Thought for the Month November 2026

Pardon?

One of the things that used to make my heart sink when I was teaching: an email or phone call from Higher Authority informing me that a pupil, or parent, or colleague had taken offence at something that a member of my department (OK, occasionally it was me!) had said or done, and asking what I was going to do about it. My first thought was usually that there is surely enough genuine offence, name-calling, insult in the world (especially online) without going looking for more. This situation always has a feeling of failure about it. After all, cats and dogs have an inbuilt system for avoiding confrontations that might lead to fatalities; we humans have similarly evolved our own ways to deal with social conflict: saying to yourself, does it really matter? Did he/she really mean it like that? Were they perhaps having a bad day? Can’t you rise above it? Be reasonable. Be adult. Unfortunately, I was having to deal with a situation in which these mantras had not worked. And one important element in the process had got squeezed out: forgiveness. There might be forgiveness at the end, but at least one side in the dispute was giving it a hard time.

Forgiveness is a difficult concept. On the one hand we read of people who forgive terrible atrocities carried out upon them or those who they love. On the other, we see a world leader handing out pardons like meaningless raffle tickets (everyone a winner) without consideration of crime or consequences. Personally, I am glad that one of the few benefits of age is that as it becomes easier to forget, so forgiveness too is easier. This is just as well: an inability to forgive lessens us as human beings. One lesson from the peace process in Northern Ireland is that not only does there have to be compromise, but also a line must be drawn under the past; thankfully there is now a generation in that province for whom the Troubles are not even a personal memory, just anecdotes of their parents and old newsreel.

Forgiveness is writ large in the Bible, not least in the Lord’s Prayer where we are enjoined to forgive others as part of our daily response to God. I am not keen on the modern version of the Lord’s Prayer which talks about others who “sin” against us – that seems to be suggesting that we are right to be aggrieved, being holier than thou our neighbour. Much better to my mind is the word used in Matthew’s gospel, that we have to forgive others their “debts” to us, not least because this links to Jesus’ parable about the wicked servant who, when his master let him off payment of a huge debt, went out and insisted on full payment of a much smaller sum owed to him. This takes us closer to the idea of forgiveness as wiping the slate clean – thankfully, most of us when we let someone off paying do not then harbour resentment about the loss of the money. We leave that to the Inland Revenue.

Forgiveness then is also about getting on with our own lives, released from rancour. Which makes what Jesus says on the subject very difficult – the injunction to forgive someone who does you wrong seventy-seven times (or seventy times seven in some translations); to turn the other cheek so that your enemy may smite that one too. The latter always makes me think of that scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail where the Black Knight turns the other cheek several times and as a result gets all his limbs cut off. I believe this is an example of Jesus the rabbi using an argument technique familiar to Jewish thinkers, taking an argument to its logical extreme in order to expose the principles behind it: surely cancelling someone’s debt does not then mean immediately offering them another loan on the same terms? Forgiveness opens the path to reconciliation, so when we turn the other cheek there is at least a better chance than 490-1 that it will not be smitten.

Let’s turn to Italy. There was a production of Romeo and Juliet recently in our neighbourhood. This play asks the question, who or what is to blame for the tragedy? Is it knife crime? Is it underage sex? Is it parents forcing a daughter into an arranged marriage? Is it a daughter thereupon disobeying her parents? Is it defying the law of the land and the teaching of the Church? Or is it rather the grudge, the lack of forgiveness that has marred this community for so long that no one can remember the original cause? And what does this say about modern day conflicts nationally and globally?

The first (and by far the best) vicar for whom I played the organ liked to retell the story about an Italian who got so worked up at a perceived personal affront (his football team lost) that he took the family television to the top of his building and threw it down. This was at a time when televisions were full of expensive glass valves: the crash must have been stupendous. It presumably relieved his feelings. So the next time someone upsets you unforgivably, you could try the same. There is a vanishingly small chance these days that you will hit the postman.

DAVID.