From writings of Timothy Keller:
. . . . a purely economic example: Imagine that someone borrows your car and as he backs out of the driveway he strikes a gate knocking it down with part of a wall. Your property insurance doesn’t cover the gate and the garden wall. What can you do? There is essentially two options. The first is to demand that he pay for the damages. The second is to refuse to let him pay for anything. There may also be a middle of the road solution in which you both share the payment. Notice that in every option the cost must be borne by someone. Either you or he absorbs the cost of the deed, but the debt does not somehow vanish into thin air. Forgiveness, in this illustration, means bearing the cost for his misdeed yourself.
Most wrongs done to us cannot be assessed in purely economic terms. Someone may have robbed you of some happiness, reputation, opportunity, or certain aspects of your freedom. No price tag can be put on such things, yet we still have a sense of violated justice that does not go away when the other person says, “I’m really sorry.” When we are seriously wronged we have an indelible sense that the perpetrators have incurred a debt that must be dealt with. Once you have been wronged and you realize that it is a just debt that can’t simply be dismissed—there are only two things you can do.
The first option is to seek ways to make the perpetrators suffer for what they have done. You can withhold relationship and actively initiate or passively wish for some kind of pain in their lives commensurate to what you experienced. There are many ways to do this. You can viciously confront them saying things that hurt. You can go around to others to tarnish their reputation. If the perpetrators suffer, you may begin to feel a certain satisfaction, feeling that they are now paying off their debt.
There are some serious problems with this option, however. You may become harder, colder, more self-pitying and therefore more self-absorbed. If the wrong doer was a person of wealth or authority you may instinctively dislike that sort of person for the rest of your life. If it was a person of the opposite sex or another race you might become permanently cynical and prejudiced against whole classes of people. In addition the perpetrator and his friends and family often feel they have a right to respond to your payback in kind. Cycles of reaction and retaliation can go on for years. Evil has been done to you—yes. But when you try to get payment through revenge the evil does not disappear. Instead it spreads, and it spreads most tragically of all into you and your own character.
There is another option however. You can forgive. Forgiveness means refusing to make them pay for what they did. However to refrain from lashing out at someone when you want to do so with all your being is agony. It is a form of suffering. You not only suffer the original loss of happiness, reputation, and opportunity, but now you forego the consolation of inflicting the same on them. You are absorbing the debt, taking the cost of it completely on yourself instead of taking it out of the other person. It hurts terribly. Many people would say it feels like a kind of death.
Yes, but it is a death that leads to resurrection instead of the lifelong living death of bitterness and cynicism. As a pastor I have counselled many people and I have found that if they do this—if they simply refuse to take vengeance on the wrongdoer in action and even in their inner fantasies—the anger slowly begins to subside. You are not giving it any fuel so the the resentment burns lower and lower. C.S. Lewis wrote in one of the Letters to Malcolm that “last week, while at prayer, I suddenly discovered—or felt as if I did—that I had really forgiven someone I had been trying to forgive for over thirty years. Trying and praying that I might.”1 I remember once counseling a sixteen-year-old girl about the anger she felt toward her father. We weren’t getting anywhere until I said to her, “Your father has defeated you as long as you hate him. You will stay trapped in your anger unless you forgive him thoroughly from the heart and begin to love him.” Something thawed in her when she realized that. She went through the suffering of costly forgiveness, which at first feels far worse than bitterness, into eternal freedom. Forgiveness must be granted before it can be felt, but it does come eventually. It leads to a new peace, a resurrection. It is the only way to stop the spread of the evil. ~Timothy Keller, The Reason For God (New York, N.Y., 2008, 2018). 194-96
(Posts with a preamble asterisk * are for a more general audience and not specific to teachings of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latte-day Saints.)
#forgiveness#vengence#example
