Jesus said, ‘Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.’

Luke 23:34

Even at Jesus’s most painful moment of his human life—experiencing ultimate suffering and immense physical pain—he chose forgiveness over revenge. At the time of his crucifixion, soldiers, religious leaders, and crowd members participated in the act of punishing Jesus. Despite their lack of awareness that He was the Son of God, the callousness of the executioners proved their spiritual darkness. Yet Jesus chose to forgive—because what he saw wasn’t just cruelty, but rather, spiritual blindness.

Throughout our lives, we will encounter people who trigger us, harm us deeply, treat us poorly, cause traumatic wounds, or reopen wounds we thought had healed. In those moments, it is easy to place blame on them—we tell ourselves that they’re callous, selfish, or toxic, forcing us to walk through life carrying the weight of bitterness, anger, and frustration in our hearts. But what if we followed Jesus’s way of handling people who participate in causing pain? What if, rather than seeing those individuals as cruel, we accepted that they are simply spiritually blind and have steered far away from God’s love? What if we acknowledged that perhaps we too have been on the opposite side, inflicting pain on others without realizing it?

In that contemplative moment, we have a choice to make: to continue following our human revengeful instincts, or to offer divine forgiveness. It is in that moment we can shift our own hearts, not for the sake of that person, but for the sake of resembling Jesus more than we ever have for ourselves. When we learn to forgive others for what they did not know, we also allow ourselves to be forgiven for what we did not know.