Forgiveness and freedom

Walter Brueggemann ( Prophetic Imagination ) cites Hannah Arendt’s claim that Jesus’ offer of forgiveness was his “most endangering action because if a society does not have an apparatus for forgiveness, then its members are fated to live forever with the consequences of any violation. Thus the refusal to forgive sin (or the management of the machinery of forgiveness) amounts to enormous social control. While the claims of Jesus may have been religiously staggering, its threat to the forms of accepted social control was even greater.”