Picking Up the Pieces--August 18, 2021
"And the Holy Spirit also testifies to us, for after saying, 'This is the covenant that I will make with them after those days, says the Lord: I will put my laws in their hearts, and I will write them on their minds,' he also adds, 'I will remember their sins and their lawless deeds no more.' Where there is forgiveness of these, there is no longer any offering for sin." [Hebrews 10:15-18]
If my kids are being careless in the kitchen and knock a mug onto the floor, I will insist that they help with the broom and dustpan to pick up the pieces. And certainly, I will want them to learn to be careful, not just in kitchens, but wherever they are, and to take responsibility for cleaning up messes when they contribute to them. But I'm not going to hold it over them for the rest of their lives, demanding payments of $4.99 every morning to keep paying for that mug over and over. I won't keep on bringing up "the one time they broke that mug" over and over, either, to embarrass or shame them, or even to make a lighthearted joke. I won't introduce new people to my kids by saying, "And these are my children... who once broke a mug in the kitchen when they were goofing off." That's not how decent parenting works.
And the reason for that is love. Love is more interested in how relationships continue rightly into the future than in rehashing the past for personal profit. Sure, I want my kids to become mature humans who can own up to their mistakes and repair what they break--but I will love them even now while they are learning that. I need them to know that the relationship will continue, even after a broken coffee mug, a broken curfew, or a broken heart. I need them to know that my love for them is not dependent on their capability to pay for the ceramicware they break. And I need them to know that our relationship is not defined by their clumsiest moment, or by their most thoughtless actions, or their meanest words.
This is the nature of how forgiveness works: it is not saying that whatever infraction has been done by the person who wronged you was OK. It is saying that what they have done doesn't have to define the future, neither to keep you as permanent victim nor to cast them forever as the irredeemable villain. Forgiveness opens up the future by saying that your relationship will not be reduced into a monetary transaction to pay back lost damages from the past. Forgiveness says, "I am done demanding further compensation for what you did. I will not weaponize the past. Let's move forward."
Now, to be sure, forgiveness needs truth-telling as well. I can't ask forgiveness if I cannot bring myself to admit that I have caused you harm, and I will probably bristle at your attempts to offer me forgiveness if I won't admit what I've done, either. But truth-telling doesn't have to lead to demanding a pound of flesh for compensation. Seriously, my kids don't need to be forever shelling out allowance money for a mug--they need to see how their actions caused the accident, to contribute to cleaning it up (and if possible, gluing the pieces back to together so it can at least hold pencils), and to make plans for how to avoid this happening again. But I need them to know that I love them more than the cash value of a coffee mug. Forgiveness is what tells them the relationship is more important than seeking those damages. Forgiveness is what says, "I'll absorb the loss because I value you more than the broken pieces." Forgiveness is what says, "I am done demanding payment."
I expect that none of this is particularly novel for parenting--this is pretty standard, I imagine, in households with small hands and breakables. But what surprises me is how often we fail to make this same connection to God. We who know the power of forgiveness in our relationships with our children, grandchildren, spouses, and friends--we have a hard time seeing that God chooses such relationship with us as well. We have a hard time seeing that God is less interested in extracting payment from us as restoring relationship with us, and so we end up picturing God as some Divine Accountant who insists on itemized listings of every liability we have incurred and every transaction of payments back. We end up assuming God is more interested in the heavenly ledger books being balanced than in assuring us our relationship can continue. And we end up talking about the Christian faith like it is primarily about how to pay off a greedy Debt Collector in heaven, rather than about living in the family of a God who loves us more than the cash value of what we break in the kitchen.
The writer of Hebrews has tried to be clear to us here on this point, if we will give him a listen. Here he is quoting a passage from the prophet Jeremiah, who promised a day when God would both forgive our past infractions and also consciously choose not to remember them anymore in a sort of chosen forgetfulness. God refuses to weaponize our past failures against us again--or like the old line says, in forgiving us, God takes the past and buries it with a shovel... and then buries the shovel. And in the words of this passage, where there is forgiveness, there is no longer any need for offering anything up in repayment or restitution. Forgiveness itself, in the Greek of the New Testament, comes from the word for "letting go." Sometimes we forget that God chooses to let go of whatever debts or rightful claims God could make over us, because God would rather hold onto us instead of a bunch of freshly counted beans. That's how forgiveness works.
Think of what that means if we let it sink in. It would suggest, not only in our relationship to God, but even in our society's way of thinking about infractions against the law and even criminal justice, that the goal is restoring relationship and setting things right again, not necessarily about paying some societal "debt" behind bars for a certain amount of time. It is easy, given our current criminal justice system, to reduce actions to quantifiable sentences of jail time--as in, "That robbery was worth the equivalent of ten years in prison," or "That person owes society his whole life because of what he has done, so we have to execute him in the name of settling the score!" But all of that suggests that there is some eternal accounting department that must be satisfied, rather than a God who wills for relationships to be restored and for wrongs to be set right. Those are two very different pictures of God, to be honest. One suggests that the math adding up correctly is the most important thing, and the other suggests that God would rather have us than the $4.99 for a new mug.
If the work of justice systems is to repair what is broken, to restore what has been taken away, and to make relationships possible again, then it will change how we see people who have made bad choices, broken laws, and caused harm. It will mean we see them--gasp--as God does, which is more like children in a household who are loved even when they break things or hurt each other, rather than as irredeemable wretches. Where there is forgiveness, there is no more offering for sin. Where there is forgiveness, we no longer have to define people by their worst moments or biggest failures. Where there is forgiveness, there is hope for the future, and for a beginning again.
How can you and I be a part of helping other people (and maybe ourselves, too) to pick up the pieces and begin again, rather than dooming other children in the household to being branded with their worst mistakes forever? How can we be a part of God's eternal restarting with the world... today? That seems a good way to spend this day.
Lord God, give us the hope and courage to begin again today--with you, and with one another.
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