Quotes about Forgiveness

Forgiveness is the new reality. It is the power of the revolution.

Forgiveness isn't weakness. It was and is a great strength.

The minute you think you're good enough for God, God says, 'I'm not interested in people who are good enough for me.' And the minute you think you're too bad for God, God says, 'It's you I've come for.

And, since the exile was the result of Israel's idolatry (no devout Jew would have contested the point, since the great prophets had made it so clear), what they needed was not just a new Passover, a new rescue from slavery to pagan tyrants. They needed forgiveness.

And all of this can be summed up in the phrase "forgiveness of sins." None of it has to do with redeemed souls leaving the world of space, time, and matter for something better. All of it has to do with the strange, unanticipated fulfillment of the hope of Israel.

The old creation lives by pride and retribution: I stand up for myself, and if someone gets in my way I try to get even. We've been there, done that, and got the scars to prove it.

Israel's sins had resulted in exile, exile had been prolonged, a new "slavery" had been the result—so that the new Passover would need to be effected through sins being forgiven. And sins are forgiven, as we have seen in the gospels and in Paul's other letters, through the representative and substitutionary death of Jesus. But in Romans Paul goes one dramatic and decisive, unique and vital step farther.

We have, alas, belittled the cross, imagining it merely as a mechanism for getting us off the hook of our own petty naughtiness or as an example of some general benevolent truth. It is much, much more.

That is why, in accordance with the Bible, the message of freedom from all "powers" (the Passover message) is directly connected to the message of "forgiveness of sins" (the message of the end of exile).

Our father in heaven, May your name be honoured 10May your kingdom come May your will be done As in heaven, so on earth. 11 Give us today the bread we need now; 12And forgive us the things we owe, As we too have forgiven what was owed to us. 13Don't bring us into the great Trial, But rescue us from evil. 14

Cornelius didn't want God (or Peter) to tolerate him. He wanted to be welcomed, forgiven, healed, transformed. And he was.

Jesus's followers themselves were to be given a new kind of task. The Great Jailer had been overpowered; now someone had to go and unlock the prison doors. Forgiveness of sins had been accomplished, robbing the idols of their power; someone had to go and announce the amnesty to "sinners" far and wide. And this had to be done by means of the new sort of power: the cross-resurrection-Spirit kind of power. The power of suffering love.