One of the speakers, journalist Elizabeth Bruenig, recounted an incident that she described as the “perfect” act of forgiveness. Some 30 years ago, a woman was murdered. The killer was caught and convicted, and sentenced to death; she was also, remarkably, utterly unrepentant. She would express neither remorse nor regret. She would not even meet with the victim’s brother, who had intervened on her behalf to ensure that she would not be executed.

And yet, he forgave her anyway.

I suppose there is something perfect about that — in the same way that a perfect work of art or music can fill you with sadness and longing. To Bruenig, affording grace to a person who not only did not want forgiveness but was liable to throw it back in your face was an example of profound moral courage. I don’t disagree, but another, more cynical thought also occurred to me: what else was he going to do?

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There’s a saying that I’ve seen printed on pillows and such, in those shops where they sell scented candles emblazoned with LIVE LAUGH LOVE: it reads, “Let go, or be dragged.” It’s trite, but it captures something about the price of holding a grudge — how the weight of an injustice can grow to become a greater burden than the original offence. That wound you refuse to allow to heal will fester, and deepen, until you’ve caused more damage through your scab-picking than the person who cut you in the first place. You may desire retribution, but you may also find it unavailable to you, and then what? The only thing left is forgiveness.

This was when I started thinking about OJ Simpson, who in some ways strikes me as a funhouse mirror version of the Bruenig’s unrepentant killer. The contours of OJ’s life after his acquittal for the 1992 killings of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman, which he definitely committed, have been aptly described by Oliver Bateman as “posthumous” — that is, long before OJ’s actual death, to a certain segment of the public, he might as well have been. We wished he were. And his existence after the trial, per Bateman, made for “a striking modern-day reflection of how legacy and infamy intermingle in the digital age”. Insofar as OJ did have a life after getting away with murder, he owes it largely to the sense among members of Gen Z that history before the internet simply didn’t exist; the most sympathetic audience to Simpson’s comeback performance were always the ones too young to have actually seen its first or even second act.

Those of us who do remember the trial, the car chase — or Simpson’s reputation for domestic violence — were less inclined to welcome him back into polite society. But even those who protested most vehemently against his reemergence could only do so for so long, before the whole endeavour seemed pointless, especially in the face of Simpson’s winking remorselessness. Remember, this was the man whose brilliant plan after being acquitted of murder was to confess to the killings by way of a six-figure deal for a book titled If I Did It. And if the title was a provocation, then the original jacket design — the I DID IT in eye-catching red, with the “IF” printed in letters so pale that it couldn’t be seen at a distance — elevated it to the level of farce.

The brazenness of it was such that, at the time, it seemed like the only option we had was to laugh it off or lose our minds. OJ’s acquittal despite his obvious guilt was no longer just a tragedy but a terrible joke — one we were all in on whether we liked it or not. And the question of whether he might be forgiven (not that he was asking for this) became inextricably entwined with the question of whether we could forgive ourselves for our inability to do anything about it — for a miscarriage of justice so complete that the only catharsis was to make it a recurring gag on Saturday Night Live. Imagine the relief when Simpson managed to get himself sent to prison anyway, this time on a robbery charge for which it hardly mattered if he was guilty or not. Nothing could undo the appalling error of his acquittal, but here, at least was a way to halfway correct it. The only problem, and nobody wanted to think about this part, was that he would eventually be let out again.

And then he was.

An uneasy dynamic has existed between the world and OJ in the seven years since his release. Unlike Mike Tyson, who finished serving a prison sentence for rape the same year OJ was acquitted of murder, and who has since found his footing in popular culture as a sort of lovable drunken uncle figure, OJ remained on the fringes of public life; he never won complete rehabilitation. But nor was he saddled with the baggage of a Bill Cosby, a Roman Polanski, or even a Woody Allen (nobody ever feels compelled, for instance, to issue a disclaimer about their distaste for OJ before professing an appreciation for Roots or The Naked Gun series, both of which featured him as an actor). I’m still trying to understand the calculus whereby one person is merely (and not even necessarily credibly) accused of a bad act against a woman and spends the rest of his life a pariah, while another, who most definitely killed two people, can make something of a public comeback in which his criminal past becomes part of his charm.

