“I don’t need ANYBODY’S forgiveness.” I was standing in the narthex of the church in New York City where I was serving as an associate pastor, when I heard a voice say that. The pastors were all greeting people exiting through different doors at the end of the service, and the voice was coming from the door where the senior pastor was standing, who had just preached a sermon on forgiveness.
I knew the voice without even being able to see her; we’ll call her 
Margaret. Margaret was, in many ways, a pillar of that congregation. Every Thursday night, for decades at that point, Margaret led our Thursday Night Shelter Dinner, which fed over 100 unhoused people every Thursday night.
It was not an easy job; there was always the possibility of a guest having a physical or mental health episode, the wealthy neighbors on the Upper East Side of Manhattan were always causing problems for the guests as they lined up outside, disliking what they perceived as an imposition of poverty in one of the fanciest neighborhoods on the planet; and the sheer logistics of producing a healthful and delicious meal at that scale every week were exhausting.
On top of all of that, Margaret always had trouble getting volunteers to carry out the program. Well, more accurately, Margaret had trouble keeping volunteers, because Margaret had very…precise ideas about how to do pretty much anything related to serving that meal. Very precise. To the point that I once had to spend several weeks wooing a new member to come back to the church after Margaret publicly excoriated her for not cutting the cake for dessert exactly the way that Margaret wanted her to.
“I have never been treated so insultingly in my life,” the new member confided to me, her voice cracking from anger and humiliation just remembering it, and she was from the rough and tumble world of a major Wall Street investment bank. After that, I started telling new members that the Shelter Dinner program didn’t have any open slots in which to serve.
And that’s just one of many, many incidents of Margaret treating others poorly, to the point that the Elders would eventually have to arrange a celebration of Margaret’s “retirement” from leading the program, which was not what Margaret wanted to do. Yet here she was, insisting loudly that “I don’t need ANYBODY’s forgiveness,” and livid at the senior pastor for suggesting otherwise in his sermon.
It honestly hadn’t occurred to me until that day that being forgiven can be so hard. I knew that forgiving is hard; I had lived long enough at that point to struggle through some tough ones on that count already. But I didn’t realize that being forgiven could be so difficult; I always thought of that as a gift. But forgiving is hard, and sometimes being forgiven is at least as hard. I think what makes them both so hard is when we can’t let go of our own rightness.
I shouldn’t have to forgive them, we think; they should come crawling to me begging for forgiveness. I don’t need to be forgiven, we tell ourselves; I was the one in the right. Given that, it’s not surprising that Paul raises the issue of forgiveness three times in just five versions as he writes to the Colossians with instructions on what it means to live the new life in Christ that they have been given. But it’s interesting how he does it. He doesn’t just say “forgive those who have wronged you.”
He says, “bear with one another and, if anyone has a complaint against another, forgive each other.” Now, here’s a quick but really important bit of grammatical insight. In Greek, there are three types of “conditional sentences” that begin with the word, “if.” The first is a simple conditional, meaning it may or may not be true: “if we go out for lunch after church today, we should get pizza.” The second is a “contrary to fact” conditional, meaning the condition in question is not true: “If I was President, I would make putting pineapple on pizza a second degree felony.”
No matter how right the action in question might be, the condition for taking it isn’t fulfilled. The third type of conditional question is the “Probable Future” conditional, meaning that the condition in question is almost certain to be fulfilled: “If Uncle Joe eats pizza, he’ll get sick because he’s lactose intolerant.” It’s the third-class conditional sentence that Paul is using here about forgiveness, meaning that what he’s saying is “if anyone has a complaint against another, which is obviously going to happen, then forgive each other.”
Not only is it going to happen, but its going to happen in multiple directions: you will need to forgive each other; those who forgave on one thing will need forgiveness on something else, and those who have been forgiven on something will need to forgive next time. And just to make sure everybody realizes that they’re all in the same boat, Paul concludes by saying, “just as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive,” which perhaps is another reason that being forgiven is so surprisingly hard: when we can get past our own sense of rightness, we not only realize that we need to be forgiven, but that in being forgiven we have to forgive others, too.
One of the most profound themes running throughout the entire TV series is about forgiveness, and the show is particularly insightful on how important clothing ourselves in compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience is to be able to practice forgiveness, as Paul tells the Colossians in preamble to his words on forgiveness. We see this clearly in an episode at the end of the first season.
As a reminder, the show is about a relentlessly positive Midwestern American division II college football coach named Ted Lasso who is hired to come to the UK and coach a struggling English Premier League soccer club, despite knowing nothing about England or soccer. The owner of the club, a woman named Rebecca, is new in the role because she was just awarded the ownership of the team as part of a bitter divorce settlement with her narcissistic ex-husband, a man named Rupert.
