JESUS’ foundational teaching,
underpinning everything of the character of God in Him, pivoted around reconciliation — bundled in myriad
forms of the Hebrew shalom. Completeness, sanctity, forgiveness, acceptance,
inclusivity, not least formational and foundational, the reconciling of humanity
back to God.
Let’s focus on the concrete term of
forgiveness to ground the concept of reconciliation:
“Forgiveness comes as a struggle for a way of life.”
What on earth can this concept
mean? Forgiveness is the hardest thing we will encounter on this earth. This is
because life binds us within relationships. Bitterness is a common human
temptation and experience. It is a challenge for every human being to overcome.
Hence the Saviour’s message. What Jesus came to preach we have to take to heart
and apply. It works.
Forgiveness is the struggle we
enter when we want Jesus’ way of life. And Jesus will complete us through the struggle, in the learning
and application of surrender.
The truly broken people I meet have
the same story — rejection early in their lives they couldn’t seem to ever reconcile.
It seems a cataclysm they cannot resolve. And they stay broken. They cannot
surrender it to Jesus. It’s the opposite for those who have wrestled with and
overcome their brokenness. Theirs is the dimension of wholeness and healing, to
every corner of their lives, because they forgave. Because they made an
ongoing practice out of reconciliation in every part of their lives. And yet,
the paradox is this: we, you and I, are at times broken as we are at times
whole. Forgiveness comes as we struggle for a whole way of life.
Jesus is the key. The Man. His
teaching. The topic of forgiveness. The concept of casting away the world’s faulty
and broken logic, of ‘justice’, for a bigger dream. A dream only God can found
and ground within us. And now is the time. Now, while blood pumps through your
arteries, whilst oxygen courses through your body to nourish your cells so
those neural pathways might make those connections. Now, whilst familial brokenness
wreaks its cancer through our and others’ lives. Before death takes a person
beyond the reach of our reaching out.
Now.
A person. A situation. A bitterness
unreconciled. Identify it now as God’s Spirit puts His finger on it.
Transcend it.
Ditch the fallacy that it’s your
right to hold them to the wrong. Embrace the fact that forgiving their wrong is
your key to making it right.
If forgiveness comes as a struggle
for a way of life of wholeness, we could agree we want that way of life whatever the cost. And we know in faith
that God’s blessed shalom stands as the reward for giving up every shred of
resentment; that the person and situation be utterly unshackled from the
moorings of our antipathy.
The vision we may have is one of us
blessing them with a love we have never previously given to anyone. For, this
love is the love of God giving to this person what they can only imagine is
God-inspired. We see in this vision the actual melting away of grief even in
the action of giving our love away.
Forgiveness is a daily process, a
practice never to be mastered, only appreciated for the value it tips back into
our lives.
Jesus came to teach us to forgive in order that He could heal
us.
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