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Or perhaps it was precisely because of OJ’s utter irredeemability that any sort of redemption was possible: that once someone has done the worst thing, even the slightest glimmer of humanity might feel encouraging. It’s a familiar trope in fiction, the monster you find reasons to root for. Hannibal Lecter, Dexter Morgan, Raskolnikov, Macbeth. These are bad men, they do bad things — but we know this only in the abstract, without any accompanying wound. These are bad men, they do bad things… but not to us, so maybe it’s sort of okay?

Of course, to the victims, it’s not okay. And while Simpson may have travelled a peculiar sort of redemption arc in the final years of his life, there is still a difference between rehabilitating one’s brand — something a person can do for himself — and forgiveness — which can only be bestowed by someone else. When we abandon hope of seeing justice done because we’re too tired, or too disgusted, that’s something, but it’s not forgiveness. Nor is it forgiveness when the people bestowing it upon you have no real sense of the harm you did. And whatever status Simpson enjoyed as an internet personality, he was never let off the hook by the families of his victims, who remained at once shattered and animated by his crimes. The most memorable statement on the day of OJ’s death was made by Ron Goldman’s father, Fred, who never stopped insisting on the necessity of justice long after the rest of the culture had made its uneasy peace with the murderer: “The hope for true accountability has ended,” he wrote.

It’s possible to imagine a world in which this remark was one of resignation, and also of relief; after more than 30 years, with his son’s murderer dead, surely nobody could blame Fred for letting go now. (Indeed, if you continue clinging to a remorseless killer after he himself has died, the question arises of which immortal realm you might end up being dragged to.) It’s also possible to imagine a world in which this could have become one of those perfectly imperfect moments of forgiveness, for lack of an alternative. But this is not the path forward that Goldman proposes. “[Despite] his death,” he wrote, “the mission continues; there’s always more to be done.”

In other words, when the hope for vengeance is lost, forgiveness is one possibility, but not the only one. Another sort of hope might takes its place, and with it, another sort of power: not the status of the permanent victim, or the self-satisfaction of the moral hero, but the purpose of the survivor.

So when the Archbishop this week suggested Prince Andrew is “seeking to make amends” and encouraged people to be more “open and forgiving”, he was not going out on some fashionable theological limb. He was doing what he was supposed to be doing: proclaiming the faith.

But however often Christians say the word in church, forgiveness has always been a profoundly unpopular idea, and is increasingly so in a post-Christian society. Look at the reaction to the Archbishop’s comments. People are aghast and angry. Why? Because the very idea of forgiveness can be extremely hard to reconcile with the much simpler and more popular idea of justice.

Justice means people getting what they deserve. Wrongdoers facing punishment: an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. Punishment has to be proportionate to the wrong done. The scales of justice cry out to be balanced. It is a debt that has to be paid. Yet the greasy and featherbedded Prince Andrew has obviously not paid his debt — so how dare the Archbishop speak about forgiveness? Bloody establishment, they all look out for each other.

This is where justice can take us. It was Nietzsche — no friend of the Christian faith, of course — who famously suggested that even the justice of the courtroom can have a highly persecutory tone, a mob desire for the blood of the perpetrator camouflaged by wigs and gowns. Consider also that common set-up at the beginning of the trashy American revenge movie: a crime is committed that allows us to see the various acts of response, however gruesome, as a form of moral restitution. The idea of justice allows violence to be understood as morally acceptable, unavoidable even. Justice becomes the moral word for winning. And Americans like to be thought of as winners. It is, of course, their least attractive side. And their most foolish.

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At its worst, this logic of justice can perpetuate violence ad infinitum. It can create an unstoppable cycle of vendetta — one act of justice/violence inviting another. Feuds between families can perpetuate this drama over generations. Justice is the engine of revenge. Violence is mimetic. What most frightened Desmond Tutu about post-Apartheid South Africa was the prospect of justice driving a death cycle of violence — with some never-ending response and counter-response sending his beloved country into perpetual civil war. “No future without forgiveness,” he wrote. Forgiveness was a way of breaking the cycle of tit-for-tat violence. Peace could only be established by holding back on the justice bit. Forgive your enemies. That, for all its faults, is what the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was seeking to model.

In complete contrast to Tutu’s “No forgiveness, no peace”, Black Lives Matter protestors regularly chant “No justice, no peace”. One way of reading this is that we won’t give you peace unless we have racial justice. It can be heard as a moral justification of ongoing violence.

