Continuing from Timothy Keller and a previous post ‘Real Forgiveness is Costly Suffering’ . . .
When I counsel forgiveness to people who have been harmed, they often ask about the wrong doers, “Shouldn’t they be held accountable?” I usually respond, “Yes, but only if you forgive them.” There are many good reasons that we should want to confront wrong doers. Wrongdoers have inflicted damage. . .and it costs something to fix that damage. We should confront wrongdoers—to wake them up to their real character, to move them to repair their relationships, or at least to constrain them and to protect others from being harmed by them in the future. Notice, however, that all those reasons for confrontation are reasons for love. The best way to love them and the other potential victims around them is to confront them in the hope that they will repent, change and make things right.
The desire for vengeance, however, is motivated not by good will but by ill will. You may say, “I just want to hold them accountable,”but your real motivation may be simply to see them hurt. If you are not confronting them for their sake or for societies sake but for your own sake, just for payback, the chance of the wrongdoer ever coming to repentance is virtually nil. In such a case the confronter will overreach, seeking not justice but revenge, not their change but their pain. Your demands will be excessive and your attitude abusive. He or she will rightly see the confrontation as intended simply to cause hurt. A cycle of retaliation will begin.
Only if you first seek inner forgiveness will your confrontation be temperate, wise, and gracious. Only when you have lost the need to see the person hurt will you have any chance of actually bringing about change, reconciliation, and healing. You have to submit to the costly suffering and death of forgiveness if there is going to be any resurrection.
(Posts with a preamble asterisk * are for a more general audience and not specific to teachings of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.)
#forgiveness#vengence#example
