Jesus challenged his friends to forgive people seven times seventy which essentially means that we’re never freed from forgiving those who have offended us.
I wonder, though, in a time and culture where we are so incredibly mobile, where few work at the same job their whole lives and even fewer live in the same home their whole life, and where rootedness is a forgotten value if we ever rub shoulders with the same people enough to ever need to forgive someone seventy times. While I understand the metaphorical nature of Jesus’ statement it strikes me that very few of us stay in the same place long enough or put down roots deep enough to ever need to truly believe Jesus’ wild invitation. Who ever sticks around a person or place that needs that much forgiveness?!
Is it harder to forgive or to stay put? Is it harder to forgive or to know your neighbors? Hmm, I wonder.
While I think that I’ve created a false dichotomy, I still think it’s worth wrestling with. When someone offends you on Facebook what do you do? You defriend them, you remove them from your virtual world. When a barista at a cafe offends you what do you do? You go to a different coffee shop. When life starts to feel to bloated with all that crappy life stuff what do we do? We move, get a new job, a new house, etc. Being able to move, to relocate, and explore new areas is a gift, but it might be a gift that we’ve drank too deeply of. Are we a culture that’s drunk on change, newness, and mobility? And does that drunken state preclude us from the gift of forgiveness?
(Thanks to Mark Scandrette’s book “Practicing the Way of Jesus” for developing some of these thoughts)
I may be arguing semantics here, but I do not believe that our ability to move on to something new precludes us from the gift of forgiveness. Reconciliation… well that's another story altogether. 😉
Yeah the downfall of this blog post is that it's easily caught up in semantics I think. I tend to think that forgiveness is always a choice that an individual can make (regardless of location or proximity) whereas reconciliation is relational in nature and much more difficult to fight for. My thought about forgiveness however is that we have allowed our mobility to give us the facade of forgiveness when in reality it might be more forgetfulness than anything else. Avoidance is an easier and less painful route than forgiveness. We could probably include lots of other good, bad, ugly, and great things in our culture that make forgiveness difficult and reconciliation even more so.
I shouldn't really write anything about reconciliation though 'cause it would be out of complete ignorance (most of what I write is only partially out of ignorance!). After reading some of Desmond Tutu, Miroslav Volf, and a few others I am confident that I know very little of the cost of reconciliation.
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