This is a guest blog by Brad Klingele
A dear friend, suffering in a protracted conflict says to me “I have my story of what is happening, they have their story, and neither story is the real story.” Jesus’ observation that my friend is not far from the Kingdom whispered to my soul.
The end is like the beginning, as Nyssa says. In Christ all of creation will be reconciled to God, such that God will be All in All. We will be reconciled to each other and divinized, participating in the self-gift of the Trinity. Jesus’s life shows us that we are the ones who are violent, and we project our violence onto God and onto others. We live by “the law” when we defend our false self image and an image of a false, retributive and therefore violent God by inflicting death on others.
Jesus shows us that God is not like this; He comes and predicts that we will murder Him, that we are all murderers from the beginning, and that we try to preserve life by inflicting death on others (John 8). We live by a “law” of violence. We set up rules to live by, and we live by seeking to preserve our sense of self and our very lives in and through protecting our lives and self-image by using violence and preventing a true self-understanding of ourselves as hopelessly caught up in a world-view in which we must use violence to prevent death and prevent seeing ourselves as caught up in this culture, this way of being. Jesus’ life reveals that from the beginning it is not the case that God is violent, rather, He is forgiveness.
Jesus refuses to use violence to protect Himself, revealing that God is nonviolent, for when we see Jesus, we see the Father. If we are to become God, we are to live by recognizing that God forgives us and invites us into accepting death and suffering. Death and suffering are not the problem; living by violence and living by an image of God as violent is the problem. God is forgiveness and peace. We needn’t fear death or suffering because God will raise us up when we accept His life and enter into accepting death. In this acceptance, we trust that God forgives us all, and will forgive us all.
If we want to live a life that is a participation in the forgiving, non-violent God, we too must live by forgiving each other and returning peace instead of violence. We may not withhold forgiveness, we may not return violence, for we are to be the ongoing reconciliation of God and the world by accepting our brokenness, our violence, and enact a different culture, a way of being, that is Divine.
Labelling people who harm us as bad, or as evil, is normally seen as the prerequisite for forgiving; why would we forgive if we had not been harmed?
It is hard to forgive other people. It is in fact very dangerous; Jesus forgave sins, and people knew that this was a claim to be God. Only God can forgive sins. There are hidden impediments to forgiving that are not normally understood in the literature on forgiveness.
Forgiving others does preserve ourselves from the ravages of anger that injures us. Stanley Hauerwas, in his Princeton lectures emphasizes that it is much, much harder to be forgiven than to forgive. Rene Girard reveals why this is the case.
Girard helps us to read, through the Scriptures, that since the dawn of the evolution of becoming human (hominization), we are participants in a reality in which we hide our violence from ourselves and project it onto others and, ultimately, God.
Before the Gospel, I couldn’t look at my faults because it was too scary and also because at some level surely God hated me. Accepting forgiveness requires feeling accepted and loved in and with many faults. Real love is capable of seeing faults and assuming the best and fully accepting the person as they are; in this unconditional acceptance of myself as broken, we can allow Christ to transform us because we can look at our faults while knowing that our value lies in being loved; we are not loved by God because we are good, we are good because God loves us.
Forgiveness requires acknowledging that I am blind to the ways I hurt other people. If I can see that I am blind, maybe I can forgive others for their blindness when they hurt me. I am grateful for friends who explain, right away, the ways I hurt them. It is only because they love and like me that I can hear how I hurt them without just despairing. It’s only in love that I can accept my faults. But it still is so painful, to see the seemingly intractable patterns I have of hurting people.
For most of us, however sophisticated our articulation, we have a kind of first pass Christianity, or Sauline Christianity, meaning Saul before he became Paul. I have broken a moral norm and I must be forgiven. I am saved insofar as I trust Jesus to forgive the transgression and confess breaking this norm and then follow the norm. Once I or anyone recognizes that they ought to follow the norms and believe the right thing, one is safe. This safety usually extends to “I won’t be harmed” by the results of my breaking of a moral norm; I will have a life that is less troubled. We tend to imagine that the troubles we face are usually due to breaking of a moral norm. And so once I find myself following the moral norms, and someone breaks a moral norm and injures me, I see myself as injured, as righteous, and the other as a worse person than I am. Their injury to me ends up reinforcing my sense of being righteous, and I come to rely on the unrighteousness of others in order to reinforce my righteousness. At a subconscious level, we are seeking safety, a self-image as good, so that we are safe from God and feel good about ourselves, and safe from hell and the consequences of an immoral life. Jesus pokes fun at this with the prayer of the Pharisee vs the Plebian, the woman caught in adultery, and emphasizing the righteousness of prostitutes as distinct from religious leaders.
This makes nonsense of course, of the cross and incarnation as a mere second-chance, or even infinite chance schema and does little to acknowledge the radicality of Jesus; it makes the following of norms the primary reality and God’s forgiveness the secondary reality, as James Alison articulates in The Joy of Being Wrong. St. Paul makes fun of this notion in the first section of Romans, but alas, as Douglas Campbell points out, we have lost the context and read it not as a first century Colbert Report sendup, but as an earnest condemnation of those who break moral norms.
We fear death, alienation, poverty, suffering, and violence. We seek security through power, position, prestige, money, and a deontic “objective” truth bereft of the category of relationship. When we ground our identity in these idols we live by “the law.”
When we live by a concept in which belief in Jesus is essentially following the rules, we derive our security and sense of self from whether or not we are successful in following these rules. We necessarily blind ourselves to self-knowledge because any discovery of rule-breaking is a threat to who we think we are. We become our own saviors because we must succeed in following the rules and we must believe the right thing.
When others cause injury, we see them as outsiders and ourselves as insiders. And so we must compound our self-identity by setting boundaries in which those who have broken the rules are bad, while I, who live righteously, am good. Jesus punctures this when He says “no one is good but God alone.”
