It was Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg’s On Repentance and Repair that first brought things into focus for me.
I was raised as a Christian, and so the ideas of forgiveness and repentance were always intertwined for me. I’d never thought about them as entirely separate concepts.
What would it look like to repent for a transgression without the expectation or promise of forgiveness? What might it look like to repair a harm that you’ve caused or been complicit in simply because it was the right thing to do, and not because you wanted the harmed party to let you off the hook?
What would it look like if we separated the work of repentance from a contractual & transactional understanding, wherein we do the right thing and expect some sort of reprieve in return?
And is forgiveness really forgiveness if we don’t give it until we receive what we’re owed?
I confess: I have an extremely complicated relationship with the expectation of forgiveness.
I think forgiveness is exploited.
I’ve never forgotten the ways that we celebrated the forgiveness shown by (some of) the family members of people slain by domestic, white supremacist terrorist Dylann Roof as they attended Bible study at Emmanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church on June 17, 2015. I remember feeling discomforted by the rush to forgive someone who’d done something so plainly evil, and feeling equally discomforted by judging the compassion of the people most directly impacted. I remember hating the pressure we put on victims and their loved ones to quickly forgive the people who meant them harm.
Daniel Simmons Jr. (whose father, Rev. Daniel Simmons Sr., was among those murdered that night) declared, “I know that you don't understand that, but God requires me to forgive you. I forgive you. He also requires me to plead and pray for you, and I do that.”
Rev. Sharon Risher (whose mother, Ethel Lance, was also murdered by Roof) went yet further, stating, “I still don’t want you to die.”
Watching these devastated people make these declarations made me feel small. Because, if I’m being honest: I was fine with the idea of Dylann Roof dying for what he did.
But there was something undeniably Christlike about some of these responses.
The gospel accounts record some of Jesus’s last words—even as he hung suspended from one of the Roman empire’s torture devices—as “Father forgive them, because they don’t know what they’re doing.” The amazing grace, mercy, and compassion of God is portrayed by a suffering servant pleading on behalf of the forgiveness of the very people who are administering his torture. And that is what some of the family members of those slaughtered by a racist terrorist extended to Dylann Roof before he had shown the slightest sign of repentance or repair.
I thought about this episode this past week as Alabama made history by becoming the first state to execute a person by nitrogen hypoxia. In essence, they gassed a man to death. In 1996, Kenneth Smith was convicted of murder for hire for the 1988 murder of a woman whose husband (a pastor, harrowingly) hired a hitman to kill his wife and make it look like a burglary in order to collect insurance money.
As is often the case after executions, the family of the victim was given an opportunity to share remarks. Michael Sennett (one of the slain Elizabeth Sennett’s adult sons) declared that, “His debt was paid tonight.” Another son, Charles Sennett Jr., said, “As Christians, we forgive him.”
If I’m honest, I’m much closer to the Sennetts’ sentiments than Rev. Risher’s reaction. I’d like to forgive people, even as I want them to pay what they owe. I want to be like Jesus, and I want other people to make their wrongs right.
But that’s not actually the story of Jesus.
On the cross, Jesus forgives people who haven’t even acknowledged that they’ve erred in the first place.
There are so many people who go to church regularly, read scriptures regularly, immerse themselves in the work of reformed theologians regularly, and have found a way to miss this fundamental truth.
I was confronted this reality in the aftermath of my latest public stance against the penal substitutionary theory of atonement (PSA). PSA suggests that, on the cross, Jesus took on the penalty that we (sinners) deserved in order to satisfy our debt and the justice of God, releasing the elect from the penalty of their sin. While I wholeheartedly reject this framework for a number of reasons we won’t explore fully in this post, one reason continually surfaces in the pushback people voice to my opposition to this particular lens of viewing scripture.
“If Jesus didn’t die in your place, then who paid the cost for your sin?”
My answer is always the same.
Nobody did.
Because it was forgiven.
When I dream of my student loans being forgiven, I’m not envisioning some benevolent person coming to pay the debt. I am envisioning the company I owe a debt to eating a loss. That’s what forgiveness means. Some combination of benefactors can come and provide debt relief by paying off the debt on my behalf. But only the person to whom the debt is owed can provide debt forgiveness, and they do that by taking the loss themselves.
The confounding part of the gospel is that, on the cross: God takes on the loss.
There is no satisfaction in the torture of innocent people. There is no justice in vicarious punishment. There is only loss and lament. God has every right to be infuriated by the torture and execution of an innocent person, even if that innocent person is the very human incarnation of God who fully understood that the path they committed to would lead through a barbaric death. I say through and not to, because the cross is not the end (or telos, if we wanna be theology nerds right now) of forgiveness. Forgiveness is authenticated by the reality of the Resurrection. In spite of the cruelty that the world shows Jesus, Jesus does not leave the world to battle death on its own. He defeats death in the Resurrection, and he does it so that people can experience the fullness of God.
All of this happens independently of any reparative work on our part. God forgives because forgiveness is who God is and what God does.
As Paul suggests in Romans, the goodness and kindness of God is meant to lead you to repentance. God does not wait on us to repent in order to be kind to us. God is not waiting on us to repair what we haven’t shown ourselves capable of repairing. It’s the other way around. God is kind to us so that we will repent. God forgives us before we even know that we needed it so that when we learn that we need it, we’ll feel like righting our wrongs.
The story of Jesus is not one in which God withholds forgiveness until a debt is paid. You can not forgive a paid debt. So many of the things we believe about God obscure this plain truth.
We can demand that people pay what they owe us, or we can forgive them. But we cannot do both.
As I continue following the Son where he leads me, I am drawn further and further from viewing justice as retributive. The Son is leading me to an uncharted territory where justice is most clearly embodied where broken relations are restored to working relationships.
The justice of this world is retributive. The desire of God is restorative.
When forgiveness looks like the fulfillment of the retributive justice, I fear that we might mess around and miss God.
Which is hard to stomach. But narrow is the way when you’re following the Son.\
Twenty some years ago my good friend Mike got the news that his mom had been murdered. She still lived in the farm house he grew up in and lived alone. A local man knew this and decided to rob her one night. The result was mom dead and the man in jail. Mike went to the trial and was given the opportunity to speak to the man who murdered his mother. We asked if he laid into him. Mike looked at us and said no. Mike told the man that Jesus still loved him and that he, Mike, forgave him.
After 20 plus years of walking with Jesus, I’m still not sure I have that forgiveness in me and never want to find out if I do.
I have been thinking about this very topic incessantly. And the conclusions I am starting to draw (ones very similar to yours) leads me to a God that is....well, God's ways DEFINITELY aren't my ways. Not as to say "God definitely doesn't sin like me...swear, drink, etc.", but that I definitely do not lot and forgive like good does. But...that's what I am called to do if I allow myself to become whole. And that is amazing and terrifying and....anyway. Really enjoyed this post.