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December 1, 2021 - January 9, 2022
If perpetrators were repentant, forgiveness would come more easily. But too often they are not.
“the predicament of partiality”—the inability of the parties locked in conflict to agree on the moral significance of their actions.
forgiveness breaks the power of the remembered past and transcends the claims of the affirmed justice and so makes the spiral of vengeance grind to a halt.
Lamech’s kind of revenge, which returns seventy-seven blows for every one received, seemed, paradoxically, the only way to root out injustice (Gen 4:23-24). Turning Lamech’s logic on its head, however, Jesus demanded his followers not simply to forego revenge but to forgive as many times as Lamech sought to avenge himself (Matt 18:21).
Only those who are forgiven and who are willing to forgive will be capable of relentlessly pursuing justice without falling into the temptation to pervert it into injustice, we could add.
For the followers of the crucified Messiah, the main message of the imprecatory Psalms is this: rage belongs before God76—not in the reflectively managed and manicured form of a confession, but as a pre-reflective outburst from the depths of the soul.
by placing unattended rage before God we place both our unjust enemy and our own vengeful self face-to-face with a God who loves and does justice.
And when one knows that God’s love is greater than all sin, one is free to see oneself in the light of God’s justice and so rediscover one’s own sinfulness.
though we must forgive, in a very real sense no one can either forgive or retain sins “but God alone” (Mark 2:7).
“Forgiveness” sums up much of the significance of the cross78—for Christians the ultimate symbol at the same time of the destructiveness of human sin and of the greatness of God’s love.
As Dietrich Bonhoeffer saw clearly, forgiveness itself is a form of suffering;80 when I forgive I have not only suffered a violation but also suppressed the rightful claims of retributive justice.
in a world of irreversible deeds and partisan judgments redemption from the passive suffering of victimization cannot happen without the active suffering of forgiveness.
Forgiveness is the boundary between exclusi...
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Much more than just the absence of hostility sustained by the absence of contact, peace is communion between former enemies
the cross says that despite its manifest enmity toward God humanity belongs to God;
“While we were enemies, we were reconciled to God through the death of his son,” writes the Apostle Paul (Rom 5:10).
As an expression of the will to embrace the enemy the cross is no doubt a scandal in a world suffused with hostility.
we feel we need the cunning wisdom of serpents, but the cross invites us to the foolishness of innocent doves (1 Cor 1:18ff.).
even as a judgment against enmity, the cross remains an offense in a world of violence.
Will not such a “word of the cross” be all too good news for the perpetrator?
For the very nature of the triune God is reflected on the cross of Christ. Inversely, the cross of Christ is etched in the heart of the triune God;
Note first the two dimensions of the passion of Christ: self-giving love that overcomes human enmity and the creation of space in himself to receive estranged humanity.
By eating the bread and drinking the wine, we remember the body broken “for us” who were God’s enemies, and the blood spilled to establish a “new covenant” with us who have broken the covenant (1 Cor 11:24-25).
the act of forgetting the evil suffered, a certain kind of forgetting I hasten to add.98 It is a forgetting that assumes that the matters of “truth” and “justice” have been taken care of (see Chapters V and VI), that perpetrators have been named, judged, and (hopefully) transformed, that victims are safe and their wounds healed (see Chapter VII), a forgetting that can therefore ultimately take place only together with the creation of “all things new.”
even if thinking can deny evil, it cannot remove pain; it triumphs not “over real evil but only over its aesthetic phantom,” as Paul Ricoeur puts it.
Such redemptive forgetting is implied in a passage in Revelation about the new heavens and the new earth. “Mourning and crying and pain” will be no more not only because “death will be no more” but also because “the former things have passed away” (Rev 21:4 CEB)—from experience as well as from memory, as the text in Isaiah from which Revelation quotes explicitly states: “the former things shall not be remembered or come to mind” (Isa 65:17; cf. 43:18).120
The God of Israel, who is about “to do a new thing” and who calls people “not to remember the former things,” promises to blot their transgression out of God’s own memory (Isa 43:18-19, 25; cf. 65:17). “I will forgive their wrongdoing and never again remember their sins” (Jer 31:34 CEB).
“God has made me forget all my hardship and all my father’s house” (Gen 41:51).
Hierarchies cannot be simply leveled, least of all through struggle; they must be inverted: the Lamb is the Shepherd (Rev 7:17) and the Kings are the Servants (Rev 22:1-5).
the narrative of the cross is not a “self-contradictory” story of a God who “died” because God broke the covenant, but a truly incredible story of God doing what God should neither have been able nor willing to do—a story of God who “died” because God’s all too human covenant partner broke the covenant.
If such suffering of the innocent party strikes us as unjust, in an important sense it is unjust. Yet this “injustice” is precisely what it takes to renew the covenant.
The readjustment of complementary identities, the repairing of the covenant even by those who have not broken it, and the refusal to let the covenant ever be undone—these are the key features of a social covenant conceived in analogy to a Christian theology of the new covenant.
“embrace”—a metaphor that seeks to combine the thought of reconciliation with the thought of dynamic and mutually conditioning identities.
There is no coming to oneself without the memory of belonging.
The first link with the other in a distant country of broken relationships is memory.
With an identity constructed out of the shell of the original identity as a son and the broken pieces of the attempted identity as a “nonson,” the prodigal sets out on the journey home.
The second surprise is the father’s permission to leave with “all he had” (15:13).
Away from home, the son remained still in the father’s heart.
No confession was necessary for the arms to open up and the offer of embrace to be extended for the simple reason that the relationship did not rest on moral performance and therefore could not be destroyed by immoral acts.
Confession followed acceptance (15:21). But it did follow, without interruption.
The first interruption enacted an unconditional acceptance; the second performed a transformation.
The older brother did not like the music and dance around the prodigal’s return. He was angry and would not come in (15:28). The spatial distancing was an outward sign of inner exclusion. The prodigal is no longer his brother; he is “this son of yours”
As long as the younger brother and the father have a relationship (“this son of yours” [v. 30]) he will exclude himself from the relationship with the father.
The older brother is not just insulted because he behaved better but was treated worse (15:29-30). Neither is he simply acting out his fear over his inheritance207 that he now may be obliged to share. Instead, he is angry because some basic rules have been broken—not oppressive rules that destroy life but rules without which no civil life would be possible.208 The one who works (15:29) deserves more recognition than the one who squanders; celebrating the squanderer is squandering. The one who obeys where obedience is due (15:29) deserves more honor than the one who irresponsibly breaks
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preference for the excluding one is tacit exclusion of the faithful one.
Powerful arguments demanded that the one who excludes others be excluded, the one who disobeyed do penance, the one who squandered repay.
Obsession with the rules—not bad rules, but salutary rules!—encourages self-righteousness and the demonization of others.
Insistence on observance of the rules fosters polarities where none are to be found and heightens them where they do exist.
relationship has priority over all rules.
Relationship is prior to moral rules; moral performance may do something to the relationship, but relationship is not grounded in moral performance.
