No Future Without Forgiveness

by Desmond Tutu

Forgiving means abandoning your right to pay back the perpetrator in his own coin, but it is a loss that liberates the victim.

Does the victim depend on the culprit’s contrition and confession as the precondition for being able to forgive? There is no question that, of course, such a confession is a very great help to the one who wants to forgive, but it is not absolutely indispensable. Jesus did not wait until those who were nailing him to the cross had asked for forgiveness. He was ready, as they drove in the nails, to pray to his Father to forgive them and he even provided an excuse for what they were doing. If the victim could forgive only when the culprit confessed, then the victim would

be locked into the culprit’s whim, locked into victimhood, whatever her own attitude or intention. That would be palpably unjust.