Forgiveness is an issue that crops up every day, one way or another: sometimes we are asking for it, sometimes we’re giving it. Often the things that need forgiving are tiny, and the forgiveness acts as an oil which maintains our relationships with the people around us. Occasionally there are big wrongs that need forgiving, which is deeply challenging. To fully forgive someone may be a work of many years.

Forgiveness is something that Jesus felt very strongly about. At the heart of his teaching is the message that God longs to forgive us for anything and everything that blocks our relationship with him; he knows we are far from perfect and is quick to forgive us, if only we are prepared to acknowledge that we need it. But this encouraging message comes with a sharp challenge: we must also be forgiving, because if we wont forgive others, we can't be forgiven.

Underneath all this, at times, the hardest part of forgiveness is forgiving ourselves. It is sometimes the case that God is willing to forgive us, that other people are willing to forgive us, but we are unable to forgive ourselves. So we become stuck in self-loathing over things that God considers quite forgivable, and that other people are prepared to accept about us.

So what is forgiveness? Forgiveness is a resolution to continue with a relationship even though it has been damaged. This is how God forgives us. Another way of looking at it is that to forgive someone is to deny ourselves the right to any form of vengeance (including the right to tell other people what that person has done to us). In both cases, forgiveness is not a feeling but a way of behaving. God behaves to us as if we hadn’t wronged him, even though we have. The cliché, ‘forgive & forget’ does not come from the Bible. We can’t make ourselves forget a hurt, but we can reach out across our pain and restore a valuable relationship.

Sometimes we muddle up ‘forgiveness’ with a quest for moral reform, making forgiveness conditional on guarantees that ‘it’ will never happen again. Jesus never did that. When he rescued an adulterous woman from being stoned to death, he advised her to reform her ways, but he did not make it a condition of her salvation. For Jesus, forgiveness was about loving sinners, not reforming them.

This month’s theme will demand of us that we are honest with ourselves and with one another. It is not about vague theory, it is about life-enhancing experience.