Ah, there’s that old saying, “An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.”  It’s the biblical quote we pull out when we want to get even, and feel okay about it.  This kind of retributive justice has limitations – the bumper sticker version that most concisely states the problem states it this way:  “An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.”  This idea of justice made it into the Hebrew canon and the Jewish Law because it was a step toward civility in the development of human relationships.  Before this understanding there was a cycle of increasing violence:  it was more like two eyes and a tooth for an eye.  So an equivalency principle was a good thing.

But it is apparently not ultimately God’s desire for human relationships that we go around trying to get even with each other for the inevitable wrongs that we commit against each other.  Jesus makes this point quite clearly in the Sermon on the Mount, when he gives us this extraordinarily difficult teaching about turning the other cheek, and going the extra mile and having the shirt stolen off our backs and giving our cloak, too.

Children have an innate sense of fairness.  The three stories we heard earlier are memories of childhood injustices.  Our sense of injustice develops very early.  Jesus teaching is a hard teaching in the world in which we live.  It is a hard teaching for a woman who has seen her grandfather lynched.  It is a hard teaching for a child who watched siblings get what they needed while he did not.  It is a hard teaching for a child who experiences gender inequities built into a culture and sanctioned by one’s own family.

One reason this is so hard is because we absolutely know that the person we are being asked to forgive was wrong – and it is important that the wrongness of their action be acknowledged and honored.  Those who are called on to forgive do not want the offender to be exonerated from responsibility.  But forgiveness does not mean exoneration.

A Father who found his way to forgiveness for the death of his son in an automobile crash caused by an impaired driver describes his journey:

“It was some months later that it hit me:  until I could forgive the driver, I would never find the closure I was looking for.  Forgiving was different from removing responsibility.  The driver was still responsible for Michael’s death, but I had to forgive him before I could let the incident go.  No amount of punishment could ever even the score.  I had to be willing to forgive without the score being even.  And this process of forgiveness did not – really involve the driver – it involved me.  It was a process that I had to go through; I had to change, no matter what he did.

The road to forgiveness was long and painful.  I had to forgive more than just the driver.  I had to forgive Michael, and God (for allowing it to happen), and myself.  Ultimately, it was forgiving myself that was the most difficult.  There were many times in my own life I had driven Michael places when I myself was under the influence of alcohol.  That was a hard recognition – my need to forgive myself.  My anger at other people was just my own fear turned outward.  I had projected my own guilt onto others – the driver, the courts, God, Michael – so that I would not have to look at myself.  And it wasn’t until I could see my part in this that my outlook could change.  This is what I learned:  that the closure we seek comes in forgiving.  And forgiveness is a gift of mercy”

(Told in Johann Christoph Arnold, Why Forgive?  Farmington PA:  Plough Publishing House, 2007 – available online)

“I had to be willing to forgive without the score being even.”  This grieving father’s words get exactly to the heart of Jesus teaching.  It is not about evening the score.  For God, forgiveness is about mercy, reconciliation and transformation.  Last week, we spoke of forgiveness as involving the will…willing the well being of the offender.  Marjorie Suchocki reminds us that “Forgiveness is more than recognizing and naming evil to the fullest possible extent, it is intentionally meeting this evil with the will toward well-being.”  (The Fall to Violence:  Original Sin and Relational Theology, New York:  Continuum, 1994.  p.  155).

In classical Christian terms, we might think of it this way:  we are called to love our enemy, which means that we are called to engage in acts of mercy directed toward the well-being of the offender.  And, as we established last week in the first sermon in this series, it is good for the offended, too, to engage in forgiveness and mercy.  And, it is forgiveness and mercy that lead to transformation.

