Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you.  Luke 6:27]

Do you want to live in ruins?  Recently, while watching a television program, I heard one of the characters say, “He ruined my life.  He should pay.”  She had been raped thirty years before, and it took a long time for the perpetrator to be brought to justice.  The court proceedings did not turn out as she hoped.  The prosecutor was not able to win a conviction.  Outraged by what she considered a miscarriage of justice, she struggled with her need to be avenged because her life had been ruined.

I see this attitude in a lot of situations.  Adults live in ruins because of abuse at the hands of a priest or a parent in their childhood.  Ethnic groups live in ruins because of wrongs done to their ancestors. Siblings live in the ruins of a quarrel long in the past, and they never speak to each other again.

These individuals believe that the effect of a wrong done in the past cannot be erased from their lives until some matching or greater pain is inflicted on the person responsible for the original injury.  They claim that they want justice; what they really want is revenge.   

In the service of their need for payback, not only do these individuals testify to the pain of the injury, but they also commit to the role of victim.  Any suggestion that they might give up the quest for reprisal due to the passage of time or in the interest of building new lives for themselves is received as if it were an insult to the magnitude of their suffering.  They seem to prefer sitting in the ruins of the life that might have been. 

Pray for those who persecute you.  [Matthew 5:44]

Jesus taught us that it is not necessary to live in ruins.  When he said that he came to give life and to give it abundantly, he made that offer to everyone.  Those with trauma and injury in their past were not excluded.  Jesus offered healing and wholeness, joy and fulfillment, cleansing and change to everyone.  What he did not offer was retribution.  Some people take undue comfort in the proverb which says that doing good to an enemy heaps coals of fire on his head, and they legalistically exhibit what they choose to call kindness to those who have wronged them in the deliberate hope of seeing smoke from those coals rising from the heads of their enemies.  However, careful reading of biblical teachings will make it clear that any such coals were more about shame than punishment.  They were not revenge.

Do not weep for me, but weep for yourselves.  [Luke 23:38]

Jesus’ life is a lesson in giving up the right to be a victim.  In his own home town of Nazareth, he was attacked with the intent of throwing him over a cliff; he escaped, and he took no action at all against those who had attacked him.  When he met a vile tax collector, who would have had to steal from honest citizens in order to make a living at his chosen occupation, Jesus invited this man to be one of his twelve closest friends.  When Roman soldiers were nailing Jesus to the cross, He prayed that they might be forgiven and spared the vengeance of the Almighty for the assault on His Son.  Jesus demonstrated that it is not only possible but highly desirable to leave the ruins behind.

Why is this a good thing?  Why should anyone let an enemy escape without punishment?  How do we even do that?  We read in the Bible that God wants justice done on behalf of the weak and the wounded.  How is it justice to forgive and forget? 

The answer lies in what becomes of those who remain victims.  Suppose, for example, that the prostitute Jesus rescued from the Pharisees had devoted the rest of her life to getting a court judgment against the Pharisees for false arrest.  Imagine that Zaccheus, overcome by guilt for his theft and graft, had simply wadded up in a ball and cried remorsefully until he finally died.   What if the widow of Nain had gone on a crusade to destroy the local doctor who had let her son die in the first place?  What sort of life does a person live if he or she is unable to leave the ruins of victimhood?  People who cannot forgive others and cannot forgive themselves live in the ruins of what might have been a life.

Therefore we have been buried with him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life.  Romans 6:4

How do we escape the ruins?  There is a simple answer that is hard to learn.  When we remember our baptism, we remember that we are marked with the cross of Christ forever.  Christ died on the cross, endured the ruin of our lives for us, and rose victorious over all of that.  The power of this sacrifice is embodied in his words, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.”  [Luke 23:34]  Those words mean that our lives need never be in ruins because of our own guilt, and those words set us free to forgive others for all the pain they inflict on us.

God’s forgiveness through Christ is always there for each of us.  A new life, made whole, guilt-free, is right in front of us.  However, when we are busy keeping accounts of the things other people do to harm us, it is very hard for us to allow ourselves to be forgiven by God.  We even project our own attitudes and need for retribution on God.  At the very least, the self-righteous attitude which nourishes our victimhood keeps us from knowing that we need forgiveness.  The Pharisees were completely self-righteous individuals, and Jesus said to them, tongue in cheek, “I have come to call not the righteous, but

sinners. ”   [Matthew 9:13] He was saying that as long as we think we are righteous, we hold ourselves apart from God.  When we are able to see ourselves more clearly as the sinners we are, we hear Jesus’ call to forgive and to be forgiven.

