Journey Toward Justice 28

This chapter is titled 'Justice, Forgiveness and Punishment'. This is a chapter where the ideas expressed here are not entirely new and yet must be stressed and restated again and again across time and space is there. Without repentance and forgiveness, reconciliation cannot take place in a broken world. With repentance, forgiveness is possible. Of course, forgiveness is not always easy specially when one has faced deliberate and systematic injustice over a long period of time. For example, a person who has been sent to Siberia with all his family members and had to see one member after another dying over the years will find it very difficult to forgive Stalin even when, say, Stalin apologised. Yet forgiveness is good for the soul when the culprit has repented of his wrongdoings. 

Can we forgive someone who refuses to say sorry? No. But didn't Jesus forgive the soldiers on the cross who did not say that they were sorry? Well, Jesus 'forgave' those soldiers because they did not know what they were doing. But is wronging someone without knowing that it was actually wronging them right to be called wronging someone? Yes and no. In a way it is wronging the victim because you were harming the victim even when you did not know that you were wronging him. But in a way it is not wronging him because it was a mistake. And conceptually one has to make a distinction between wronging someone knowingly and wronging someone unknowingly. Wronging someone knowingly is 'wronger' than wronging someone unknowingly. Jesus was using 'forgive' for the latter kind. And this Greek word that Jesus used for this latter kind may be translated as 'let go', not bearing resentment against those who unknowingly harmed him. 

So conceptually, can we forgive someone who harmed us knowingly and who refused to apologize? No. But can we forgive/let go of someone who harmed us unknowingly and who therefore did not apologize? Yes.