Another story from Arnold’s work.  It concerns Karla Faye Tucker, the infamous Texas Pick Ax Murderer who was ultimately put to death for her crimes.  But this is not her story.  This is the story of a man who is the brother of one of her victims.  In the aftermath of his sister’s death, and then his father’s death, also by murder, this man wanted revenge.  He admits that he was filled with hate, and wanted to get even.  Always involved with alcohol and drugs, it got worse for him.  Now, in his words, here’s what happened:

     “Then one night, I just couldn’t take it any more.  I guess I had come to the point where I knew I had to do something about the hatred and rage that was building in me.  It was getting so bad that all I wanted to do was destroy things and kill people.  I was heading down the same path as the people who had killed my sister and my dad.  Anyway, I opened a Bible, and began to read.
     “It was really weird.  I was high – I was smoking doobies and reading the word of God!  But when I got to where they crucified Jesus, I slammed the book shut.  For some reason it struck me like it never had before:  My God, they even killed Jesus!
     “Then I got down on my knees – I’d never done this before – and asked God to come into my life and make me into the type of person he wanted me to be, and to be the Lord of my life.  That’s basically what happened that night.
     “Later I read more, and a line from the Lord’s Prayer – this line that says “forgive us as we forgive” – jumped out at me.  The meaning seemed clear:  “You won’t be forgiven until you forgive.  I remember arguing to myself, “I can’t do that, I could never do that,” and God seemed to answer right back, “Well, Ron, you can’t.  But through me you can.”

(Johann Christoph Arnold, Why Forgive?, Farmington PA:  Plough Publishing House, 2007).

Ron visited Karla Faye Tucker.
“When I got there, I walked up to her and told her that I was Deborah’s brother.  I didn’t say anything else at first.  She looked at me and said, “You are who?”  I repeated myself, and she still stared, like she just couldn’t believe what she was hearing.  Then she started to cry.  I said, “Karla, whatever comes out of all this, I want you to know that I forgive you, and that I don’t hold anything against you.”  At that point all my hatred and anger was taken away.  It was like some great weight had been lifted off my shoulders.”

In reading the Bible, which is the text many discouraged and desperate people still turn to seek answers, Ron discovered the invitation that Marjorie Suchocki describes this way:  “We are invited into the divine love that is finally God’s forgiveness, God’s own will toward our well-being.  This opens us to the great possibility of sharing in God’s love for the world, a love that extends even toward those who violate us.”  (Suchocki, p.  159).

Jesus says it this way:  “Love your enemies and pray for them that they might be children of your Father in heaven…”

Mercy is very disarming.  Karla Faye Tucker could hardly believe it.  She found it easier to understand the rage people felt against her than the mercy that she was shown by Ron, who developed a friendship with her; learning her story of abuse at the hands of a drug addicted mother, and of her conversion to Christianity through a ministry at the Harris County Jail.  When Karla went to her death, some of her victim’s families were on television saying how happy they were that Karla was dead, and how glad they lived in Texas where “what goes around comes around.”  Ron was in the room reserved for the family of the executed inmate, praying for Karla.

It is not God’s dream that the whole world be blind.  Or that incarcerated persons be warehoused for life.  Or that we trade a life for a life and call it justice.

It is God’s dream that every person gets a chance to experience the mercy and grace of God – that every person come to know that God’s love is poured out to the righteous and the unrighteous, and the movement of God’s world is toward righteousness and justice.

Reconciliation is not always possible.  Particularly in situations of great injustice, it is not always possible.  But forgiveness is.  This forgiveness is often a journey.  It is not a one moment decision that makes it better right away.  At the very least, forgiveness as an act of will begins with rejecting the desire to get even.  It moves to considering what the well being of the violator might look like.  It understands that one’s own well being depends on forgiveness.  And it ultimately depends on our willingness to throw ourselves before God, and draw deeply, as Ron did, from the well of God’s love, which did not fail even at the moment of the greatest injustice ever – the execution of Jesus.

The world is full of things that should give rise to outrage on our part…that should call us to cry out “It’s not fair.”  And cry out we should.  The beginning of justice is the naming of injustice…the work of God’s people is to cry out, to forgive the offenders, to lift up the lowly and bring down the haughty.  To model love of enemy.  To be merciful.

Life isn’t fair – but it is being redeemed by the grace of God.  Alleluia and Amen.