Give the kind of gift that can’t go under a Christmas tree. A gift that keeps on giving

Normally, I am one of the first in my neighborhood to get up the lights and tree for Christmas. The weekend of Thanksgiving has me scrambling through bushes stringing lights and climbing the steps into our attic to fetch decorations.

With Christmas a few days closer to Thanksgiving than usual this year, I noticed many of my neighbors out before Thanksgiving getting their decorations out. Like the people who had their Christmas cards in the mail right after Thanksgiving, I try not to hate, but sometimes it is hard. But it is really jealousy at organization. How do you people do that? I still have not even gotten Christmas cards done, let alone mailed. It might not happen. It will be one more thing about which I feel guilt and must forgive myself.

Forgiveness is one of those things we could use more of at Christmas. At this time of year, we focus on the beginning of the story. There, in a manger in Bethlehem, a young woman had a child. We celebrate his birth and focus on the angels singing, the shepherds, the wise men and the baby. But that baby would grow up. An historic figure, whether one believes he rose again or not, we have Roman records documenting his execution.

The Gospel writers were mostly either eyewitnesses or interviewed the eyewitnesses. The physician Luke, writing his Gospel account, tells us that on the cross Jesus asked God to forgive those who were killing him. Luke, in the Book of Acts, also documents that the first Christian martyr, Stephen, asked God to forgive those who were stoning him to death.

Christians, for obvious reasons, focus on the divinity of Christ. But Christ was fully man. Gethsemane makes no real sense without understanding Jesus was fully man. The cross makes no sense without that understanding, too. The only sinless, blameless man to live was tortured, beaten, made to carry a cross with a crown of thorns pushed into his scalp, then nailed to that cross and hoisted into the air. He could feel the weight of his body around the nails as gravity pulled on him. He could feel the sins of the world piled on top of him.

“Father, forgive them,” he said. What we tend to do is say, “I will forgive you, but let me add these pre-conditions to my forgiveness.” In our relationship with God, repentance is a necessary component of forgiveness. But in our relationship with each other, like the man Jesus on the cross or the man Stephen being stoned to death, the necessity is forgiveness with no strings attached.

At Christmas, as we begin to reflect on the past year or the nostalgia of past Christmases, it is often easy to dredge up from memory bad experiences. We cling to petty grievances or past sleights. We allow others to exercise control over us by hanging on to insults or compounding injury through our own failure to forgive. Often, the person we most need to forgive is ourselves. We cling to the bad things we have done. God has an easier time forgiving us our sins than we have forgiving ourselves the dumb things we have done.

Do not wrap up forgiveness under the tree. Share it today. Forgive. Christ on the cross, battered and bleeding forgave those who killed him. Our inability to forgive is a suggestion that somehow our consciences were more pricked that the innocent redeemer who died on that cross. But we know that is not so. So we must let go and forgive.

Erick Erickson hosts “The Erick Erickson Show,“ which is broadcast across Georgia.