Rebecca vigorously defends Ted during his first press conference against the onslaught of criticism for his lack of experience or even awareness at the beginning of the series. Yet later that same day, alone with her deputy who runs the day-to-day operations of the team, she explains that she does not, in fact, believe that Ted will lead the team to new success with his unorthodox style and methods. In fact, she is secretly hoping that he will lead the team to total ruin through his incompetence, and she will do whatever she has to do to make sure he does, because she feels like Rupert never loved her like he loves the team and it will hurt him so much to see them utterly fail and not be able to do anything.
Over the course of the season, though, she begins to struggle with the conflict between her burning desire for revenge, which leads her to secretly do all kinds of appallingly things to undermine Ted and the team, and her growing appreciation for the team, the fans, and most of all for Ted. From the beginning, Ted has insisted on building an authentic relationship with her as the owner rather than a purely transactional one, enticing her into a daily morning meeting that he calls “Biscuits with the Boss,” in which he gives her a small box of mind-blowingly good shortbread cookies (or biscuits, as the English say) that he secretly bakes himself while they talk about whatever comes to mind.
And so as the season goes on and she shares all kinds of experiences with him as a warm and devoted person who is profoundly committed not only to leading her team and caring for her players, but to caring for her as a human being and friend, as well, she starts to realize just how awful her revenge plot and the actions she’s taken to further it have been. She has several false starts about confessing to him, but it isn’t until she has a particularly painful encounter with Rupert that she actually does it.
She walks straight from that encounter down to his office in an almost zombie-like state, and closes the door behind her as he looks up at her with his usual earnest smile of interest and attention. “I’m a terrible human being,” she says. (Well, that’s a paraphrase for decorum in worship, but that’s what she means.) He looks at her in confusion. “Ted, I lied to you,” she continues. “I hired you because I wanted this team to lose. I wanted you to fail, and I’ve sabotaged you every chance I’ve had.”
She goes on to describe multiple betrayals of him behind his back that were designed to humiliate him or damage the team, and Ted’s sunny expression begins to cloud over as he listens. “This club is all that Rupert ever cared about, and I wanted to destroy it, to cause him as much pain and suffering as he has caused me. And I didn’t care who I used, or who I hurt; all you good people just trying to make a difference. Ted, I’m so sorry,” she concludes her voice cracking as she watches the waves of shock, anger, and pain wash over Ted’s face for an agonizingly long period of silence.
Then Ted gets up from behind his desk and comes over to her, and looks her right in the eye for a moment. “I forgive you,” he says simply, the pain wrought by her confession still written on his face. Rebecca is stunned. “What? Why?” she blurts out in genuine disbelief. “Divorce is hard,” he says simply; “it doesn’t matter if you’re the one leaving or…if you’re the one who got left.” He’s not just saying that.
One of the main plot points of the first season is Ted’s struggle with the dissolution of his own marriage, of his slow and grudging acceptance that, as a man defined by his positivity and conviction in the power of belief to accomplish almost anything, his marriage is irretrievably broken and all his wife wants now is a divorce. “It makes folks do crazy things,” he continues, a bit of his usual smile creeping back onto his face. “I’m coaching soccer, for heaven’s sake. In London. I mean, that’s nuts!” he chuckles, then returns to sincerity.
“But this job you gave me has changed my life; gave me the distance to see what was really going on. You and me? We’re good.” He extends his hand, and instead she embraces him in a tight hug, overwhelmed with gratitude. For her, being forgiven was so hard because she not only felt she didn’t deserve it, but she couldn’t even imagine it being offered. And when it was, it changed both her and him in profound ways that we see play out over the rest of the series.
“As God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience,” Paul says, as the pre-requisites for bearing with one another and forgiving each other when anyone has a complaint. Those characteristics are precisely what we see in both Ted and Rebecca in that scene, which I think is one of the most powerful and authentic scenes of confession, repentance, and forgiveness that I have ever seen.
Rebecca is able to summon the courage to confess to Ted through humility and meekness; Ted is able to summon the courage to forgive her through that as well as compassion, kindness, and even patience, empathizing with how difficult it is to cope with the pain of divorce, knowing that it has led him to do some crazy things, too. It is in knowing and admitting to ourselves that we, too, need forgiveness that we can most easily find both the power and the responsibility to forgive. And compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience are what help us get there.
What’s so helpful about Paul’s instructions about that here is the metaphor he uses: “clothe yourselves,” he says; “clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience.” In other words, those are not attributes we have to generate within ourselves in order to bear with each other and forgive each other; we can pick them up, put them on, see what version of them fits us individually. They become a part of us after putting them on, not from sprouting within us.
And yet they keep us warm when it is cold; dry when it is storming; beautiful, when we don’t really feel like it on the inside. The call is also the opportunity, to “dress for success,” to adorn ourselves in what God finds most beautiful, and let them become such a part of us that others ask in wonder, “where did you get that?” And we can smile, in compassion and kindness and humility and meekness and patience, and tell them: “It was a gift. But I can tell you where to get your own.”