When we experience forgiveness, we learn what it means to be healed and made whole.  We discover that we want to be like the woman at Sychar and the mental patient in the Gadarenes – we want to tell everyone what Jesus has done for us.  We are able to forgive others, because we have moved into a new life, a life where we are no longer living in the shadows, in the tombs, in the ruins of a life.  We don’t feel like victims, and we don’t want to act like victims.  Life feels so new and so full of promise that you might say we are reborn.

So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new!  [2 Corinthians 5:17]

When you face a decision that challenges your faith, how do you decide what to do? For example, if you trusted a friend with personal information that you didn’t want other people to know, and your “friend” told people anyway, would you be able to forgive that person? Would you even feel obligated to forgive that person? If you forgave her, would you ever speak to her again?

There are a couple of ways you could react to this problem. The first possibility is to take the legalistic approach. You would almost certainly think of The Lord’s Prayer right away. In that prayer, Jesus taught us to pray, “forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.” That statement seems fairly straightforward, and if you read more of the words of Jesus, you will discover that Jesus said that if we don’t forgive other people, God won’t forgive us. It sounds like a bargain. You trade your forgiveness of other people for God’s forgiveness of you.

But what if you haven’t done anything wrong? Under that circumstance, are you entitled to withhold forgiveness from your “friend” until you need to ask God’s forgiveness for yourself? There are other issues, too. After you forgive the offense, do you continue your friendship with someone who betrayed you? Must you try to forget that this person behaved so badly? Where do you go from here? The legalistic approach requires that you understand all the terms in order to know how to proceed.

The other possibility is to look at the situation as a breach of your relationship with someone who has been a friend, and to look at your response to this affront in the context of your relationship with Christ. This view also starts with the Lord’s Prayer, where we are enjoined to extend forgiveness as God forgives us. However, if we interpret this prayer as a conversation growing out of relationship, this statement does not constitute a bargain. Rather, from within our relationship with God, we pray that we might extend to others the forgiveness we receive from God. We don’t forgive others in order to make a deal with God. We do it because we are forgiven.

From within our relationship with God, we look further at Jesus’ teaching, and we see that he was constantly pointing to the importance of our relationships with people around us. He said that loving the neighbor was second only to love and faithfulness to God. In the parable of the Prodigal Son, the father welcomed and forgave someone who had broken the family relationship over money. As Jesus prepared to die, he told his disciples that loving one another was to be an identifying mark of the followers of Christ. If we set forgiveness in the context of all the teachings of Jesus, it clearly is intended to have healing power for relationships, not to be a bargain with God.

We can look at the Ten Commandments as legal statements, too. After all, the Ten Commandments are “commandments.” Yet, we dare not read them the way lawyers read contracts. To do so would be to wipe out all the rest of God’s revelation to us in the Bible. Everything we read in the Bible is part of the seamless whole of God’s revelation. The entire Bible points to Christ, God’s final Word. We cannot carve a commandment out of the text and study it in isolation. Nothing in the Bible stands alone; it all is part of one seamless truth.

We can look, for example, at the commandment that says, “You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.” Scholars who know Hebrew dig deep into every word of this commandment and evaluate the semantics. Looking at the precise wording, they ask if it means that lying is prohibited only in the setting of a trial. Is it possible that it doesn’t even apply to daily conversations? Are little white lies okay? Theologians wrestle with the problem, tallying up the list of verses where there is instruction about lying. This commandment has been thoroughly parsed for its legal implications.

In the context of all Biblical teaching, however, we can see that although it was stated as a law in an age when that was the way people could understand it, this statement can be wisely interpreted by turning it around from a prohibition against lying to a demand for truth. There may be some room to argue about what constitutes an infraction of the command not to give false testimony, but it is hard to argue with an admonition to speak truth. In light of the Bible as a whole, it seems quite clear that God was a great deal more interested in motivating people to speak the truth than in preventing people from lying.

Every healthy relationship is based on truth. We must speak truth in our relationship with God, and we must speak truth in our relationships with people. When we understand that truth is the foundation of all our relationships, we begin to appreciate the real significance of the commandment. Nothing destroys a relationship more quickly than the discovery that it is built on a lie. Relationships must be built on a solid foundation of truth.

