The Inexcusable Bit: What Forgiveness Really Means

Why did the Creed-makers bother to plant this line in our mouths: “I believe in the forgiveness of sins”? Isn’t that obvious—like saying, “I believe water is wet”?

Not quite.

Belief here doesn’t mean “I agree in theory.” It means “I live as if it’s true.”
And forgiveness doesn’t mean “brushing it off.” It means “the debt is real, and I release it.”
An excuse says: “It wasn’t really my fault.”
Forgiveness says: “It was my fault—and we can be reconciled.”

That’s why the clause needs repeating. It’s the sort of truth that tarnishes fast unless you keep polishing it.

Here’s the hard edge of it: we say God forgives sins—and we also say He won’t forgive us unless we forgive others. That isn’t a side note or a special case. It’s in the Lord’s Prayer, and Jesus states it plainly: if you don’t forgive, you won’t be forgiven. No footnotes. No “unless it was really bad.” No “unless they did it again.”

And that’s where we start to squirm. Because we often make the same mistake in two directions—first with God, then with our neighbor.

With God: We Ask for Excuses, Not Forgiveness
When I think I’m asking God to forgive me, I’m often trying—quietly, politely—to get Him to say, “Oh, you couldn’t help it. You didn’t mean it. You’re not really to blame.”

But if I’m not really to blame, then there’s nothing to forgive. Forgiveness only exists where guilt exists. In that sense, excusing and forgiving are almost opposites.

Of course real life mixes them. Some of what I call “my sin” turns out to be weakness, ignorance, fear, pressure—things that lessen blame. That part can be excused. But there’s usually a remainder: the part I chose, the part that is simply wrong. That part can’t be excused. And that is the part that needs forgiveness.

Yet that’s the part I least want to bring to God. I’d rather arrive with a brief for the defense.

Two remedies help.
  • First: remember God already knows every genuine extenuating circumstance better than you do. If there’s anything that truly reduces guilt, He won’t miss it. You don’t need to sell Him on your case. Bring Him what’s actually diseased—the inexcusable bit. Going to confession with a stack of explanations is like visiting a doctor and spending ten minutes proving your elbow is fine instead of showing him the broken arm.
  • Second: actually believe forgiveness is real. Much of our excuse-making comes from a secret fear that God will only take us back if we can make ourselves look reasonable. But that’s not forgiveness; that’s a negotiation.
Real forgiveness is sterner and kinder: it looks straight at the sin—ugly, petty, mean, malicious—and still says, “Come home. We can be reconciled.” That's what God offers when we ask.

With Others: We Refuse Excuses, and We Confuse Forgiveness with Pretending
Now flip it. When it comes to forgiving other people, we often think “forgive” means “say it wasn’t really wrong.”

So we protest: “But he did cheat me.” “She did break her promise.” “He did bully me.”
Exactly. That’s what forgiveness addresses. If there’s no real wrong, there’s nothing to forgive.

Forgiving doesn’t mean you have to trust them with the next promise. It does mean you must fight for something far harder: the death of resentment—no cherishing the wish to shame them, hurt them, “pay them back,” or enjoy their fall.

Here’s the key distinction:
  • With my sins, I’m too quick to accept my excuses.
  • With their sins against me, I’m too slow to accept theirs.
It’s a safe bet my excuses are weaker than I think, and their excuses are stronger than I think. So fairness says: start by looking for what might lessen their blame. But even if the person is fully guilty, forgiveness still begins. And even if 99% of what they did can be explained by pressure, ignorance, or pain, forgiveness starts with the remaining 1%—the part that is truly culpable.

Excusing what can honestly be excused isn’t Christian charity. It’s basic justice.
Christianity goes further: it forgives what has no excuse. Why? Because God forgave the inexcusable in me.

That’s the scandal. And it’s hard.

Sometimes it’s not hardest to forgive one spectacular betrayal. Sometimes it’s harder to forgive the small, daily cuts—the endless provocations, the same selfish habit, the same cutting remark, the same manipulation, the same coldness, again and again. The bossy sibling. The detached spouse. The deceitful child. The coworker who keeps taking credit. The person who never apologizes.

How do you do that?

By remembering where you stand when you say, night after night: “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.” Those words aren’t poetry. They’re a condition. We’re offered mercy on no other terms. To refuse to forgive is to refuse God’s mercy for ourselves. There are no hints of exceptions, because God means what He says.
# # #
Tonight, name one person you’re still “excusing yourself” about—and one person you’re still “charging interest” to. Then pray one honest sentence: “Lord, I bring You the inexcusable part. And I release the inexcusable part in them.” Then take one small act that matches it: drop one revenge-thought you’ve been rehearsing.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Smoke & Spirits: A Fellowship of Beggars

 Custodians of the Flame I Discipleship isn't a solitary march toward some austere perfection. It's a companionship, a shared path where the disciple learns not only from the Master but also from the fragile presence of others who walk beside him. Communion, in this sense, isn't merely a sacramental gesture confined to the altar; it's the living tissue of discipleship itself, the way our lives are bound together in Christ. And stewardship—the often narrowed word that people reduce to the management of money or property—emerges here as nothing less than the vigilance required to safeguard this communion. The disciple isn't an owner but a witness. He doesn’t possess Christ; he's possessed by Him. To follow Christ is to be dispossessed of the illusion of autonomy, to live in a world that's no longer “mine” but “ours.” In this, stewardship isn't bookkeeping, but custodianship of grace. The disciple holds vigil over a reality he cannot produce, only receive:...
Read more