As well as perpetuating discord, the justice tradition has another related weakness: it invariably imagines that the person calling for justice is in the right. When Hamlet appeals to Polonius to treat others better than they deserve, he observes: “Use every man after his own desert and who [of us] should escape whipping”. Or in other words: if we all get justice, we are all in trouble. In the same vein, Martin Luther came to realise that he hated the phrase “the justice of God” because all of us — sinners that we are — are condemned. Only through God’s forgiveness can we be saved. OK, this is church speak. But the equivalent secular point is that all of us require forgiveness. Justice language — unqualified by mercy — points the finger at us all in the end. This is why social justice warriors end up consuming each other in an orgy of recrimination.

The Jubilee is a perfect time to think about forgiveness. This is when we try and think of ourselves as a national community, reconciled for a few hours of cake-eating and tea-drinking. The street party is a powerful way of neighbours, who may have fought for years over the garden fence, to put “being right” aside. I am an enthusiastic monarchist because I think of the crown as holding the community together in a way that is beyond political contestation. The Queen has sought to do this for 70 years. It’s part of her priestly role as it were, it’s what she was anointed for. Thank God for her.

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Jubilees seek to restore something broken or lost. At the turn of the millennium, many of us came together to lobby for the forgiveness of the financial debts that the developing world had built up over years. Jubilee 2000 asked that we wipe the slate clean. It drew upon the Biblical idea of the Jubilee — that every 50 years debts would be redeemed. It is very telling that the Judeo-Christian tradition often uses financial language – debt, redemption – as ways of talking about salvation. Back then it was the right that complained about the forgiveness of debts. These days it is often the left. Both insist upon the iron logic of pay-back, justice.

Forgiveness is not sentimental slush. It’s not being overly nice or gullible. Properly speaking, it is about the refusal to respond to wrongdoing in kind — those last two words being very important. It is not a refusal of the criminal justice system. It is a recognition that you do not get punishment proportionate to the crime — a murderer does not get murdered, a perpetrator of sexual violence does not get molested. Even more, it is a denial of the satisfaction that comes with payback. As Tutu was right to point out, forgiveness is a way of giving the community back a future, a strategy of restoration.

The reason being the Archbishop of Canterbury is the most impossible job in the world is that he has to try and say something like this within a public culture that believes forgiveness is fundamentally mistaken and wrong. It requires messy compromises. It might let people off the hook, smirking as they slink away. It might leave some victims unsatisfied, bitter that justice has not been properly dispensed.

But the alternative is a kind of endless cultural war. “No justice, no peace” is a terrifying slogan. For often, justice is the desire for revenge by another name.

The Queen must have known. But she did it anyway, because though few people have any doubt that he is a total wrong’un (I don’t doubt it one bit), he is still family. Many families have rotters in their midst. And one of the most valuable things about family is that virtue is not a condition of membership. A mother can love her children, even if they have done terrible things — indeed, that is precisely the sort of dogged love many of us celebrated last Sunday. Besides, this was Prince Andrew’s father’s memorial service. Shamed or not, of course he had to be there. (Though, over in sunny California, the more virtuous members of the Royal family didn’t quite see it that way.)

In truth, I don’t much care for memorial services. The purpose of them is to speak well of the dead; literally, to eulogise. Such events work well for the powerful, the famous and the righteous. “A man of rare ability and distinction, rightly honoured and celebrated, he ever directed our attention away from himself,” said the Dean of Westminster of Prince Phillip. Memorial services don’t require much religion either, which is part of their popularity in a secular age. They are sandwiches of hymns and readings and speeches — and songs can be easily substituted for hymns, poems for Bible passages.

In my time as a priest, I have buried a number of men (always men, as it happens) about whom no one has a good word to say. I have buried paedophiles. I have buried murderers. No one wanted to come to their service. The funeral was just me, an empty crematorium, and their coffin. The weakness of the memorial service is that it doesn’t work in such circumstances. There is no eulogy to be had here because there are no good words. Memorial services exist for upstanding members of the community.

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But alone in the crem, undertakers having a fag outside, and armed only with the words of the Mass, there exists a kind of encounter with death, and with the evil that some people do, that for me at least is the absolute core of priestly ministry. Of course, most of us haven’t committed such crimes — but nonetheless, this still feels like the business end of the human condition. This is death as total desolation, without applause, without consolation. And of course, I pray for forgiveness, no matter what the crime. And for the victims of this person’s wickedness too. Which is why I often cannot myself forgive — that stuff is seriously above my pay grade. No, I will leave that bit to God.

