These topics can, for me, be very tough to sort out. Do they all go together? Is it possible to have forgiveness, for instance, without reconciliation? What happens to justice in this mix?I’m quite sure that I often get them tangled up with one another, so a couple of recent interactions prompted me to think once again about the relationship between and among forgiveness, reconciliation, and justice.
They are not the same thing. But they are related.
One of the reasons I get tangled up in them is because I don’t like conflict or to retain memory of conflict, if I can avoid it. I want my relationships all to be “OK,” differences settled, disagreements at least sorted out enough that we can all move forward. This extends pretty naturally to situations in which I’ve been hurt, damaged, wounded. I’m the sort of person who (I’m told—and I myself can sometimes sense this) will work hard to try to achieve reconciliation by attempting to reach that goal even when it’s not in my power to reach it. I have sometimes compromised myself by apologizing when I’m not guilty.
How so?
It’s important to come to terms with the fact that reconciliation involves at least two parties: the offender and the offended, the one who has done the damage and the injuried party, the “victim.” Thus, if I want all of my relationships to be in a state of reconciliation, even if I move to create the conditions for reconciliation (whether I’m the perpetrator or the victim), it still requires the other party to respond to or to extend themselves toward me. This is not something I can force to happen.
For instance, I can express sorrow over my actions to the person I’ve hurt, and they remain free either to forgive me at that point, or not. If they forgive me, the conditions and context for reconciliation exists; if they do not, reconciliation is not yet possible (even if it becomes possible in the future; people can change). The reverse is also true, of course: I can choose not to forgive someone who asks me for forgiveness.
Reconciliation requires movement toward the other person on the part of both parties.
Where I tend to get stuck is when I’ve been hurt by someone and there is, so far as I can tell, no apparent movement by them toward me, either to discuss the occasion of the hurt or to express sorrow. What then? Given my personality, I tend to want to try to figure out a way to broach the subject, have a conversation, write a note—whatever!—in order to address the problem, the blockage in our relationship. This, however, hardly ever goes well, in part because my approach is felt by the other person as an attack or pressure. At the least, it creates a very awkward situation for everyone involved.
What then, should be the perspective of the person who is the injured party when the person(s) who created the injury do not express sorrow over the injury? The primary human reaction to being injured is to retaliate.1 Biblically, however, retaliation is not an option: “I will repay [= retaliate]; revenge belongs to me, says the Lord.” This injunction occurs a number of times in the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament. So vengeance is off-limits for followers of Jesus.
This means, then, that the challenge for me in cases where I’ve been injured is: do I want vengeance, do I want to pay someone back for what they’ve done to me? Or can I wait, hoping for movement on the part of the person who has injured me. Can I trust that God will work for justice in my case?
Yes. Yes, I can, because I want to believe that God will ultimately work to bring “rightness” to all things, including me and the other person(s) and our relationship.
My power is limited. That this is true is OK—and really more than OK; it’s good. I can forgive others, whether they respond to my expressions of sorrow or not. And it leaves me free to be responsible, insofar as that’s possible, for the condition of my own heart, my own thinking. It permits me to treat the person(s) who injured me with kindness, with love, and without a reserve of anger that is ready to carry out vengeance.
This does mean that I must be willing to absorb the damage that another person inflicts on me. But that’s precisely what God has done for me. I long for this to become a deeper part of me, something that comes more quickly, more naturally, with more of a sense that doing so is what I’m called to.
What about justice?
Every human being innately wants justice, especially when we’ve personally suffered injustice. Justice, it seems to me, is a byproduct of the entire process of forgiveness and reconciliation. It’s much more than punishment or retribution.
Stay tuned; I hope to address this in the near future as an extension of this post. . . .
Limiting retaliation is behind most of the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament laws. It’s not so much “an eye for an eye” as “never more than an eye for an eye.” One doesn’t have to look far to find many modern examples of the promise to retaliate with more damage than was originally inflicted: the penalty is frequently greater than the original wound. Even here, retaliation is the community’s task, not a privilege given to individuals. The laws of Exodus and Deuteronomy have frequently been misunderstood in this regard.