Musings after Archbishop Sample’s 2025 Easter Vigil Homily

Each year, the Easter Vigil offers the Church a cosmic interruption. It's the night in which time cracks open and eternity pours through. And this year, Archbishop Sample’s homily reminded us—quietly but unmistakably—that the Resurrection is not a metaphor. It's a rupture. A healing. A mission. We're not permitted to be ungrateful for the miracle of existence. The Most Important Night—Yet the Most Overlooked The Easter Vigil is the crown jewel of Christian liturgy. But in our time, its brilliance is hidden not by persecution, but by indifference. It begins late. It runs long. It is ritual-heavy and slow. For many, it's exhausting. Yet perhaps its very inconvenience is the beginning of its sanctity. In an age that worships efficiency and comfort, the Easter Vigil stands as a silent protest. It doesn't entertain. It doesn't flatter our schedules. It waits. It builds. It dares to make us linger at the edge of the tomb. Its strangeness isn't a liabi...
Read more

Parish Life in a World Without Windows

From Vigil-scale Theology to Parish-scale Practice - or - On Archbishop Sample's Call for Mission Renewal Mission Renewal is simply the parish deciding to live as if the Resurrection is real —not a slogan . If the Easter Vigil is the night when God cracks time open, Mission Renewal is the work of keeping the windows open on Monday. What follows are concrete correctives—habits that keep grace from being quarantined. Call it the Vigil, operationalized. Faith shrinks when treated as a department. It becomes one line among budgets, a committee slot like landscaping or youth sports. But the parish is not a nonprofit with chaplains—it is the Body gathered to meet God. Every choice should bend to that end: does this deepen our encounter with the living God? Finance, bricks, and outreach exist only to make the house hospitable to Him. Cut faith down to a program, and the soul of the parish withers. Metrics fail when cut off from mystery. We count heads, dollars, hours—and call it success...
Read more

Grace Reaches for a Towel

We keep pretending grace is a scented cloud, a mood, a private glow. But in practice it looks like a woman at the market who gives the better peach to a stranger and keeps the bruised one for herself, because love prefers to pay in flesh. It looks like the last armful of firewood hauled across the yard to a neighbor’s cold stove, and a room thawing into rough laughter. Grace isn’t rare; we’re stingy. What we call “encounters with God” nearly always begin with grit in the shoe. A quarrel with the boy, the bill you can’t pay, the door that won’t latch in the rain. We rub our sore heel and cuss, and there He is between the cuss and the breath, asking if we’ll kneel while standing in the puddle. Heaven loves a splinter; it makes a way through the skin (2 Corinthians 12:7). Sometimes our parishes pretend otherwise, polishing announcements like cutlery, confusing neatness with holiness. Still, the Lord keeps slipping past our committees by the sacristy drain, where the janitor bends over rus...
Read more

Challenging "Mission Renewal" II

The worst doesn’t stay in the past; time isn’t a landfill where we bury filth and call it gone. It seeps into vows, into work, into the way a hand hesitates before touching another hand. It teaches the body to mistrust itself, the memory to bite like a dog that was beaten too long. Some carry a secret winter inside them, years after the blows stopped, long after the door was changed and the voice silenced. They laugh on schedule, they perform competence like a liturgy, and still the hour comes—always the same hour—when the old room opens and the light dies. That’s what's wearing on the adult: not melodrama, but attrition. The soul eroded grain by grain till it fits precisely inside the lie it was taught. Now if “Mission Renewal” won’t kneel here—before this particular hell where innocence was used as kindling—it’s a cowardly gospel. Healing can’t be a slogan. It has to be a descent. It has to look the history in the face and refuse to blink. Justice must be served in daylight, and ...
Read more

The Back Door Problem: Conversions Are Rising—Why Retention Must Be Our Priority

Thoughts on The Great Catholic Church Reconfiguration The trouble with “the numbers” isn’t that they lie; it's that we ask them to become prophets. In the above-linked analysis, the Church in North America appears to be simultaneously collapsing and converting—parishes closing while OCIA lines lengthen; vocations thinning while Easter Vigil photos look like springtime. The impatient mind resolves this contradiction by selecting whichever statistic flatters its mood: revival! or ruin! But reality isn’t obliged to be emotionally coherent. The present context isn't a slogan; it's a landscape—uneven, wind-scoured, and full of ridges that distort our sense of distance. Staying Grounded: The Asceticism of Refusing “Cherry-picked” Consolation To remain grounded today is to practice a kind of intellectual humility that feels, at first, like deprivation. We're tempted to make one bright number a sacrament and one dark number an excommunication. Yet the report’s “radical reconf...
Read more

Augustine, Doubt, and Pastoral Care

"Everyone who knows that he is in doubt about something, knows a truth, and in regard to this that he knows he is certain. Therefore he is certain about a truth. Consequently everyone who doubts if there be a truth, has in himself a true thing on which he does not doubt; nor is there any true thing which is not true by truth. Consequently whoever for whatever reason can doubt, ought not to doubt that there is truth."—St. Augustine, De vera religione liber unus # # # Augustine’s little syllogism about doubt is less a trap for skeptics than a candle for the night within us. The moment I notice that I doubt, I meet a truth that doesn’t waver with my wavering: I’m doubting. That insight, that small, self-evident light, is already an encounter with something more than myself, for I didn’t mint its certainty; I discovered it. Doubt, therefore, becomes a strangely Eucharistic phenomenon: it offers, in the very poverty of not-knowing, a real contact with the Bread of truth. What is t...
Read more