A professor of world religions tells a story about one of her students, a young Muslim from Morocco, who worked part time as a waiter in a Boston hotel. Abdul, who went by ‘Mike’ to keep things simple, was an avid and attentive student, always bringing in news clippings and other tidbits related to the religions the class was studying. One day he came to class and reported on a nasty fight that had erupted among some of his coworkers at the hotel. Among other things, insults were uttered in which the integrity of mothers and sisters had been impugned. Afraid the tension would turn physical, Mike intervened. He sat his fuming coworkers down and informed them that they had a duty to forgive one another because they were Christians, and forgiveness was what Christianity was all about. “I know,” he said, “because I am taking a course.”

I don’t know whether Mike’s instruction had any impact on his Christian friends, but he was right about one thing: forgiveness is what Christianity is all about. It’s about lots of other things too, of course. I expect that if pressed most people would name love as its distinctive practice, or perhaps justice; but love is not love in the full Christian sense, nor is justice, until it has confronted the hard and terrible imperative of forgiveness and met the challenge.

Although the other two Abrahamic traditions also enjoin forgiveness on their adherents, I think it’s fair to say that neither has posed the requirement to forgive in quite the same way as Christianity. The Christian practice extends from everyday making nice among intimates to the forbearance of enemies, the pardon of persecutors, and reconciliation among nations. It hopes for, expects, and demands repentance and reparation, but does not always condition itself on either, and is to be offered even in their absence. Thus it stands at the center of Christian faith as its glory and its stumbling block, a gracious miracle and an awful scandal. If Paul is right that when all is ended, love will be the last and greatest virtue standing, it will likely have the look of an astonished enemy forgiven.

The commandment to forgive is baffling and even upsetting to many people who are not Christians. Some of my Jewish and Muslim friends are not fond of the parable of the prodigal son, for example. The pardon of the reckless son and the apparent neglect of his dutiful brother seem arbitrary and unjust. They find it hard to grasp why Christians think such a patently unfair story is so heartening. The truth is that many Christians find this story hard to fathom as well. At the same time that we secretly hope God will receive and pardon us just as the father embraces the prodigal, our hackles are raised by how easy it all seems. The kid has gotten away with murder—no questions asked, no groveling required, no penance imposed. And the elder boy gets our immediate sympathy: he deserves better.

There is no doubt that the Christian understanding of forgiveness is a touchy and complicated matter. On the interpersonal level, it is complicated especially by the assumptions of the age in which we live, a time when the human psyche is center-stage and the knowledge derived from its exploration informs much of the church’s pastoral practice. This is, of course, a good thing. I could list a thousand ways in which it is so, but suffice it to say that anything that affords insight into, instills compassion for, and contributes to the healing of a human being, mind and body, is unmistakably of God. I do not want to be misunderstood, then, when I say that in the case of the Christian practice of forgiveness, our therapeutic reflex may be helping disciples miss the peculiarly Christian mystery, and the point.

It has become commonplace in the therapist’s office and from the pulpits of Christian churches to note that forgiveness has the power to heal the one who forgives. We often hear it said that to withhold forgiveness is to harm ourselves, that forgiveness relieves us of the burden of anger and hate, and that it is therefore as much, if not more, a gift for us as it is for the person forgiven. A well-circulated Facebook meme sums it up: “Forgive others not because they deserve forgiveness, but because you deserve peace.” Forgiveness from this standpoint is about the well-being of the forgiver, not the one forgiven.

This sounds right to our psychologically-attuned ears. And in an important way it is. Psychological studies and personal experience teach that forgiveness can and does make us feel better, and that the long, fraught process of forgiving someone yields immense benefits for the one who engages it with purpose. Holding onto hate and hurt, allowing blame and anger to fester, corrodes the psyche and has an adverse impact on both body and soul. Again, this is indisputable, and anything we can do to lessen this pain and relieve this burden is too little. However, to posit personal peace as the reason we need to learn to forgive, or even as the implied goal of forgiveness, is to miss the transforming power of the particularly Christian practice of pardon.

We do not forgive because we deserve peace; we forgive because Jesus told us to forgive. We do not forgive because forgiving will heal us; we forgive because it is what Christians do. Our practice of forgiveness is before all else a practice of obedience. In other words, it is a mark of discipleship, a characteristic of the sequela Christi. If they know we are Christians by our love, they will know it unmistakably by the patient, responsive, and obedient practice of the kind of love that ideally pardons even the unpardonable, that seeks the good of the enemy, the healing and well-being of the all who sin against us. And because pardoning, especially pardoning enemies and persecutors, does not come naturally to us, we need to learn it by being obedient to a commandment that compels us to do what we would never do left to our own devices.

