MY GRANDMOTHER, GOD rest her soul, lived by a social calculus that I never understood as a boy. She and my grandfather would occasionally be invited to weddings, and it would fall to her to decide what to buy as a wedding gift. In making that decision, she didn’t begin with what she thought the bride would like or what the new couple could use. When possible, she started with remembering what gift that family had brought to my mother’s wedding. If it was a lavish gift, she would buy a similarly lavish gift in return. If it was, in her estimation, a cheap gift, then she would cheap out as well. The thought process, it seems, was: Serves you right; you disrespect my family, and I’ll dis yours.

It boggled my mind. I still have a fuzzy mental picture of where we were standing in her house when she told me this. She said it very matter-of-factly, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. Not only did I not understand that way of thinking, I had a hard time believing that she could actually remember all the gifts people brought to a wedding that had happened so many years ago.

But now, in hindsight, I think I understand. It didn’t matter whether her memory of who brought what specific gift was accurate; what mattered was the emotional impression each gift left. Most of the gifts probably left little to no impression and were forgotten. But to her, others felt especially respectful or disrespectful, and that impression was forever after associated with the families that gave those gifts. In her mind, therefore, some families deserved something nice in reciprocation, while other families deserved retaliation.

She had a long memory for such things. And if the truth be told, so do we, particularly in the way we hold our grudges and resentment.

ALL THE WAY back at the beginning of our study of First Corinthians 13, I mentioned a story from Matthew 18, of Peter coming to Jesus to ask how many times he was obligated to forgive someone who offended him. It’s fair, I think, to assume that Peter’s intentions were good. He wanted to be a better person, and to him, forgiving up to seven times sounded like a worthy goal.

But Jesus’ answer was meant to turn Peter’s way of thinking inside out. A righteous kind of forgiveness isn’t simply about imposing a rule of behavior from the outside, especially if it means continuing to hold a grudge while you struggle to do the “good” religious thing. True forgiveness, rather, is about a change of heart, about being transformed on the inside.

And so is love. In First Corinthians 13:5, Paul teaches that love “keeps no record of wrongs.” Paul’s verb could be translated as “compute” or “inventory.” To say that love doesn’t keep a record of offenses is not to say that such a record doesn’t exist in memory — but the question is what we do with that memory and how it shapes the way we treat the other person.

Again, think of the parable Jesus told Peter in response to his question about his obligation to forgive. Jesus told a story about a servant with an unimaginably huge and unpayable debt to the king, who unexpectedly cancelled the debt and let the servant go. That servant remembered the debt he was owed by someone else, and desperately and violently tried to collect.

When the king called the servant in to condemn such behavior, he didn’t deny that the other man owed the servant money. He didn’t say that he had no right to remember the debt. But he did say that he should have extended the same mercy to the other man that he himself had received when he groveled before the throne. Mercy, rightly understood and rightly received, should beget mercy.

MANY OF US can explicitly remember things that happened to us long ago. Some of them are happy memories. But many of them are unhappy memories of being mistreated. And even when we aren’t consciously recalling such memories, they can unconsciously shape our emotions. Our brains are wired to remember things that have hurt or threatened us in the past, the better to avoid them in the future. If that weren’t the case, we’d keep touching hot stoves, literally or figuratively.

The problem, though, is that this automatic process can set us up for a merry-go-round of resentment and anger. Let’s take together the last three things Paul has taught about love:

[Love] is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs… (1 Cor 13:5)

We are by nature self-seeking, wanting to protect our own interests both physically and socially. That’s not in itself a bad thing. But often, when someone hurts or offends us, we will have an enduring memory of that event, and that memory will shape — whether consciously or unconsciously — how we see and respond to that person going forward. The implicit memory of past hurts makes us more wary, more sensitive to new slights, more likely to be quick to anger.

That in turn can fuel our ongoing resentment, a conscious and calculating rumination about how terrible the other person is. That can lead to unloving behavior. And in an ongoing relationship, that may mean doing things that offend the other person. We may think our attitude and behavior is justified — but then again, the other person probably thinks the same thing. Around and around we go, each keeping a record of the other’s bad behavior, each causing new offenses.

What stops the merry-go-round? The commitment to love.

DON’T GET ME wrong. I’m not saying that there aren’t cases in which we have been intentionally hurt by someone else. Again, to use Jesus’ metaphor, there are legitimate moral debts to be paid. Nor am I saying that we should just “forgive and forget,” at least the way that phrase is typically used to encourage people to act as if the offense had never happened.

Nor is Paul trying to guilt individuals into becoming best friends with their abusers. His concern, if you will, is the unity of the community. Love for one another is what sets the followers of Jesus apart; it’s a tangible demonstration of the truth of the gospel.

So, the question isn’t whether we’ll remember past offenses; the question is what we’ll do when those memories arise. We can self-righteously lean into anger and resentment, or we can remember what we’ve been forgiven and lean into love instead.

Why should we do this? Because as Paul will suggest next, our truest and deepest joy should be in whatever serves the gospel.