to love anyone, as C. S. Lewis said in The Four Loves, is to have your heart wrung and broken.
When my husband told me he wanted out of our marriage while I was weeks away from giving birth to our second son, bitterness stood at the door ready to take me in her arms and poison me and anyone I rubbed against. Vengeance visited my thoughts daily, enticing me to use the power I had to make my husband pay. And fear tried to deceive me into enabling my husband by making excuses for him and blaming myself. And I’d be lying if I said these three insidious visitors don’t come knocking to this day.
Forgiveness Is not Reconciliation
That was nearly nineteen years ago, and by the grace of God, my husband and I have reconciled and are entering our thirtieth year of marriage. But forgiving my husband did not guarantee reconciliation.
Forgiveness is not reconciliation. It takes one to forgive. It takes two to reconcile.
When we set out to forgive others in obedience to Jesus, we aren’t promised those we forgive will respond rightly. We may forgive and keep our distance from the person who wounded us. There were many days while my husband and I were on our way to divorce when I had to ask God, “How am I to love this man like Jesus has loved me when this divorce is final? How am I supposed to forgive him and treat him with undeserved kindness when I have to drop off our boys at his house?”
I think we easily confuse this aspect of forgiveness. Rachel Denhollander set a clear example of what it looks like to extend forgiveness without a reconciled relationship in her victim statement at the trial of Larry Nasser.
Denhollander exposed the idea that forgiveness comes from doing good to make up for wrongs done. Yet she points her perpetrator to his only hope. “Should you ever reach the point of truly facing what you have done, the guilt will be crushing. And that is what makes the gospel of Christ so sweet. Because it extends grace and hope and mercy where none should be found.”
In this situation, a very necessary boundary remained in place, and yet Rachel bore the pain that comes with extending forgiveness without the hope of a reconciled relationship. “I pray you experience the soul crushing weight of guilt so you may someday experience true repentance and true forgiveness from God, which you need far more than forgiveness from me—though I extend that to you as well.” (You can read the full statement here.)
Only Jesus can restore the broken relationship between a person and God. Although reconciliation is a ministry all Christians are called to, we cannot grant faith to anyone. As ambassadors of Christ, we can hold out the arms of forgiveness and bear the pain that comes with entrusting that person to God, choosing to demonstrate love even to our enemies.
While walking through those damaged years in my marriage, I learned to turn away from bitterness and vengeance and instead bear the pain with a tender heart. Entrusting the Lord with all my rightful anger and fear cleared a path between my husband and me. By God’s grace, my husband turned towards repairing our relationship on that path. And I’m so glad he did. But even if he never did, I would still have tasted the goodness of the Lord in learning to forgive.
Drink from the Cup and It Will Overflow with Worship
The Holy Spirit walked me through that dark time, helping me to forgive, teaching me what forgiveness means, and causing my affection for God to explode. I have begun to understand God’s love, which, as Ephesians 3:19 says, is beyond knowing and must be experienced.
The holy, pure Creator of the universe, who is love and life, bore the shame and loss that comes with offering forgiveness to ungrateful and undeserving sinners. I didn’t experience a response of wonder to that truth until I drank from the same cup. And then my cup began to overflow and I began to worship like I never have before.
Sheila Dougal lives in the low deserts of Arizona with her husband and sons. Her poetry and essays can be found at Fathom Mag, Clayjar Review, The Gospel Coalition, Risen Motherhood, The Joyful Life Magazine, and other publications. You can also find her at her blog, Cultivating Faithfulness, Twitter, Instagram and Facebook.