When people forgive their offenders soon after the offense, as in the memorable case of the Amish parents of murdered schoolchildren, we often recoil. It feels too soon. But such folk are not forgiving once and for all. They are instead starting someplace. They are obediently saying the words of forgiveness, knowing that by saying them they are beginning a practice that, they trust, will eventually help them feel and live what they say. We forgive our way into forgiving–this is the nature of practice, and it is the nature of obedience.

–Rubens, Return of the Prodigal

Now, if forgiving were a commandment  that enjoins us only to obey, we might rightly chafe under it; but it is more than a commandment—it is a person, “it is the Lord”—the same Lord who taught (ah, the parables of Luke!) that God’s joy increases when the lost are found and sinners are restored; the same Lord who embodied his teaching in his person and practice, a practice of mercy that included us. And because we love him gratefully for the mercy we have known, it is to this Lord and no other that we respond in obedience when we set out on the path of pardon to benefit our enemies, as he did his, and to seek their good.

We forgive because Jesus, whom we love, commanded it. We forgive as he did also because we know from our own experience of being forgiven that it is good to be forgiven. We want offenders and enemies and persecutors to know what we have known. To love someone who does not love us or who has caused us harm and grief is something we do for that other, not for ourselves. It’s her peace we are after, not our own.

I am not saying that this is easy, pleasant, straightforward, or quick. I am saying that it is the kenotic pattern we have been given, the pattern faith tells us will save. We love and are children of a God who does not shrink from humiliation. We follow a self-emptying Christ. Our practice is meant to conform to this divine impulse: it was to heal and restore that God’s life was poured out in other-directed and sacrificial compassion. It is hard to imagine that Jesus ever considered what was in it for him to pardon the tormentors who nailed him to the cross.

This is not to say that his practice on the cross did not affect him in any way. For all we know, it made him even more human, even more complete, even more lovely and whole than he was before he extended that amazing grace. The point is not that forgiveness doesn’t benefit us who forgive; it’s not even that we should not hope it will benefit us, or be grateful when it does, or help others see that pardoning is a process that does good to the one who pardons. The point is that a disciple of Jesus is content to forgive because Jesus did, because we were the objects of that largess, and because he told us to go and do likewise. That is enough. That there are side effects and consequences for us—things that are rich and good and human and welcome—is grace upon grace.

The idea that we forgive as much or more for ourselves than for the one forgiven is not a Christian idea. It has merit and therapeutic value, and that value cannot be discounted in the large discussion of forgiveness as a human process, difficult and prolonged, rewarding and needed. I am not aiming to drive an artificial wedge between Christian faith and human experience. I mean only to affirm that for disciples, because we are in the image of the self-emptying Christ, the goal of pardoning cannot be expressly or primarily self-seeking, even as it is true that our practice of pardoning delivers blessings of wholeness and peace to us that are in themselves desirable and good.

In the end, of course, the Christian wisdom is that the offender deserves forgiveness every bit as much as the offended against deserves healing, unburdening, and peace—which is to say, not at all. No one deserves anything in Christ’s economy of grace. We simply and unaccountably receive; we get to share in every good that Christ has to offer because God is like that—generous, compassionate, merciful, and good. We forgive and we accept forgiveness (a practice every bit as difficult and demanding and, without grace, impossible as forgiving is) because as partakers of the kingdom’s largess we move in a gracious universe–in theologian Mark Heim’s felicitous words, “the vast accomplished grace around us.”

In this resurrection cosmos, deserving drops away as a frame of reference. What takes its place is the kind of solidarity that makes it increasingly difficult to distinguish hurt from hurt. Our enemy, we discover to our own pain, is also a sufferer: someone has harmed, hated, and feared him too. And we who forgive also need forgiving for our countless offenses against the other.

There is no innocence in the kingdom, only mercy; and a revolutionary vision, available to anyone who desires it, by which—after a lifetime of hard and painful practice, our hearts fixed on Christ’s compassion–we may come to see at last the profound common suffering of our common human condition, the breathtaking truth that the sinner and the sinned against share one flesh, one damaged human heart.

