Forgiveness is the lynch pin

I recently went over my old, unposted posts here on the blog. Most of them were half written, incomplete meditations or things that ended up feeling too raw to share in this forum. But I also happened upon one about forgiveness. It was during a season when I had been thinking a lot about forgiveness. Examining it from a variety of angles (i.e., personal, psychological, historical, theological, etc.) - it seems like I understood something for a minute there. Something I was glad to be reminded about.

Below is the post (edited a bit). I hope it resonates for you. 

I've been thinking about forgiveness a lot lately. I remember when this current meditation started. I was at the Christmas Tea at Calvary Chapel Spring Valley and the speaker was talking about the importance of slowing down and reflecting on the Christmas story rather than running around completely distracted. It was a good talk, but in my case at least, she was preaching to the choir. I want to have SLOW DOWN tattooed on my heart. So I was tuning in and tuning out - but then she said something that really stuck out for me. She was making the point that Jesus was the perfect gift and she said something like, "If our problem was a lack of knowledge, He would've sent an academic. If our problem was financial, He would've sent an economist. If our problem was political, He would've sent a politician. But our problem is sin, and so He sent forgiveness in the form of a savior."

This really got me thinking because my tendency is to see the world's problems as so multifaceted as to be nearly unsolvable. You know... I tend to think that war, starvation and injustice are the result of socioeconomic factors, historical pressures, unequal distribution of wealth, corrupt politicians, physical conditions, biological differences, etc - I do not typically see them as all tied to a singular root, much less the single root of sin and un-forgiveness. Yet this is what she was saying... and so I started spinning it around in my mind. Thinking about my life, thinking about my clients lives, my friends lives and trends between cultures and times.

And I gotta tell you - the more I think about it, the more I think forgiveness is the lynch pin in the whole redemption plan.

Think about it like this - sin and un-forgiveness are intricately tied such that to some degree every sin is tied to an unhealed (and most likely unforgiven) wound. Since the first sin, there has been a (generally) uninterrupted pattern of broken (sinned against) people hurting (sinning against) other people.

To make this personal, when you are sinned against - you are hurt. Without forgiveness, that hurt drives you to act on your own behalf to either (1) get revenge or (2) insure that "never happens to me again." Problem is revenge immediately hurts the other (sin as a reaction to sin - increasing rather than decreasing our overall problem) and trying to insure that it "never happens again" still eventually hurts others.

How exactly does that happen you might ask? How does protecting myself from being sinned against actually cause me to sin against others?

I think when ever we resolve to completely avoid taking one relational role we necessarily take it's complementary role. So for example, if we resolve to never be the victim again, we become the perpetrator.

The way this really resonated for me was through a conversation I had with a Jewish girlfriend of mine this past week. She was talking about how she and her husband had parted ways with Jewish tradition because they couldn't understand the unmasked hatred toward the Palestinian people. She also shared some of her experiences growing up Jewish where the motto was "never again" referring to the losses in the Holocaust and Russia due to genocide. Specifically, she described the Jewish people as determining to prevent their own oppression by building up physical (a huge and elite armed force), intellectual (a large number of highly educated people), and financial (accumulating wealth) power. Power they will now use to scare, manipulate or buy their safety. Sadly, this plan "to protect" looks eerily like the plan originally used to by their oppressors.

From my perspective, the cost of unforgiveness in this situation is incredibly high - without forgiveness the only choice was to become (or at least resemble closely) that which they hate.

And I don't think this plays out on only a political level either. I am pretty sure it boils down to the personal level as well. By seeking to avoid being abused, you become an abuser - to avoiding being controlled, controlling - to avoid being rejected, rejecting. And perhaps its not always so clean and parallel but it seems highly likely to me that all the wounding comes from wounds.

Thus, what did we need - an economist? an academic? a therapist?

No, we needed to start forgiving each other. A reason to start seeing each other as broken people in need of love, wounding us out of a place of brokenness.

We needed Jesus. We needed someone to model and live a life of radical love and forgiveness. We needed some one to say, "You have heard it said: 'Love your neighbor and hate your enemy' But I tell you: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you." But more than that, we needed someone to LIVE IT! A man that would carry a cross for nothing. Who would be "pierced for our transgressions" and still say "Father forgive them, the know not what they are doing."

We still need Him. I need Him every single day. I need Him so that I can remember why I need to forgive. I need Him so that I have a prayer of remembering even when I am persecuted, even if when I am diminished, even if when I am aching that it is NEVER my job to make sure it doesn't happen again. It is my job to forgive.