There wasn’t a prayer of confession at this week’s memorial service for Prince Philip. Many would have loved to see Andrew perspire his way through that one. “We have done evil in your sight,” said my congregation together on Mothering Sunday. Some of us have more to confess than others. But confession and the search for redemption exists for those who have done great wrong as well as for those of us seeking reassurance as to the eternal consequences of our daily peccadillos.

“Amazing grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me.” My church in South London has long been a black-majority church. Yet one of the most popular hymns we sing is one written by a former slave trader, John Newton. Had the memorial to him been in stone, no doubt we would have been asked to take it down, just as Jesus College Cambridge have been petitioning — unsuccessfully it now turns out — to have a memorial to a college benefactor, Tobias Rustat, taken down because of his links to the slave trade. Some months ago, the Archbishop of Canterbury unwisely got involved, supporting its removal.

I have no problem with removing bits of old stone in churches and chapels. But I do find it problematic that we might do so on the basis of the virtue of those being memorialised. The church is not a house of moral virtue but a place for those seeking redemption — and that means a place for the wicked as well as for the just. “I once was lost and now am found,” wrote Newton.

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I am absolutely not arguing that we ought to see the good in people who have done great wrong, that somehow, deep down, they have within them a spark of goodness. Nor am I naive about the possibility of change. Priests are generally much more sceptical of human nature than many people expect. We have listened to so much self-justifying bullshit over the years — how could we not be? No, this is not about thinking people are better than they are. It is about God’s capacity to forgive in a way which exceeds my own.

The possibility of forgiveness is awkwardly related to morality. Secular versions of evil generally invite a kind of retributive logic in which wickedness deserves punishment. Forgiveness sticks in the craw of moral reasoning. Which is why, without God, morality inevitably becomes a kind of cancel culture — a righteous anger that responds to injustice with punishment. And such a culture will have no truck with what might look like attempts to rehabilitate wrongdoers — sweaty nonces, whether princes or not.

But fundamentally, Christianity isn’t much interested in morality, it’s interested in love. At its core, it’s about how to love the intrinsically unlovable. As a mother might love her unlovable child. As God might love us. Allowing Andrew to support her as she walked into the place where she made vows to support the Christian faith might just be one of the most obviously religious things the Queen has done. And when Christianity gets enacted at this level, we should expect to be scorned for it, not applauded.

Many of the spirituals that she sang were taken from the Biblical book of Psalms, often from passages that lament the conditions of slavery into which the people of Israel were taken. She sang at her friend Martin Luther King’s funeral. Harry Belafonte called her “the single most powerful black woman in the United States”.

Among her favourite hymns was ‘Amazing Grace’. I find it hard to hear her sing it without welling up. It is utterly beautiful and captivating. And the opening words are such a direct and powerful statement of the Christian doctrine of redemption:

Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound
That saved a wretch like me
I once was lost, but now am found
Was blind but now I see.

The hymn was written by John Newton. And John Newton was a slaver. Not in Edward Colston’s league, perhaps. But he captained slave ships, trafficking his human cargo to a life of utter misery, and he personally profited from the slave trade. ‘Amazing Grace’ is such an extraordinarily powerful hymn precisely because it was written by a man with such a shameful past.

Newton has become a kind of patron saint to those looking for some sort of redemption. It’s no surprise, then, that Rev Jonathan Aitken, the disgraced former Cabinet Minster and a previous guest on my Confessions podcast, co-authored a biography of the man. Even those of us whose sins do not add up to anything like Newton’s, recognise in his words the promise that we are not necessarily eternally imprisoned by the things that we have done wrong in our lives. Jackson understood this. “I sing God’s music because it makes me feel free” references freedom from imprisonment on a number of different levels.

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The contrast here with the developing moral consciousness of the contemporary culture wars is acute and, to me, quite frightening. For although something like the anger that feeds into the toppling of Edward Colston’s statue has a clear moral righteousness about it, it is not a righteousness that has been tempered by any sense of our collective need for redemption.

