Why is forgiveness divine?

As Alexander Pope famously wrote, “To err is human, to forgive divine.”

It’s a beautiful line, and yet it is missing one key feature.

See, we as individuals are made in the image of God. But we only fully image God when we are knit together into loving relationships like the community within the Godhead we call the Trinity. And sometimes when we think of sin, we think only of the harm done to our individual natures and not also of the damage done to our nature as a community. What makes forgiveness divine is that it restores that communal image of God after it’s been damaged.

But forgiveness is only half the remedy, a kind of potential healing which still waits on an apology to be complete. The breach is in our relationship, and until both of us have contributed our portion, the relationship remains broken.

Forgiving is indeed divine. But because refusing to apologize preempts the most vibrant aspects of the divine purpose, we should say that apologizing is divine as well.