How Can We Forgive People Whose Crimes Are This Bad?

Have a good look at this group of men above. This is the convicted gang who raped and abused babies, toddlers and children under five in attacks that were then streamed on the Internet for other paedophiles to watch.

There’s no doubt that this is some of the most repulsive and wicked behaviour imaginable. Just thinking about it makes one go through the predictable gamut of emotions: anger, disgust, outrage, sadness and hate.

As expected, the mass reaction to this on social media has been an outpouring of vilification, expletives and calls for these ‘horrible scummers to be tortured slowly until they die’. As a human being I have no trouble seeing the appeal to these criminals getting their just deserts. With such horrific crimes, it’s easy to feel an ‘eye for an eye’ mentality well up inside of us.

The Christian faith encourages a radically different response – one that, it has to be said, causes lots of discomfiture. We Christians are instructed not to be overcome by evil, but to overcome evil with good. As St Paul says in Ephesians, “Let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamour and slander be put away from you, along with all malice. Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you”. In saying this, St Paul is echoing Christ’s commandment that in loving God we are compelled to love and pray for our enemies.

I can’t deny that, in cases like the above, it is difficult to write an apologia calling for these people to be shown love, grace and forgiveness. Many of you will think their crimes are so heinous that they are beyond forgiveness; many others will insist that it’s not for us to forgive, as only victims and people personally affected by it can really do the forgiving. Others, perhaps even many Christians, will be adamant that forgiveness can only take place when the perpetrators are truly sorry for what they’ve done. In all likelihood, many of you reading this will assert that even sorrow isn’t enough for these wretched individuals to be forgiven.

For all of the above views I have sympathy. Furthermore, I can’t be in the least bit sure that I will be able to justify your forgiving the perpetrators of those awful crimes. But I’ll have a try – not in a way that demands you are compelled to forgive them, but simply in a way that tries to explain why I think the God we see in Jesus endorses our forgiveness.

The condition under which we Christians forgive others is on the basis that we have all been forgiven by God. As much as it punctures our ego to hear this, in the eyes of God we are loved no more or no less than the men you see in the article above. In the eyes of human beings it is easy to see that most of us are not anything like as dangerous and perverted as them. But through God's eyes there is a brokenness to being human that can only be fixed by the power of God's forgiveness - forgiveness that comes from the fact that God is love and keeps no record of our wrongs. Christ forgave all those who beat Him to within an inch of His life and then finally killed Him on the cross - and He impels us to mirror that response. In doing so it will do us little good if we pick and choose who qualifies for that forgiveness and who doesn't.

At a human level every single one of us can come up with some kind of personal gradation for our ability to forgive. Tony can forgive burglary and vandalism, but not murder. Diane can forgive murder, but not rape. For Jessica, most things are forgivable, including rape, but she just won't extend that forgiveness as far as Hitler and Stalin. Christ encourages us to throw away all our attempts at gradation and forgive everyone - not just for the benefits it confers on us, but for the benefit it confers on the world. The challenge that comes with that - and I warn you it's a big challenge - is twofold.

In the first place, it's a challenge of forgiveness on the basis that in terms of human brokenness we are all capable of just about any act of evil given the wrong circumstances (for more on this see my blog posts here and here) - and that in relation to God's awesomeness none of us can claim to be any better than anyone else. That is to say, the best of us and the worst of us are all equally forgiven sinners benefiting from the love and grace of Christ on the cross. Any attempt to set ourselves apart from those we consider the worst people in the world is simply to construct an illusory version of ourselves that is easily shown to be deceptive the moment we start to examine what lies unchecked beneath the outward personality we reveal to others.

In the second place, and this is really a development of the first point - the reason awful people can be forgiven is because love and grace are the main qualities that transform us from our awful state to a better one - just as an absence of love and grace is so often the main catalyst for turning people bad. Nobody is born bad - they are made bad; by the weaknesses and brokenness of other humans, and by their own failings. Picture those men above as new-born babies. You would not be calling for those babies to be 'tortured slowly until they die’.

The babies are only tiny humans awaiting the mix of goodness and badness that is going to befall them. All babies will grow up to sin, but equally, like us, they will all grow up to be forgiven sinners. Due to an absence of the qualities that lead to goodness, some of those forgiven sinners will go on to be pretty wretched adults. But the antidote to their wretchedness is never going to be to respond with even more of a lack of goodness - it is only by showing them love and grace that they can see how much of a solecism their wretchedness is from human goodness.

Perhaps the key to this difficult issue is the realisation that as we get older and wiser we see more clearly how people's selfishness, thoughtlessness, perversions, and, let's be frank, down right wickedness that we observe on the outside is down to the subterranean hurts, fears, guilt, weaknesses and insecurities that lurk beneath on the inside. It's the historical legacy of pain that we never get to see. Think about the things you've done in life that make you most ashamed. I'll wager that when you did those things you were not at your best. You were fighting inner battles that the rest of the world never got to see. And if anyone was going to judge you on those actions, wouldn't you rather that they had access to the whole picture - the picture that can add proper extenuation to the guilt and shame you were compelled to face?

As it happens, this is the access to you that God has - but not only the full access to the inner self, He also knows all the extenuations and the indictments of which your inner self is not even aware. If with this omnipotence His decision is to forgive us all our sins, and suffer and die for us as a man in order that that forgiveness can be tangible to everyone who will ever live, it's a pretty good bet that when He tells us to forgive everyone, we are actually hearing perfect advice. Instructions from God are the only times that we ever do get perfect advice.

My hunch is that those awful men in the above picture would have turned out very different if they had been shown more love when they were growing up. Forgiving them doesn't for one second trivialise the absolutely disgraceful things they have done, it simply strives to avoid dehumanising them in the way that they have dehumanised their victims and been dehumanised by those who let them down.

It’s no use insisting – as one might be tempted to insist – that many of us have been hurt and damaged by others but we don’t go on to be paedophiles. For it is no doubt the fear, pride, insecurity and ignorance that prevents them from responding as you or I might that necessitates our love and grace towards them – it is the medicine of agape that counteracts the poison of their evil.