The new, highly secular ‘cancel culture’ represents an extreme form of righteousness that has all the moral power of a certain kind of protestant Christianity, but none of the basic scaffolding of redemption on which such Christianity is built. And morality without forgiveness or redemption is a frightening, persecutory business.

Part of the problem with the cancel culture of modern identity politics is that it makes the confession of sins so much more difficult to achieve. Or, to put that in a more secular idiom: how can we all confront the various forms of racism, sexism, homophobia and so on that we harbour within, when the consequences of any form of public admission are devastating and toxic?

There’s a sort of furious moral vigilantism that encourages its adherents to trawl through our public utterances — in order to condemn and shame us in the high court of Twitter. Against this digital shoaling of the mob, any protestations of rightful innocence are impossible to make, and the fear of being targeted makes any exploration or confession of our hidden failings terrifying to contemplate.

Cancel culture makes us hide in fear. It makes us publicly pretend we are better than we are. It turns us all into liars — and the more we fear the exposure of our failings, the more we point the finger at others in the hope of misdirecting the anger of the crowd.

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Hate the sin, love the sinner. This phrase is often trotted out in evangelical circles, and it has become too much of a cliché. But nonetheless it neatly summarises a kind of firewall that developed in some Christian circles to stop legitimate anger at injustice spilling over into some kind of endless personal attack upon the perpetrators. And it enables us to explore our own failings so much more easily.

The problem is that, under Christian culture, we used to believe that wrongdoers would get their ultimate comeuppance when they faced the divine after death. From such a perspective the final administration of justice would be carried out by the ultimate righteous judge who knows all the secrets of our hearts.

But this God is now dead in popular culture. And so the consequences of our moral failings have to be reckoned with in this life — otherwise we would get away with them without any sort of censure. In other words, the God that would judge us all with fairness and kindness has been replaced by the high court of the digital trial. And once sentence has been passed, there is no coming back, ever. That is what it is to be cancelled.

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In 2007, down a small alley off Fenchurch street in the City of London, Archbishop Desmond Tutu unveiled a sculpture to remember and acknowledge the evils of the transatlantic slave trade. This site was chosen because this is where John Newton had his parish after he became an Anglican clergyman. And it was here that he came to influence fellow evangelicals like William Wilberforce and the whole abolitionist movement. The base of the sculpture is an ambiguous structure that can either be read as the pulpit from which Newton preached his sermons against slavery, or as a slave auctioneer’s podium.

This is one work of public art commemorating a former slaver that I presume will not be targeted by those seeking to pull down other structures. Though if #ghandimustfall can trend on Twitter, and if a statue of Churchill can be graffitied — a man who, whatever his undoubted failings, was instrumental in the defeat of one of the most murderous and racist regimes the world has ever known — then no amount of redemption is sufficient in the eyes of our new guardians of public morality to blot out our past offences.

Sure, there are many statues of dead white men with blood on their hands that I would not lose sleep to see the back of. And who of us didn’t cheer when that statue of Saddam Hussein was smashed to the ground?

But nonetheless, without some sort of secular equivalent to personal redemption — and I don’t know what that would be — those who recognise themselves as “a wretch” will look nervously at this crescendo of moral righteousness and begin to fear that one day the same people will come after us too. Indeed, without the existence of redemption we should probably all be afraid of vigilante moralism.

Veganuary-style health kicks and detoxes will succumb within days to the allure of that last half-jar of Stilton and the little gift bottle of Port that needs tidying up. The pledge to run every day will slowly convert itself into a general promise to be more active, and eventually the buzzing and the nudges from that fitness tracker you unwrapped on Christmas day get turned off, you lose the charger, and put it away.

Surely every house in the land has borne witness to countless diaries filled in religiously for a few weeks, half-heartedly for a few more (with a couple of days written at once to cover up a missed entry or four). Then one skipped day becomes five, and 50, and the diary quietly slips under the bedside table to be discovered in some burst of pre-Christmas cleaning, when — after the dust inspires a few sneezes — the blank pages inspire a few quiet seconds of bittersweet contemplation about our failure to live up to our aspirations to do better, be better.

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Honestly, I don’t know why we choose this time of year to make resolutions. We want to beat our instincts: use our rational brain to conquer whatever habits our emotions have drawn us into. We know that’s going to be hard: we’ll need to stretch every sinew to reinvent ourselves as that ur-version we have in our mind. And we decide to start the job in the cold, dark and wet, when our yearning for comfort and hunkering down is at its strongest. It’s as if we want to fail.

