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There’s a missing piece to grace and forgiveness, a missing link if you will, kind of like Bigfoot. It’s a piece of the puzzle I don’t fully understand myself, so you’ll find no brilliant revelations, no solved riddles here. The best I can do is point out that I keep having this visual of a jigsaw puzzle laid out on a table, but it is imperfect, unfinished, because there are some pieces in the middle missing.
I know the answer to this riddle in some kind of spiritual, ethereal way, but I just cannot put my finger on it, I cannot make it tangible and material. I can however, assure you that there is a piece missing from our puzzle. That missing puzzle piece answers the question, “what is the difference between a Christian and a doormat?”
All in good humor here, but I know perfectly well how to go about being a doormat. Being an endless giver in a world full of takers. Forgiving 70 times 70 and smiling all the way through. And then having to do it all over again, forgive the same darn thing that happened again, because some people are slow learners and have to chump you more than once. Oh I get it, let me tell ya. I spent a couple of winters with no windshield wipers, no side window, and no heater, because someone had vandalized my car. I’ve spent weeks riding the bus, walking, because someone slashed my tires and I couldn’t afford new ones. Those are the more amusing irritations.
We Christians who like our Jesus jukes and our soft grace sometimes seem to forget that forgiveness comes with a steep price, that it literally means to absorb the cost on behalf of another. Somebody else paid the bill. Somebody else experienced the suffering brought about by your actions.
Absolutely we should forgive because forgiveness sets us free. As you forgive so shall your Father forgive you. “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.” And on a spiritual level, an individual level, there are no “ands” after that. There are no “buts.” That’s it, we forgive, even our enemies.
But, “and” is true on a cultural level, on a corporate level, it doesn’t end there! Or at least it shouldn’t end there. There is an “and.” There is a “but!” When it comes to being a petty crime victim for example, I just can’t afford to keep absorbing the cost. At some point, you, the trespasser, are going to need to change your behavior. There needs to be some kind of restoration. You might even have to pay some compensation. Make some amends. Regardless, this kind of a doormat relationship is simply unsustainable.
I sometimes have to tell myself, uh no, they already have as Savior who died for them. He isn’t you.
Romans in the Bible makes some of these distinctions for us, “What shall we say, then? Shall we go on sinning so that grace may increase? By no means!” And then later the same idea, What then? Shall we sin because we are not under the law but under grace? By no means!”
The grace and mercy of Jesus calls us to repentance. He absorbed the cost, so we respond to His generosity, to His kindness. He forgives and forgets too, at least in the sense of putting sin as far as the East is from the West.
BUT, BUT, forgiveness is not just like a giant magic eraser and everyone is all happy again. I mean there is usually a big mess, some of which can never be repaired, So clean up your mess, at least as much as it is possible!
Corporately, culturally, as a larger community, we actually become the sinners when we turn the other cheek to evil, to wrong doing. Forgiveness in this context simply becomes avoidance, a lack of love, and self absorbtion. I’m really disappointed that some of the people I hold dear have not grasped this point, have written long posts I shall simply call refusing to try to understand.
The Catholic church had this huge child sexual abuse tragedy and the SBC is now dealing with confrontations of their own failures to address child sexual abuse. A corrupt system that protects itself, and assorted forms of classism, racism, are still realities in our world. These are the tragedies that come about from this kind of weaponized forgiveness, this perversion of grace where we people demand, support, or encourage forgiveness from the least of these, not as a reflection of the grace and goodness of Christ so much as a way of making sure the problem goes away so our own accountability and need to take action never has to come to light.
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See, there's this thing called biology... 
I see your point. To let an unrepentant criminal off the hook is enabling him/her to hurt other people, making you complicit in hurting those other people. Personally, I would turn them in if I could, press charges, and then I would visit them in jail and tell them about Jesus. 😉
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LOL! Thank you for that. Yes, exactly. We can also tell you all about Jesus while you’re in jail.
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Yes…we are to forgive. However, I can forgive the criminal just fine with them behind bars, doing the time for the crime they committed. I forgive the one who stole from me, but that shore don’t mean I will trust them with my check book. Forgiveness is a must. Trust is something they will have to earn back.
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Well said, Patrick!
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Deep stuff, IB. Definitely food for thought, invoking these:
Two pieces, almost identical in appearance at a quick glance, are often forced into place, thereby causing confusion and discontent. They are Grace & Tolerance. Seemingly equal, one actually requires the other. Without the one, the other remains a mere hypocritical pretense.
Fortitude, patience, resilience, strength, endurance, stamina, steadfastness = all forms of Tolerance, are impossible to sincerely possess and properly apply without first having received Grace. Such qualities are godly and require the power of God to rightly implement.
Grace is the revealed conduit through which God appropriates favor. Without it, the puzzle remains unsolved. Compassion, generosity, goodness, kindness, love, tenderness, benevolence, charity, clemency, forbearance, indulgence, leniency, pardon, reprieve, and responsiveness are its components. It cannot be earned and to realize such is to humbly accept it.
A godly administration of Tolerance involves perpetuating an attitude consistent with Grace. Forgiving the sinner does not forget the sin. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.
“Behold, I send you out as sheep in the midst of wolves. Therefore be wise as serpents and harmless as doves” – Mt.10:16.
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Definitely some food for thought on your part too, MJ! Thanks for that comment. “Tolerance” is an interesting word, one of it’s definitions is “to put up with, to endure.” So as the saying goes, “God loves us way too much to leave us where we are at.” God doesn’t want to just tolerate us, He wants to invite us into a relationship.
