Forgive or Die

 

Forgiveness in the teaching of Jesus is not for the sake of moral purity;
it’s quite simply for the sake of a future. ~Fr. Richard Rohr

The above quote from Rohr is nagging at me. I think it may be profoundly true on a level we're happy to miss.

On the surface, it's a fine piece of rhetoric: by a simple use of antithesis, Rohr challenges a common assumption—that the letting go of one's offenses, as if they had never been committed, in the teachings of Jesus had as its primary objective the cleaning up of one's life (inside and out). Sure, that may be one means to the end, but it's the end—the future—that faces extinction without forgiveness.

This idea isn't original with Rohr, of course. I think most notably of former Archbishop of Cape Town Desmond Tutu's book No Future Without Forgiveness (Image, 2000). Through his eyewitness account, Tutu focuses on how the Truth and Reconciliation Commission he chaired (pressed upon him by President Mandela, et al.) attempted to move beyond the various forms of institutionalized retribution taking place in post-apartheid South Africa. Calling out the unworkable "solution" of bringing perpetrators of apartheid to court, he describes the highs and lows of his commission's approach to justice: the granting of political amnesty to those who make a full confession of their crimes.

While Tutu's account centers on this world, it's deeply informed by the next. It's a working out of the blueprint Israel's god YHWH drew up so long ago. It's the imperfect attempt to follow the model that God in Christ lived out. It's God's way to approach justice that his Spirit continues to empower up to this very day.

While we are no doubt chosen "to be [God's] through our union with Christ, so that we would be holy and without fault before him" (Eph 1:4; see also Col 1:22), it's God's forgiveness that creates the biblical vision of his future—resurrected life on a renewed earth. The bit that gets so hard to grasp is the fact that the creator God bound himself to forgive. Without forgiveness, even his future goes. What else does the story of him walking through the animal halves alone when ratifying his covenant with Abraham mean (Gen 15:12–21)? That if the promise fails, YHWH himself will be like those shredded carcasses. This is why in the new covenant, ratified by the life and death and resurrection of Jesus, we see that if "we confess our sins to God, he will keep his promise and do what is right: he will forgive us our sins and purify us from all our wrongdoing" (1 Jn 1:9). How striking that the writer includes that God will "do what is right"! Why is it "right" (or "just") for God to forgive sins when they're confessed? Because that's what he promised to do, precisely because of his promised future.

He binds himself to forgive. Remember that the next time you fall into the same old sinful patterns that betray his covenant.

As Tutu's example shows, this kind of forgiveness for the sake of the future, the kind that God himself enacts and ultimately embodied in Jesus by the power of his Spirit, easily applies to every relationship we experience. From the creator God to his created, to the rebuilding of nations, and (not least) to familial ties, withholding forgiveness murders the future—and it will kill you.

Forgive (and be reconciled) or die.

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1 Out of 7 Is Bad

TWO MISTAKES accompany most discussions on gluttony. The first is that it only pertains to those with a less than shapely waistline; the second is that it always involves food. In reality, it can apply to toys, television, entertainment, sex, or relationships. It is about an excess of anything.

The ancient pagans got this right. At Delphi (in lower central Greece), the sanctuary of Apollo had inscribed upon it, wisely, “Nothing in Extremes.” The problem with this, of course, was that the judge of such excessiveness was the individual, whereas for followers of Christ it is the Creator God Himself. And we know His thoughts on this subject not because we fall into some kind of trance and speak his words—as the oracle at Delphi supposedly did—but because we have his Word to us. See, for example, Proverbs 23:1–3: “When you sit down to eat with a ruler, observe carefully what is before you, and put a knife to your throat if you are given to appetite. Do not desire his delicacies for they are deceptive food.” This is basically a warning to exercise self-control when faced with the extravagance of the ungodly rich who may seek to lure you into their way of thinking.