In this schema, we necessarily place others on the outside and ourselves on the inside in order to feel secure. As Paul says, who will free us from this prison?!
How do we learn the real story we are living in? Jordan Daniel Wood, explaining Maximus the Confessor’s theory of sin, explains that sin means that we pour our lives into something that is not real, because we don’t understand ourselves or God, and so we create a false incarnation. Freeing ourselves of the false self, as Thomas Keating calls it, is, according to Nyssa, like cauterizing a wart; the condition of the skin is not its true condition, and gaining true skin is painful. We think we are losing our very self, but it isn’t who we are. This is why sin is so painful; God is simply giving us our true self, but it feels like we are losing ourselves, it feels like punishment. It is not punishment but healing. Elsewhere, Wood explains that Origen tells us that God does in fact fulfill His promise in Jonah to destroy Nineveh, but in doing so He saves. God destroys what is false in order to restore Nineveh by restoring it to its true self. Jonah is rather put out by this; he wants Nineveh destroyed, not saved.
Anthony Bartlett places Jesus’ entire self-understanding of His ministry in the sign of Jonah; Jesus invites us to see ourselves as Jonah; we are violent and want our enemies vanquished. We, like the followers of Jesus before the Resurrection, imagine God as violent, but it is we who are violent, and Jesus refuses to return our violence, instead, Jesus returns after we murder Him and forgives us.
James Alison explains that the culture we live by, one of self-deception and violence, is not the center of reality; Jesus’ forgiveness is. Jesus lovingly accepts our violence, a willing victim to us, in order to reveal His love for us and our violence. We need not hide our violence from ourselves because we see that “while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.” Now, we needn’t hide from ourselves our violent ways, we can see them and know that Jesus’ love is greater than, and precedes, our violence.
The Fall, explains Alison, is not the defining reality; forgiving self-gift is. God is self-gift, God is love, and in Jesus we see that we no longer need scapegoat others in order to hide our brokenness from ourselves; we can trust Jesus who reveals through His kindness and His complete self-gift that will win over all of us, for “God desires that all will be saved,” and Jesus reveals the truth that He will win over all of us to His manner of Being; self-gift.
The Gospel reveals what we cannot see; we are murderers who are forgiven. We cannot see ourselves if we don’t know first that we are loved and then can see the ways we hurt others. Universalism is necessary for seeing this; we need God’s help, not protection from God. Only a God who saves all can do this.
We don’t know what it means to be a human or who we are, until Jesus reveals who He is, as the true Human, and then who we are called to become; participants in His Divine-Humanity as members of a communion of mutual self-gift, which is the Church.
In most approaches to forgiveness, we end up as the Pharisee “thank you Lord that I am not like this tax collector.” We are, in fact, constantly messing up, and only by trusting that God will keep transforming us can we allow ourselves to perceive our constant messiness. Shusako Endo’s Silence has a hero that we tend to miss; Ichiro. Ichiro is the one who is most like us; he doggedly seeks forgiveness. The Jesuits constantly seek to be heroic. Ichiro constantly seeks forgiveness.
Dostoevsky’s Zosima explains that we are all responsible for each other’s sin. This is not pious hyperbole; we are inescapably caught up in relationships with each other in which we are continually blind to the ways we hurt and scapegoat and seek protection from self-knowledge, from suffering at each other’s hands. This is why nonviolence, whose active form is peacemaking, is essential to participation in becoming one with Christ, who is ontologically incapable of retribution or violence. Our experience of suffering is never from God, but only from our brokenness. In the eighth chapter of John Jesus tells His interlocutors that are seeking to kill him. They hide their violence from themselves and accuse him of being crazy.
We too are all caught up in killing Jesus whenever we injure others; “Saul Saul why are you persecuting Me?” When we are angry with anyone, we miss that we are all made in God’s image and likeness; “amen, amen, I say to you, whenever you are angry with your brother you have committed murder in your heart.” When we live so as to use violence in any form to protect ourselves from suffering we live according to the history of the fall “you are children of Satan, who was a murderer from the beginning.” Girard explicates this reality handily in I See Satan Fall Like Lightning. Today more than ever we hide vengeance from ourselves more easily because we outsource vengeance in the judicial system, as Girard explains in Violence and the Sacred. Within this context we misunderstand justice as retribution. True justice is restoration to Christ.
When we know that we are loved in our bones no matter what, we can begin to see ourselves as we are; loved and brought into Jesus’ healing restoration. We are loved by Jesus precisely as people caught up in violence. Jesus was able to enter into the human culture of violence and offer love and forgiveness because Jesus knew He is loved by the Father in the Holy Spirit. Jesus is willing to suffer our violence without resentment
Forgiveness requires accepting, without resentment, our own participation in violence. In Jesus we can experience ourselves as loved by the Father in the Spirit. This often happens when we experience, usually, in at least one concrete, specific person in our life, the unconditional love, which is in fact the love of Jesus. As we experience this unconditional love, we too can then turn and offer the same to concrete, specific people in our lives.
Salvation then, is, the concrete specific participation in a particular community of people who, knowingly (as Christian) or unknowingly (in Christ) enact mutual self-gift, nonviolence, forgiveness, and unconditional love. This does not mean that we must not try to avoid injury, or that we don’t engage in trying to change the violence we experience at the hands of others. Jesus shows us His radical form of engagement, without violence, harsh words, or retribution “Forgive them Father, they know not what they do.” Salvation is a communal participation in self-gift within a community of specific people with whom we practice mutual self-gift. We begin to offer this self-gift even to those who have not yet accepted or returned this self-gift. God is love, meaning self-gift. Salvation given to humans because it is divine-humanity.