Some Thoughts on Forgiveness

This Sunday's message by Pastor Randy was another one that I suspect made a lot of people think--not just reflecting on an interesting topic, but the kind of reflection that asks the question, "Do I really want to go there?" The message was on forgiveness.

We don't much like to forgive. Holding something against someone makes us feel like we're the one in power. In Seinfeld language, we feel like we have "hand." (the upper hand) When we refuse to forgive, we feel like the righteous victim. All self-righteous people feel like they're righteous. But Jesus was not about having the upper-hand in relationships, He was more about having right relationships, which always takes a great deal of humility.

The strange thing about refusing to forgive is that while we think having that upper-hand is freeing, in reality, we hold ourselves in bondage. We want to think that the person who hurt us is the one with the problem, but it is in fact, us who has the problem. The hard thing is that in order to forgive, we have to let go of the upper-hand, we have to let go of the self-righteousness.

Dallas Willard writes about this self-righteousness and the anger associated with it.

"Anger embraced is, accordingly, inherently disintegrative of human personality and life. it does not have to be specifically "acted out" to poison the world. Because of what it is, and the way it seizes upon the body and its environment just by being there, it cannot be hidden. All our mental and emotional resources are marshaled to nurture and tend the anger, and our body throbs with it. Energy is dedicated to keeping the anger alive: we constantly remind ourselves of how wrongly we have been treated."

What Willard is saying is that tt takes energy to stay angry.

When we grow tired of expending the energy on being angry, the anger turns into contempt. Often times, this is the stage where people land. Dallas Willard defines contempt this way:

In anger I want to hurt you. In contempt, I don't care whether you are hurt or not. Or at least so I say. you are not worth consideration one way or the other. We can be angry at someone without denying their worth. But contempt makes it easier for us to hurt them or see them further degraded.

Holding contempt for someone says you've written them off. They are irredeemable.

But as we read the words of Jesus, that's not our judgment to make. "Don't judge or you will be judged," were Jesus' words. He says it another way as well, "If you forgive others, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive others, your heavenly Father will not forgive you." Judging from the amount of broken relationships in the church, I suspect we don't really believe those words. Instead of living in fear of God's unforgiveness, we instead settle for self-righteousness.

If we really believed those words of Jesus, I think more people would be making a greater effort to reconcile relationships and work through anger. Not receiving God's forgiveness is one result of unforgiveness, but there's also a practical result-we're held in bondage by that (oftentimes unknowing) person. We avoid them in the foyer after church, limit the number of places we can sit at the church picnic and decrease the number of people we can truly befriend (since you can't be friends with your friend's enemy). Unforgiveness is crippling to our spiritual life, our social life, and emotional health. With that kind of on-going pain associated with unforgiveness, shouln't we go through the relatively short-lived pain of making things right and live our lives in freedom?