Sound familiar? Whose life, before Jesus was born, best illustrates this for us? Daniel was the one who sat at the opulent table and “resolved that he would not defile himself with the king’s food” (Dan. 1:8). Again, this same principle applies to any good thing that God has created. Surely we are to enjoy them (this is no call to rigid self-denial), but we are not to consume them with ravenous gluttony, demanding more from these simple pleasures than Spirit-filled prudence allows.

Prudence, by the way, is the opposite of gluttony. Prudence, in the sense of wise frugality or temperance, is the heavenly virtue that, according to the church fathers Chrysostom and Jerome, was severely lacking in Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden; indeed, so much so that due to their wild appetite they were cast out of Paradise, for they exalted themselves as the judges (much like the ancient Greeks and Romans) of what was excessive.

Gluttony, or a lack of moderation, also leads many of us to demand all things to be exactly the way we want them. A more subtle form of gluttony, this vice is not merely tolerated in churches today but acclaimed. It has become respectable. You’ll be hard-pressed to find someone who, as the old Romans did, desired so much pleasure that after eating a meal they purged themselves in order to eat some more. But a keen eye will notice in many quarters what we may call a gluttony of delicacy.

In his Screwtape Letters, C.S. Lewis describes this vice as it inflicts “the patient’s mother.” She is a “positive terror to hostesses and servants . . . always turning from what has been offered her to say with a demure little sigh and a smile ‘Oh please, please . . . all I want is a cup of tea, weak but not too weak, and the teeniest weeniest bit of really crisp toast.’” Lewis points out that because what she wants is smaller and less costly than what has been set before her, she never recognizes as gluttony her determination to get what she wants, however troublesome it may be to others. She will, in fact, “be astonished to learn that her whole life is enslaved to this kind of sensuality.” And it is this kind of gluttonous sensuality, Wormwood instructs Screwtape, that has as its chief use “a kind of artillery preparation for attacks on chastity.” On the battlefield, the artillery bombarded the enemy’s defenses to prepare the way for an incisive attack. As long as we are deadened to this in us (and the fact that this is seldom discussed among us doesn’t help), we will continue on our merry way and in the end be as astonished as the patient’s mother.

Along with this gluttony of delicacy is often found a tendency to demand too much from others, thus exasperating them to the point of withdrawal or anger. Friendships (to say nothing of the marital relationship) are true gifts from God, yet they too can be objects of gluttony. Having high expectations is one thing; having unrealistic expectations—demanding more from others (like from a child) than is appropriate—for the gluttonous pursuance of pleasure is another thing entirely.

But there’s good news. Gluttony, which is admittedly a matter of the heart, is nonetheless often limited by our bodies. If we eat in excess, many times our bodies let us know. If we are too fussy about having everything just so, we’ll be told to do it ourselves. If we demand too much from others, they will not want to be around us. And all these can serve as catalysts to change.

Thanks be to God, change is possible. By the power of his Spirit, we are enabled to pursue such changes, to practice self-control and a healthy dose of self-denial (hard for us Americans, to be sure).

We Christians have unthinkingly embraced our society’s desire “for just a little more” as we pursue our supposed main objective in life — upward mobility. But these are little more than the sanctified vice of gluttony; indeed, they are respectable sins.


{Part of this originally appeared in Tabletalk 32.5 (May 2008): 12–13}

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On the Pathological Reliance on Medicine

I witnessed a convergence of ideas the other day when reading Rob Moll’s The Art of Dying: Living Fully in to the Life to Come. (A book, incidentally, that I think ought to be read, along with Elisabeth Kübler-Ross' classic On Death and Dying.)

A few months ago I came across (again) Gilbert Meilaender's brief article "I Want to Burden My Loved Ones" (first published in 1991 in First Things—back when it was less of a rag). Moll then brought it up in The Art of Dying and unpacks it a bit: 

"Meilander gently argues against the application of living wills or advance directives as the modern fix-all to the tendency of doctors to rely too heavily on medicine. We say we don't want to burden our families with making difficult choices when we cannot make medical decisions on our own, so we turn to legal documents that outline what we would and would not want should we ever be unable to tell a doctor ourselves. . . .