I Corinthians 13

Ah, Paul on love. Not love with candy hearts and lace doilies, mind you, because for Paul love is not the way we’re supposed to feel about each other. Rather, love is a kind of conduct that builds a reliable community of faith. The love Paul describes is the divine gift that makes all God’s other gifts work correctly – that is, for the common good.

Exercised without love, even the best gifts won’t help a congregation over the long haul, and may even harm it, as the Corinthians are learning the hard way. So this lyrical passage on love is also just plain old Paul, hammering home his vision of what God really has in mind for people who call themselves ‘church.’

Because love is a gift, you can’t force it. But Paul says you can create conditions of possibility for receiving it by acting as if you already have it. You can develop habits and practices of love that train your heart to be responsive to grace.

These practices and habits will also serve as counterweights to the strong emotions and showy stars to which churches are prone to hitch their communal wagons, only to discover later that such things are ephemeral. They vanish as fast as they appear and leave us, as someone once characterized it, spinning our wheels like the Road-Runner in mid-air with no traction.

But Christ’s love was not a flash in the pan. It was a deed he did and kept on doing even after he was nailed to a cross. In order to build up Christ’s Body, then, Paul knows something more is required than occasional brilliance on the part of a few, or the thrill of excitement that momentarily animates a congregation. You need everybody to practice – to do love, to act patiently, to behave kindly, to conduct themselves humbly, in fact to rejoice over the good, and to stop being so damned rude. Not everyone can raise the dead like Jesus, preach like Paul, prophesy like John, be a martyr like Stephen, or fix heating systems like J. J. Sullivan & Sons; but everyone can take a walk on a “more excellent way,” as Paul puts it; everyone can learn to behave.

Of course, although marriage was not the original context of this strong corrective message, what Paul says about community-building love applies as well to married love, be it between Adam and Eve or Adam and Steve. So it’s no surprise that we hear it so often at weddings, even at weddings that are in church only because it’s traditional to have them there, or because it’ll make Grandma happy, or because it’s convenient to the reception hall.

It was chosen by a relative of mine for his wedding some years ago, and when he and his now former wife asked me to “say a few words” about it at the ceremony, I did. I said that if their marriage was going to last (since half of all marriages don’t), they’d need to cultivate habits that would make them receptive to the gift of love. I said that they could not kid themselves that all they’d ever need for their marriage to keep working right would be the feelings they had for each other on their wedding day.

That poor dreamy couple didn’t give a flying bull-pucky what I said. They were lost somewhere in Lace Doily Land. The congregation didn’t care either. They were fidgety because their children were fidgety, and probably also because I was saying a few words more than the few words I’d been asked to say. Afterwards, the groom’s father approached me. He had been listening, and he was offended. “Jeez!” he said. “Why did you have to say all that? You’ll scare ‘em to death!”

I felt bad, of course. I had unknowingly transgressed an unwritten understanding about weddings – namely, that when you’re asked to say a few words all they want you to do is say, “Ain’t love grand?” and sit down. Anyway, those two aren’t married any more, and it’s a darned shame, all the pain they caused each other. I wish that text had scared them more than it did. I wish it would scare our congregations too.

–Ancient mosaic of Nazareth

Jeremiah 1:4-10; Luke 4: 21-30

I’m sometimes puzzled by the italicized headings in my Bible. Take this episode in the 4^th chapter of Luke. It’s labeled ‘the rejection of Jesus by his townsfolk.’  I agree that trying to hurl someone over a cliff is  a pretty emphatic form of rejection. All the same, I think it’d be fairer to call this passage ‘the not all that unsurprising reaction of his kinsmen to a very petulant Jesus,’ or more succinctly, “Jesus provokes his neighbors to violence.’

What’s wrong with neighbors fawning over you? Isn’t it a perfectly human and ordinary thing to be proud of a newly famous hometown kid, and even to congratulate yourselves that maybe you had something to do with his success? Why is Jesus determined to preempt their 15 minutes of fame?  They barely get through their burst of amazement when he starts flinging accusations at them.

“You will doubtless say, ‘Doctor, cure yourself…’” Well, no, there’s no indication at all that they were going to say that. But he taunts them anyway with Bible stories about God extending to outsiders the mercy usually reserved for insiders. It doesn’t take long for them to get his drift: “That’s what I’m doing. You say you love me, but when I start acting like the God of these stories, you’ll try to kill me. So why should I do any miracles for you?”