Kind of related, I’ve just finished reading an article about the judge in the Amber Guyger trial. She doesn’t understand why people are angry after she was seen hugging the defendant. She said something to the effect of, this woman still has a lot of life before her, we need to help her out. That’s good, that’s beautiful, there is lots and lots of Christian love pouring out for this woman. Meanwhile, evidence in the case was likely tampered with, and a witness was just murdered after testifying. So like, there’s this series of dead men now. Where is the Christian love for them and for their families, for the sense of injustice and futility they are probably feeling?
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Reblogged this on Holly T. Ashley and commented:
Perfection!
There’s a missing piece to grace and forgiveness, a missing link if you will, kind of like Bigfoot. It’s a piece of the puzzle I don’t fully understand myself, so you’ll find no brilliant revelations, no solved riddles here. The best I can do is point out that I keep having this visual of a jigsaw puzzle laid out on a table, but it is imperfect, unfinished, because there are some pieces in the middle missing…..
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Thank you, Holly. Much appreciated.
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😁
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Good stuff IB, this is something I struggle with frequently.
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Thanks, Tricia.
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We forgive the person, not the act. God forgives the person, not the act. In response to God’s forgiveness, we try to make the people we’ve wronged whole again, but of course, since they have been wronged, there will be a damaged piece. You know the one: the piece that fell off the table, got jelly on it, got trampled, and then chewed on by a ravenous toddler. It may accidentally fit into its prescribed place, but it looks weird in the picture. It goes without saying that when someone wrongs us, we don’t go breaking his windows out and slandering him in the papers. What this trespasser does is teach us how to regard him. Is he a friend, a relative, a coworker, or a casual acquaintance? Do you stop being friends with this trespasser? How serious is the trespass? Does this person understand that he HAS trespassed against you?
Remember that God forgives everyone. His grace is available for the serial killer and the kid who stole a pen from Costco. But unless one repents and asks for forgiveness–actually seeks God’s grace, he doesn’t receive it. Not everyone goes to Heaven. If we wrong someone, we go to them and ask for forgiveness and then try to make them whole again. If someone wrongs us, we make our forgiveness available (forgive them in our hearts and minds). However, until they confess and repent, they cannot receive our forgiveness. If they do not seek our forgiveness, then they change their status with us. It’s more of the Us vs. Them situation. These transgressors become more on the side of Them than Us, and we leave them to their decisions. We don’t hang around people that continually sin against us and harm us. That would be foolish.
It’s like the little kid that sees the cake in the kitchen. He goes in, licks the bowl with the left-over icing. He has chocolate all over his face. “Johnny, did you lick the icing bowl?” “No Mama! It was the scary guy with the mask!” “I was going to ice some cupcakes with that, now I cannot.” “It was the scary guy!” “Uh, huh…” After dinner that night, Dad asks, “Can I have some cake?” “Yes! of course!” Johnny is confused when he doesn’t get any cake. “If you had asked for the icing, I would have put it on a cupcake for you and given it to you, but you didn’t ask, you took. So there is no icing and no cake for you.” And…Mom doesn’t leave the cake and icing in a place where Johnny can get to it from that point on.
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Great comment. “We forgive the person, not the act,” I think that’s a really good clarification.
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The way I see it, we are not beings who from that point enter into relationship, we are beings-in-relationship, who from that point discover and create our identities. That means that right relatedness is always the primary goal of our ethical decision-making. In other words, unless we are in right relationships (and we are in relationship with everybody with whom we share the planet, not just the ones we like), we will always function sub-optimally, always be less than we could be. Forgiveness, I think, is a step in the process of creating right relatedness. It is a necessary precursor to repentance – people need to be given the psychological space to turn their lives around, and if they feel persecuted, guilty, worthless, angry – any powerful negative sentiment that can act as a barrier to repentance – they will not change. That means that while forgiveness does not excuse the crime – it is, in fact, an acknowledgement that it is wrong, and deserves punishment, but that this is forgone – it places the priority on restored relationship rather than reciprocal violence, recognising that reciprocal violence does nothing to restore, and therefore can only ultimately harm society.
But forgiveness of the perpetrator is only a step – the necessary first step – in the process. It does not, in and of itself, restore the relationship. That requires work. A healthy relationship is not one in which problematic power relations are allowed to play out, and I would argue that most crimes are expressions of the existence of problematic power relations. So reconciliation cannot simply allow things to go back to the way they were. It has to change those things that create and sustain the problem power relations. Sometimes those changes are not within the control of either party- sometimes systemic evils (like patriarchy and colonialism) have created climates and webs of problematic ways of relating that no one person can undo. But then what is culture if not an accumulation of individual relationships in society, a general thread that runs (in subtly different ways) through the individual lives of the members of the group? That means that as individuals elect to relate differently, the tenor of society begins to shift.
A doormat means letting things stay as they are; reconciliation means making the relationship right. Sometimes that might mean the offender needs to be restricted from interacting with other people until they can do so appropriately (what the prison system should be doing, but it is really based on controlled revenge, not on justice; why I think abused women should leave the abusers and file charges). Forgiveness does mean absorbing the cost in the sense that one denies oneself the right to retaliate. But this is done because there is a recognition that retaliation does nothing towards reconciliation: it perpetuates the systemic obsession with reciprocal violence that ultimately keeps people in antagonistic relationships. It does so because it recognises that if the cycle is to end, if the problem power relations are to be eradicated, then both parties need to respond differently: there can be no victims and no abusers, and if I refuse the role I was playing, you have the opportunity to refuse yours too.
I really think that we do ourselves a disservice by conceptualising morailty and ethics as personal issues. We are, I think, always “being-with” before we are “being”, and I think once we see that, the gospel looks subtly but irrevocably different. Reconciliation becomes a process (which it always is), not an event. It is not something I perform over and over again, it is an ongoing commitment to not allowing the relationship to go back into the space where the dysfunction can hurt the individuals.
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