Yes, the allure of a new year is like the fresh beauty of a new notebook. And perhaps the indulgences of Christmas count as “rock bottom” to inspire habits of clean living. But come on: this is a rubbish time of year to be changing yourself.

At least most of us never take it as far as Benjamin Franklin, founding father not just of the United States of America, but of the school of self-improvement. In 1726, at the age of 20, he wrote a list of 13 virtues, from temperance to tranquillity, industry to justice. He tried to practice each virtue in turn to perfection, switching on to the next virtue once a week and putting a red mark in his diary every time he failed. The book, unsurprisingly, filled up with red marks, and while Franklin eventually stopped writing in it, he carried it with him until his death. It was a constant reminder of his imperfections.

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Most of us don’t carry around a literal book with which to brutalise our consciences. But whether it’s our failed resolutions, our failed diets, the books we didn’t read, the letters we didn’t write, the mothers we didn’t call, the businesses we didn’t start or the single-use plastics we didn’t shun: I think all but the most narcissistic of us carry some measure of guilt about the better person we could have been; the better use to which we could have put our time. A palpable sense of our own inadequacy seems to be part of the human condition. Why else would advertisers who urge us to enjoy the moment have come up with the slogan: Be More Dog? It seems the only way to truly let ourselves off the hook of self-improvement is to channel a different species.

That is, of course, what the research into mindfulness tells us about the best way to be happy. We have to be more dog. We have to let ourselves indulge in the experience of every moment, instead of letting our anxious minds plague us with thoughts of what comes next. There is something delightfully twisted about making a New Year’s Resolution to be more mindful. In a sense, mindfulness is the opposite of resolution-ing: it teaches us to accept rather than to aspire, to tolerate rather than transform.

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But I for one would be sad to see the end of resolutions. Dogs, after all, did not conquer the world, invent the wheel, the semi-conductor and antibiotics — and not just because they don’t have opposable thumbs. We did, because we never settle. Because we’re never quite content, and that’s what keeps us going – keeps us away from chasing sticks and rolling in mud all day just for the glory of it. And I value that bit of doubt, that little dose of self-loathing, the modicum of shame, that drives me to do better, be better, try harder. Our desire to transform ourselves is not just our greatest curse, it is our greatest blessing too.

We need to find a way to balance acceptance and aspiration. Of course, in the Christian faith that’s relatively easy because Jesus comes along, sees our inadequacy, loves us anyway, and does all the forgiveness on our behalf. No wonder it has such appeal for its billion followers.

But those of us who don’t happen to believe that Christ is the salvation of mankind need to work at forgiving ourselves. That’s a resolution that makes as little sense as a resolution to practice mindfulness. But it might be the best one available to us all.

There isn’t much point in making New Year’s Resolutions. But there isn’t much point in many of the things we do. So make some. Fail them in style. And find a way to love yourself just the way you are.

The bishop thought about it for a bit and then replied, half-joking, half serious: “That there is no immunity from prosecution,” he said, “even when you are dead.”

One of the fundamental principles of justice is that you should get what you deserve. Immanuel Kant argued that one of the reasons he believed in life after death was that he believed the universe had to be just, and that meant wrong-doers must be punished. And given that wrong-doers are often not punished in this lifetime, there had to be some final judgment in order to keep the universe balanced for the good.

When I lived next to St Paul’s Cathedral, I could see the scales of justice from my bedroom window on top of the Old Bailey. Justice requires balance. Sin has to be paid for with punishment. It is a basic principle of law that is enshrined in the way many people understand the requirement for Jesus to be nailed to a cross.

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The argument is that humanity has sinned, and sinned to such an extent that no human punishment can be weighty enough to balance the scales. So God offers himself in the place of punishment to take the consequences of our sin, and thus right the requirements of justice. Sin requires pay-back. For many, this is the heart of the Easter story.

I have long disliked this formulation. It turns God into some sort of vicious, vindictive monster, requiring the blood sacrifice of his own child to achieve some sense of cosmic balance. Others have strongly disagreed with my conclusion, including Ian Paisley.

