Forgiveness: an analysis

There was a discussion on Radio 4 this morning about the nature of forgiveness. It prompted me to have a go myself at analysing the concept. This post is a record of my musings, ready for mayhap a sermon one fine day.

What did Jesus mean when he told the paralysed man "Your sins are forgiven?"

Is there any difference between forgiving a sin and forgiving a person? If someone has hurt us we would say "I forgive you" in preference to "I forgive your sin." Just as a sin is intimately connected to the person who sinned and cannot exist in isolation, so forgiveness is surely intimately connected to the person who sinned. To forgive a sin (or sins) basically means to forgive a person in respect to a particular sin (or all their sins). So Jesus presumably meant the man himself was forgiven.

What about the use of that passive tense? Is this just a different way of saying that someone has forgiven the man - in which case who did the forgiving? Or is this more like an adjective describing the status of the man (or of his sins, if you prefer)?

If I were to say "your clothes are washed" I am telling you that someone has performed the action of washing to your clothes. If I were to say "your clothes are clean" I am describing their current status rather than anything which has been done to them. Does "forgiven" describe what has been done or does it describe a status?

Let's consider the idea of 'forgiven' as a status. Given that 'sin' is not a physical commodity to be measured, there is no scientific test to determine the status of a sin. What about the status of sin in the eyes of the law? Some sins (not all by any means) are a crime and carry a punishment. Forgiveness has no impact on the legal consequences of a crime. A murderer could be forgiven by the victim's family and still have to face the just sentence required by law. Indeed, forgiveness has no impact on any physical consequences of a sin. If I were to punch you in the eye, you would end up with a black eye regardless of any act of forgiveness. It is difficult to think of 'forgiven' as a status unless you believe that it describes God's view of a person and their sin. Which brings us to...

If 'forgiven' implies that someone has done the forgiving, who has done it? Logically there are a number of people who could forgive. The victim themselves; friends and family of the victim; other people with no obvious links to the victim; God. And logically, they don't all have to do the same thing. I might forgive the dastardly person who parked in my place at church, and the other church members (feeling righteous anger on my behalf) might not forgive - or vice versa.

The conclusion I'm veering towards is that forgiveness is about the attitude of someone towards a sinner, and maybe is also about the way that that someone behaves as a result of that attitude. There are many ways one might describe a forgiving attitude. Here's my attempt - to forgive someone is to refuse to allow the natural hurt and anger at their sin to get in the way of loving them as you would love any other human being.

Whether or not we forgive does have an impact on our own behaviour, and on our own well-being. It may or may not have any direct impact on the one we are forgiving. (A burglar in prison may not know or care whether his victims have forgiven him.) Whether or not God forgives presumably has a much greater impact.