Oh my. Of course, he’s right about the future, and he’s right about them. But they’re not hostile now, they’re not angry yet. Why pick a fight? The text doesn’t say, but this testy Jesus reminds me of people I know who suffer what hasn’t happened yet. Psychologists call it anticipatory grief. You know something bad is on the horizon and you feel its pain long before it arrives. Far be it from me to play shrink to my Savior, but Jesus’ baiting of his kinfolk at the outset of his prophetic career smacks of anticipatory grief.

It’s why Jeremiah manufactures all those reasons to say no to God’s call “to build up and to tear down, to plant and to destroy.” It’s that tearing down and destroying part he’s worried about, the part of prophesying that, as another preacher noted, makes it unlikely that prophets will die peacefully in their beds. There’s no such thing as a successful career based on trashing people’s sensibilities. Everybody knows that. So when the young Jeremiah finally says yes, he knows he’s just agreed, if not to a death sentence, at least to a really hard and thankless life.

At the synagogue in Nazareth, Jesus is fast-forwarding to the worst case scenario, rehearsing a violent end at the beginning of his mission, trying on the shroud he will be buried in three years later, forcing the hometown folks to play their part and put it on him so that he can get a feel for its texture and dimensions, a feel for the role, the pattern of a prophet’s short and dangerous life.

Maybe it’s practice. And if it is, it poses a question for us.

Have we tried on any shrouds lately? Do we know the size we’re going to need? In what ways have we been rehearsing, even provoking the wrath to come—the wrath of the insiders who sense that they’re implicated in the great sin of mercilessness but can’t face it, and think that killing the messenger safeguards their illusion of righteousness? Have we been scrimmaging and skirmishing enough, flirting with the edges of cliffs, so that when the big battle comes down the road, we will be ready to see it through unflinchingly to the bitter end?

If Jesus is practicing, it poses a question for us. For us who say we believe in the merciful inclusive God and believe we’re totally with the program. For us who think of ourselves as the wideners of circles and the welcomers of all. For us who are so persuaded that God loves everybody without exception that we get provoked by the narrowness of those who don’t and commit mental violence against them, figuratively throwing them off cliffs of our own. For us who talk a good game. For us who must humbly confess that we have a long way to go in the business of following Jesus to the bottom of things, over the edge and into life.

Sometime in1206, a young dandy named Francesco Bernadone went out riding. He heard a dreaded sound, the bell that lepers rang to warn of their proximity. And there he was, a ragged spectre in the middle of the road. Francis’ gorge rose. But after a moment, he controlled his disgust. Impelled by something he couldn’t name, he dismounted, ran to the leper, and kissed him. He gave him all his money. Two years later, in the public square of Assisi, his father accused him of theft. Francis had been giving his own money to beggars and, now low on funds, had started dipping into his father’s. The bishop told Francis to cut it out and obey his father. Francis took off his clothes, folded them at his father’s feet, and walked away, naked. He took nothing for the journey. Then he went through all their cities and towns preaching good news to the poor.

In midsummer 1941, three prisoners escaped from Auschwitz. In retaliation, ten others were selected for summary execution. As he was being fingered for death, one man fell to his knees and cried out, “I’ll never see my children again!” A prisoner who hadn’t been selected, a Franciscan priest, beckoned to the officer in charge. No one heard what he said to him, but when the ten were marched off to be shot, the man with the children was not among them. Friar Maximilian Kolbe was.

Jonathan Daniels was a seminarian at Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, MA, when he answered Dr. King’s summons to Montgomery in March of 1965. He stayed on, working to register voters in Lowne’s County, Georgia, one of the most dangerous counties in the deep South. In mid-August, he was with a group of picketers who were arrested and jailed. The day they were released was a scorcher. They were deposited on a country road with no transportation and not much idea what to do next. Three of them, including Daniels, walked over to Varner’s Grocery to buy a cold drink. They were met at the door by Tom Coleman and his shotgun. He leveled it at Ruby Sales. Daniels pushed her down and caught the full blast.

Every day, everywhere, and in all times, Christians of every kind wake up, say their prayers, feed their children, go to work, come home and make dinner. They do not cheat the poor. They persevere in kindness. They delight in this world. They praise God for love and breath. They ask for pardon and healing. They help their neighbors. They forgive their enemies. They confront evil and try to make peace. And every now and then, some of them forfeit their lives for others. They could do otherwise, but they choose to do these things, often at unspeakable cost.