“What an outrageous blasphemy, that any man should write that which [Giles Fraser] has written. Remember, his words are from the lips of a so-called Protestant clergyman. To libel God Almighty as a ‘vicious God’ because He sacrificed His only Son on the Cross to make possible the freeing of sinners from the damnation of sin and hell, is the language of Satan’s vocabulary. … The whole message of the glorious gospel of our Lord Jesus is that He came into the world to save sinners. There was a debt to be paid. There were sins to be erased. There was a ransom to be paid. … To decry these objectives is the howling of the beasts of hell’s pit, and the roaring of the Devil himself.”

I was reminded of Ian Paisley’s characteristically trenchant response to my opinions on the death of Jesus while interviewing the extraordinary Marina Cantacuzino last week for my Confessions podcast.

Marina is the founder of The Forgiveness Project, a charity that seeks to collect powerful stories of forgiveness, of victims and perpetrators seeking a way forward that does not involve the use of vengeance to right the scales of justice. Christianity is not the inspiration for her approach – forgiveness, she says has been “barnacled by aeons of piety”.

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But I think the reverse is almost true. Christians especially may talk a good game about forgiveness, but it often does not find its way into their core doctrines – especially when it comes to understanding Easter.

Yet Cantacuzino is right, of course, that the call to forgiveness is found throughout the Bible. You may remember, back at the turn of the Millennium, that many of us were marching for the abolition of Third-World debt under the banner of Jubilee 2000. The reference to the Jubilee was a reference to a powerful tradition in the Hebrew scriptures in which prisoners are freed and debts are written off every 50 years on the Day of Atonement. The Jubilee is often referred to as “the year of the Lord’s favour”.

Here, for instance, is the first sermon Jesus gives in the Gospel of Luke. This is Jesus announcing what he is all about:

“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour. And he closed the book, and gave it back to the attendant, and sat down; and the eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him. And he began to say to them, Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” Luke, 4:18

Elsewhere, Jesus famously counters the idea that justice requires “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth” – the classic definition of pay-back theology – with a call for forgiveness. As the anthropologist René Girard was to explain: the only way to draw a close to an escalating cycle of tit-for-tat vengeance is for one party not to respond in violent kind to the other. It doesn’t make sense to me that the death of Jesus has to be understood in terms of pay-back when he so clearly repudiates this very idea.

But there is no doubt that forgiveness is morally problematic, amoral even. It feels like letting people off, and a blow against the foundations of a moral society. Take Shamima Begum. Let us assume, just for the sake of argument, that she is indeed guilty of many of the crimes levelled against her.

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Yes, she deserves to face justice – the justice of a British court, I believe. But what of the tradition that the demands of justice should be tempered with mercy? What of the idea that something like forgiveness should be at least a theoretical possibility? Or are her crimes really so heinous that no such possibility should ever pertain?

She must express remorse first, is one line on the Begum case. And because she hasn’t, no forgiveness can exist for her. This, of course, is just a way to withhold forgiveness, to grant it only to those who have become ‘acceptable’.

One of the reasons I am so keen on the idea of original sin – that human beings are constitutionally broken – is that it establishes some sort of solidarity among human beings as collectively fallen. Those who cannot say “there but for the grace of God go I”, suffer from a lack of imagination and self-knowledge. You are a wrong-un, as am I.

As Hamlet replies to Polonius, “Use every man after his desert, and who should ’scape whipping?” or – in modern English – would any of us really escape punishment if we got what we deserve? This is the reasoning that made Martin Luther come to hate the idea of a just God. Because if God is just – that is, treats us according to our merit and gives us our due – then we are all buggered. The only hope is in a forgiving God. A God of the Jubilee. And if fairness is giving people what they deserve, then what we need is a God who is not fair. This is why Christian theology is not an especially moral business.

Of course, I am not suggesting that a ‘not fair’ forgiveness is any useful basis for judicial policy. The concerns here are more existential than practical. The stories collected by Cantacuzino are beautiful and inspiring. And it is shocking, but not surprising, that some of those who have chosen to forgive are often themselves abused for having the courage to do so. They are “hated for not hating” was how Cantacuzino put it.

The Shamima Begum case has highlighted once again how collective vindictiveness can dress itself up in the language of morality. Punishment is popular. Forgiveness is not. And politicians know that.

Nietzsche had it right:

“But thus I counsel you, my friends: Mistrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful. They are people of a low sort and stock; the hangmen and the bloodhound look out of their faces. Mistrust all who talk much of their justice!”

Why is punishment so popular?

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