How Can Forgiveness
Find a Root in Us?
The Outrages of Life
We read about the Burmese army’s terrorizing of ethnic groups and the tens of thousands of women and children dying in the Holy Land and Ukraine. We see images of bombed houses and hospitals in war zones and hear the hateful shouts of White Supremacists in Charlottesville. And we wonder: what do we do with our despair, even outrage?
Then there are the more daily hurts and injustices of our
lives, perhaps some coming from decades ago.
We try to leave them behind; but as Timon said in the Lion King: “Just because it’s in the
past doesn’t mean it still doesn’t hurt.”
In such a world, we wonder how forgiveness can take root in
our hearts.
Jesus talked a lot about forgiveness. Volf points out that Jesus reversed Lamach’s policy for responding to outrage. Lamach says he will avenge himself seventy-seven fold (Gen. 4:23-24). Yet Jesus turned this dynamic on its head and commanded his fellow Hebrews to forgive seventy-seven fold (Matt 18:21).
Jesus was talking to people who likely took talk of forgiveness with a grain of salt. Jesus and his fellow Hebrews lived under an oppressively violent occupying army who acted on behalf of a foreign government who committed daily outrages against the people of Palestine. Forgiveness was not an academic topic for Jesus or his people.
Jesus was executed by this occupying force in his homeland. As he dies, he says “Father forgive them” (Luke 23:34). That is where he stood on the topic.
The Irreversibility of Some Outrages
The problem with many of the outrages of the world is their irreversibility, argues Miroslav Volf (Exclusion & Embrace—A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation, pg. 121-23). The consequences of past wrongs continue to plague us, even passing from generation to generation. The damage cannot be undone; there is no fixing things.
How can we find the freedom to forgive others in such a world?
People Like Us
Philip Caputo, an American soldier in Vietnam, recounts a day when he and his unit were dropped by helicopter into a swampy jungle southwest of Danang. They made their way through the difficult terrain encountering Vietnamese fighters, who retreated back into the countryside at the Americans’ advance. Caputo and his comrades cut their way through the thickets, looking for dead and wounded enemy fighters. It was a dangerous undertaking. Wounded soldiers can still fire rifles and toss grenades; ambushes were common as battlefields were “mopped up.”
They came upon a hut that had been used as a base camp by the enemy. They cautiously made their way up to the structure and finally inside. Among the military equipment and battle manuals left behind, they found a stack of letters to and from families and girlfriends. There were photos of mothers and fathers and sweethearts. Notes were scribbled on the edges of some of the photographs.
Caputo writes:
I was filled with conflicting emotions. What we had found gave to the enemy the humanity I wished to deny him. It was comforting to realize that the Viet Cong were flesh and blood instead of the mysterious wraiths I had thought them to be; but this same realization aroused an abiding sense of remorse. These were men we had helped to kill, men whose deaths would afflict other people with irrevocable loss (A Rumor of War pg. 122).
Caputo goes on to write that when they were back at their base, a PFC “expressed what may have been a collective emotion. ‘They’re young men,’ he told me. ‘They are just like us, lieutenant. It’s always the young men who die.’”
They are just like us.
This the nascent realization that begins the journey to forgiveness. This a taking to heart of Genesis 1:27: “So God created humankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them, male and female he created them.” We are all created in God’s image. Are not all people, in some way “just like us?”
This is the fertile ground into which the seeds of forgiveness are sown. It make take years, even a lifetime, for those tender shoots to mature. This may be the work of a lifetime.
A Beginning Place
Jesus will always be an aspirational figure for us. Few of us are Christ-like enough to bless someone while they are unjustly executing us. A good beginning point in the process is to remember the words of that PFC: “They are just like us.” In one way they are all like us. The criminals and despots, the White Supremacists and the occupying armies—they are all made in the image of God. In that way they are “just like us.”
The image God lies within each of us. Sometimes that image is so deeply buried, so marred by the powers and principalities of this world, it is very difficult to see. We can just assume it is there and act accordingly.
Jim Kelsey
Executive Minister-American Baptist Churches of
New York State