Which brings us back to forgiveness. If a relationship is to be built on truth, then forgiveness must be about truth. Forgiveness of wrongs done cannot mean that we gloss over the wrong and try to pretend that it did not happen. If truth matters, then forgiveness is about truth, also. Real forgiveness names the wrong, lays it on the table, and says, “Let’s deal with this wrong together.” If your friend has done you wrong by telling other people what you spoke in confidence, then you must both acknowledge exactly what happened, and you must agree on the way you will deal with it. You won’t make a deal to forgive her for betrayal so God will forgive you for not tithing. Rather, in love, you and your friend will work out the consequences of the betrayal together. There may be tears. There will almost certainly be some awkwardness. You will probably feel skeptical about the wisdom of confiding in this person again. Forgiveness does not mean that you abandon common sense and entrust painful secrets a second time to someone who did not protect them the first time. Real forgiveness, however, would prevent you from holding this person up for public scorn, belittling her or calling her names. Forgiveness is about living and speaking truth in love.

In Christ, God spoke his most magnificent message of love and forgiveness toward people, showing us what it looks like when someone actually wants a relationship to thrive. God came down and showed us our real selves, and then he said, “I love you, anyway.” The whole Bible is his attempt to get us to pass that love and forgiveness along to others. It’s not about making points; it’s all about building relationships.

For many years I worked in information systems, which is a polite way of saying I was a slave to computers. I had some good jobs, but every one of them included the expectation that no matter when  computer decided to throw up, I was to come running and clean up the mess. I have done a lot of searches for jobs that use computer skills, and almost every one has the same requirement. Be available 24/7.

In her book Practicing Our Faith, Dorothy Bass writes, “We need Sabbath, even though we doubt that we have time for it.” Those of us who work in today’s fast-paced businesses know that feeling. It isn’t just the technical support teams who work round the clock. It hits everyone. Single mothers with two jobs. Fathers who work for advancement so they can pay for college for their children. Mothers who give themselves to a career and a family simultaneously. The recent upswing in work-at-home options have only added another layer of stress to busy lives. It appears that there is no sacred space any more where someone can truly rest.

On Mount Sinai, God wrote his rules for people on stone tablets, and the third was about rest.
Remember the Sabbath day, and keep it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work. But the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God; you shall not do any work – you, your son or your daughter, your male or female slave, your livestock, or the alien resident in your towns. For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but rested the seventh day; therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and consecrated it.

This statement sounds like a real blessing. Imagine how it sounded to the Israelits who had just escaped from Egypt. They were accustomed to be bossed around all day every day, with hardly a minute for themselves or their families. Suddenly they were given one day out of every seven to be at peace. Nobody worked. What a beautiful gift.

Jewish history is full of people who looked at that beautiful gift and made it an onerous burden. They devoted a great deal of time and energy to calculating exactly what constituted work and what might be considered rest. Women were reduced to the necessity of checking dishwater (it was okay to wash dishes used for meals on Sabbath) for seeds. They needed to be sure they did not throw out seeds along with dishwater, lest a seed germinate, thereby incurring guilt for farming on the Sabbath. Thus people contrived to make God’s gift of rest a burden.

Christian history is full of a record of similar arguments. Christians worry that we aren’t really observing Sabbath at all, because we worship on Sunday, resurrection day. So some Christians decided to worship on Saturday, and throw theological stones at the rest of us. Most Christians think we should worship on Sunday, but they worry that we might have too much fun. Frivolity would be unseemly on the Lord’s day. Some get very disturbed about our society, a culture in which stores are open 24 hours and people may very well work on a schedule that includes Sunday, with some other day off for rest.

Martin Luther wisely observed that we are silly to get all hung up on the day of the week. God ordained for us a day of rest for every seven. We don’t have a calendar record of the day God supposedly rested, so we don’t really know what day Sabbath is anyway. What’s more, as sinners saved by grace through the blood of Jesus, we just can’t be expected to submit to a Pharisaical interpretation of God’s words. The God who sent his son to die for our sins on the cross would simply not want his children imprisoned in a legalistic calendrical prison. Jesus said that he came to fill the law full, he overflowed all the Pharisaic legalism and set us free. Free to enjoy the gift of rest God ordained for us. Free to worship any day, every day, Monday, if that is how it works out.

Jesus thought we were confused about the Sabbath, too. One Sabbath day he visited a synagogue where there was a woman with a terrible condition. She was bent over so far that she could not see anything but the ground. She had endured this condition for eighteen years. Jesus healed her right in the synagogue, and she stood up straight. People got very excited about it and the whole ritual of the synagogue was ruined. The president of the synagogue told Jesus, “You have six days of the week to do your healing. What made you think you had to heal this woman on the Sabbath?” Jesus said that the people needed to relax a bit. It was okay to do good on the Sabbath, even if it upset the routine a bit.

God set us free from sin, and he set us free from silly semantic arguments about when and how we rest. God loved us so much that he sent his only son to die for us, and God wants us to know the joy of work and the joy of rest. He does not want us tied in knots trying to figure out how to relax. God’s Ten Commandments Rock!