The Rib-Cracking, Life-Giving Gift

The Rib-Cracking, Life-Giving Gift--June 5, 2018

"As God's chosen one, holy and beloved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience.  Bear with one another and, if anyone has a complaint against another, forgive each other; just as the Lord has forgiven you, so also you must forgive. Above all, clothe yourselves with love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony." [Colossians 3:12-14]

Forgiveness is like CPR--on the day when your heart needs it most desperately, you cannot administer it to yourself.  But once it is given to you by another, it can bring you back to life.

And the people of Jesus, at the core of things, are people of forgiveness--people who have been forgiven already by Another, and people who then forgive one another because they have first been forgiven.

But pay close attention to the movement here: forgiveness, like chest compressions, is something we receive--it is something done "to" me, or "for" me, which I cannot do to myself.  Of course, if my heart has stopped and I pass out unconscious, I am physically unable to perform compressions on myself to get my heart going again.  And if I have wronged someone else, I cannot simply declare myself "off the hook" because I want to be.  Forgiveness is a gift, a life-saving service as it were, that must be performed on me by a forgiver.  And, yes, like having someone crack your ribs in the process of saving your life with chest compressions, facing the truth of the ways we have wronged one another can be painful--and yet, in a very real sense the practice of forgiveness brings us back to life when we are on the verge of giving up our spirits.  

And as the New Testament reminds us, the people of Jesus (that's us!) are called to be a people who forgive... as well as a people who face up to their need to receive forgiveness.  And moving through all of that is the central good news that from God's vantage point, we are all already forgiven because of Christ Jesus himself.  But at every turn, in every instance, and from every angle, forgiveness is given.  It cannot be seized for oneself like the arrogant would-be emperor Napoleon crowning himself.  Forgiveness is always gift, by definition.  It is never a right.  I simply cannot let myself off the hook, not any more than I can give myself chest compressions, or Lazarus can call himself back to life from the grave.

There was this old "Deep Thought" by Jack Handey from Saturday Night Live, back in the 1990s, that reminded me of that truth in a delightfully absurd way.  Handey's faux-"wisdom" went like this: "The first thing was, I learned to forgive myself.  Then I told myself, 'Go ahead, do whatever you want. It's okay by me'."  The idiocy is supposed to be (supposed to be!) obvious--that you can't meaningfully declare yourself off the hook, or forgiven, or absolved, because we don't want to admit we have done something requiring forgiveness.  Instead, our natural tendency is to tell ourselves we haven't done anything wrong, and that everything is, in Handey's words, "okay by me."  We are great at telling ourselves we haven't done anything wrong, or that the other person is being "too sensitive" or  "aren't allowed to be upset" or what-have-you.  The apostle here in Colossians, however, would remind us that none of us has the power to forgive ourselves--only the power to forgive each other.

And that is very much at the core of who we are, we people of Jesus.  We are forgiven forgivers.  We are people set free from the burdensome weight of carrying along a list of wrongs done to us and wrongs we have done to others.  We are people who know what it is to have heard Jesus say, "Your sins are forgiven," and we dare to believe it is true.  We are people who stake our being on the promise from Romans, "There is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus," and, as theologian Robert Farrar Capon once noted on that passage:

"Saint Paul has not said to you, 'Think how it would be if there were no condemnation'; he has said, 'there is therefore now none.' He has made an unconditional statement, not a conditional one-a flat assertion, not a parabolic one. He has not said, 'God has done this and that and the other thing; and if by dint of imagination you can manage to pull it all together, you may be able to experience a little solace in the prison of your days.' No. He has simply said, 'You are free. Your services are no longer required. The salt mine has been closed'."

And therefore, as Colossians now says here, just as you and I have been already forgiven, we practice forgiveness toward one another.  There is no community of Jesus apart from the practice of cancelling each other's debts like it is the first day of an unending year of Jubilee.  There are no people of Jesus other than the ones who both are forgiven already and who give forgiveness all around like it's going out of style.  It has to be that way, because forgiveness, as we have said, is always relational--a gift from one to another--rather than something I can simply claim for myself.

Daring to live as the people of Jesus, then, will mean leaving behind the realm of "demanding our rights" or "claiming our prerogatives," because forgiveness is neither a right nor an entitlement.  It is always a gift.  I do not ever--ever!--have the ability to simply insist on the power to let myself off the hook, but I do have the capacity always--always!--to receive someone else's gift to forgive me.  And when they do, it is like restarting my silenced heart.

That's why we live together in community, we people of Jesus--we need to keep bringing each other back to life.  We need to be resuscitated ourselves, and we need to keep pounding on each other's stopped hearts with the rib-cracking, life-giving gift of saying, "You wronged me... but I am not holding it against you any more.  I will not weaponize the past.  We are both free of it."

Today, there are people who are probably waiting--maybe aching--to hear from you a word of forgiveness.  And there are people, too, from whom you could ask to be forgiven yourself.  Rather than waiting for them to move, what if you took the first step?  It might just bring someone back to life.  

Maybe even you.

Lord Jesus, as you have given us the gift of forgiveness, enable us to give it out to any and all, so that we may all be brought back to life.