What has gotten into these people?

I want to say Jesus. The Jesus of the gospels who is proclaimed and preached in the church. The Jesus you may encounter when you ponder those stories. The one who is risen and lives in the communion of the table and the communion of the saints. What has gotten into them is Jesus.

From the start, Christians followed his teaching. But it was never enough to follow a teaching. To follow at a bit of a distance. They sensed that there was something else, something deeper than ethical likeness they desired. They spoke of it as being “in Christ,” “I in him and him in me,” even  “Jesus in the heart.”

They talked about having  Jesus in the heart like Jews spoke of having Torah in the heart. Torah, they said, is not some stern, exacting Law we are bound to follow: it is a honeycomb, its thousand cavities brimming with gold. To study Torah is to thrust your fingers into the comb and bring out the honey. The more you savor Torah—lick your fingers, roll it on your tongue—the more it turns the heart sweet.

For many Christians, Jesus seemed like that too. He gets into your heart. For some of us, it happened as naturally as growing up. From earliest childhood, we heard stories about him. We learned them by heart. We learned songs about him too. We sang them by heart. And over time we came to believe that Jesus knew us and cared about us. He was a growing sweetness in our hearts.

For others, he got in more by surprise. We were in college, or working  jobs in another town. We’d blown off church. We’d get back to it some day, we said, maybe when we had kids. Meanwhile we spent Sunday mornings celebrating the liturgy of the roller blade, the NY Times, the Everything Bagel. Then one day we heard an old hymn, and it made us cry, or something else sparked deep emotions. We never realized that Jesus could be in the heart, but suddenly there he was. In ours.

Now, some Christians say that to have Jesus in the heart we must get on our knees, admit we’re lost, confess him as our Lord and Savior, and beg him to come into our hearts and save us. If we don’t do that, they say, we’ll have only bitterness to look forward to, and we’ll deserve its every sting. They even say that if you have  Jesus in the heart you’re worth more to God than those who don’t. But if you have him in there, he will show you  how favored you are. He will bless you with everything you could ever want or need.

It will feel warm and good to have him in there, they say. He will always be our friend. He will get us out of jams. Find us parking spaces and a spouse. Give us smooth sailing straight to heaven. Set us up on thrones to lord it over the ones who refused him as they go off to their well-deserved destruction.

But when you read the gospels, you discover that’s not exactly how it goes. What you find out is that Jesus in the heart will do you no good in the smooth sailing department. He won’t let you do any lording, either. He doesn’t do thrones, unless they’re shaped like a cross.

He won’t get you out of anything. He’ll get you into something. And it won’t always feel good. At times it will make you feel more lost than found. At times it will feel more like an injury than a cure.  It will break your heart. It will also heal your heart. It will make you brave.

And every time you think it’s enough to care only about your own kind, Jesus in the heart will tell you who your neighbor is. “A man was going down from Jericho to Jerusalem and fell among robbers…”

Every time you think it’s enough to do good only to vetted and deserving people, Jesus in the heart will ask you the question he put to the sheep and goats, “Did you see me? I was the one in jail. I was the beggar. It was me who was homeless and high. I was the refugee.”

Every time you think it’s okay to go with the crowd, isolate the misfit and pick off a stray like the woman caught in adultery, Jesus will bend down and trace your hypocrisy and betrayal on the dusty dirt floor of your innermost heart.

When you are tempted to aim for power, status, and prestige, sacrificing the people you love to your ambition, in your heart Jesus will say, “In the wilderness I was offered dominion of the world. It was tempting. You are tempted too. But you don’t have to lose your soul.”

When you face a decision you know is right but you’d do anything not to have to make it, Jesus will say, “I set my face towards Jerusalem and the cross. Follow me.”

And when you come up against the most severe, the most frightening, the most painful trial, you will look in your heart for him. And you will find him there as he is in his Passion, full of anguish. A man who knows what’s coming, who’d love to escape it and lead a life without challenge and suffering, and who is sweating blood over it, terrified and alone. His shaking hand will reach for your shaking hand. It will never let you go.

——–

*The latter part of this reflection is based on (and some portions paraphrased from) a short unattributed piece I found on the internet and kept in my files for many years. I have subsequently lost that hard copy. I would eagerly acknowledge the author and put quotation marks wherever they belong if I had a new copy and/or could discover who the author is.