[But] this appeal to a piece of paper overturns what families are supposed to do—carry each other's burdens. When we allow someone else to care for us, make decisions for us, Meilander says, we most often discover that they are willing and eager to pick up our burdens." (p. 90)

Advance directives are, of course, not inherently wrong, but "it is best when a range of people . . . are part of the conversation about what medical care a patient desires." The main benefit of advance directives is getting the conversation started.

Moll also writes early on in the book about what he alludes to in the above quote—relying too heavily on modern medicine. "Our hope in medicine can lead to an unrealistic expection that medicine can cure whatever disease we or our loved ones might have. Such expectations tempt us to believe we need not contemplate and prepare for our death or that of our family members." He goes on: "Aggressive medical care may always be our first option, but by pursuing powerful medicine until there is 'nothing left to do' we likely forgo time with loved ones, final pursuits or perhaps a spiritual deepening in anticipation of life with God" (p. 35). Such is the irony of certain Christians' proclivities toward being "so pro-life [that] we're anti-death" (in the words of one Christian gerontologist, p. 33).

Then along came Hauerwas. In "America's God Is Dying," he writes (among other things that are actually the piece's focus):

"The fear of death is necessary to insure a level of cooperation between people who otherwise share nothing in common. In other words, they share nothing in common other than the presumption that death is to be avoided at all costs.

That is why in America hospitals have become our cathedrals and physicians are our priests. I'd even argue that America's almost pathological reliance on medicine is but a domestic manifestation of its foreign policy. America is a culture of death because Americans cannot conceive of how life is possible in the face of death. And thus 'freedom' comes to stand for the attempt to live as though we will not die."

The point about foreign policy aside, think how this same culture (of triumphalism and glory) has gripped the American church—the very place where the cross ought to be rooted. Christians here cannot conceive of how life is possible in the face of death. And so American Christians, just as much if not more than non-Christians, die poorly, precisely because they have forgotten how to die well, which means they've forgotten how to live. 

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Sins of the Father

{This originally appeared in Tabletalk 27.10 (October 2003): 43}

"Like father, like son" could very well be an appropriate superscription above 2 Samuel 13 in our English Bibles. In it, we see the beginning of the fulfillment of Nathan's prophecy of woes against the house of David (2 Sam. 12:10–12). The rape of Tamar by the crown prince Amnon (2 Sam. 13:1–22; cf. 11:1–13) provides us with the first parallel to King David, while the murder of Amnon by the hand of Absalom provides the uncanny second parallel to his father (2 Sam. 13:23–29; cf. 11:14–27). Chips off the old block, indeed.

Second Samuel 13:30–33 brings us to the final section of this story of rape and murder—an event that eventually shattered all stability within the kingdom. It is during this chapter that one flaw repeatedly comes into view: David's growing lack of discernment.

The king should have been off to war with his army in the early spring (2 Sam. 11:1) instead of actually looking for trouble. Now, the same lack of discernment manifested itself when the nagging Absalom requested the presence of his brother Amnon at his feast, to which David gave his acceptance (13:24–27). Despite his suspicion, the king gave in for want of godly acumen.

The same flaw appeared again after the murder, when "news" came to David that all of his sons had been killed. The king reacted like a broken man, but was quickly corrected by his nephew, Jonadab (vv. 30–32). What David should have known about Absalom and the rest of his sons, Jonadab knew all too well:  "Only Amnon is dead. For by the command of Absalom this has been determined from the day he forced his sister Tamar" (v. 32). In essence, the possibility existed that the nation would have been rescued from civil strife if David had not lacked the discernment to punish Amnon in the first place.

This portion of scripture, then, serves as one of the clearest description of the effects of sin. To be sure, every biblical book speaks of it, but none so strikingly as the latter half of 2 Samuel. The wages of David's sin actually brought physical death. Enigmatically, God's chosen king, whose kingdom marked great success early on, suffered horrible decline after his great sins against Bathsheba and Uriah. But in the end, it is not so enigmatic: While God's standards cannot be violated with impunity, he worked and continues to work through the most wretched of sinners.

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