I can still picture it. It was a white Mercedes, one of those newer
models. And as I was taking my son to school last
week, this white streak of German engineering nearly hit me. That
car cut me off. Then as we came to the
next intersection, do you know what that Mercedes did? It cut me off again. As I smashed on the brakes,
I tried to think positive thoughts.
Maybe he is running late? Maybe he’s not noticing what he’s doing. But inside, I was seething. I was saying. What a jerk! I felt the anger rise up inside of me.
Have you ever felt that? Someone cuts you off in traffic or maybe it
happens elsewhere at the mall or at a party or at a family event. Someone does something rude, thoughtless,
maybe even hurtful. And you feel the
anger rise.
That’s ok.
When someone does something hurtful, you’re going to feel anger. Anger
can be good. Anger in the right place
and in the right measure leads you to address things you need to address. But a lot of times, it’s not the right
place. Even when it is, you don’t have the
right measure. You know. Your anger has gone over the top. But still what do you do with it? How do you deal with that anger?
And what about when you feel the anger not because of a
minor slight? You feel anger because
someone has stepped way over the line, has hurt you, your family, done you deep
wrong. As rightful as that anger is, can
it ultimately help you? Can it
ultimately help you move past the pain and the injury? If it can’t, what can? In this story of a stunning act of God, and
one man’s stunning reaction, God shows you the way. Let’s listen and hear what God has to say.
When someone does you wrong, how do you move past
it? How do you move beyond the anger to
peace, from the hurt to the healing?
In this story, God shows you the way.
God tells you. You don’t deny the
debt on both ends, and you realize who has ultimately taken charge of the
payment. Only when you do that, do you become
free to move on.
Now before we get to what this whole debt and payment
thing means, let’s look a bit at why you and I get angry when wrong is done to
begin with.
To understand that, you need to understand how Jonah’s
news of divine judgment came as shocking news to these folks in Nineveh. If you remember the story, God asked Jonah
to go to Nineveh to deliver this warning because it served as the capital of
the most ruthless empire yet in human history.
When it came to cruelty and murder, the
Assyrians wrote a whole new book.
You can look it up. But these
Assyrians probably didn’t feel too bad about it. Why?
They lived in a world where the gods they worshipped did even
worse. The gods were always fighting
and killing each other, so why shouldn’t they.
That’s simply how the world worked. There are no rules, except kill or be
killed.
But then Jonah pops up and describes a whole different
way of seeing the world. Instead of a
bunch of gods duking it out, Jonah talks about one God, a God who sets the
rules for everyone. And this God has decided that the Assyrians
have broken the rules big time, and it’s time for divine pay-back.
When the Assyrians hear this idea, they freak
out. They think. What if we’re wrong, and Jonah is right? If so, we’ve messed up big-time. We’ve got to do whatever we can to stop this
God from taking us out. We’ve got to
change our ways.
But when God listens to their pleas and decides not to
destroy them, Jonah gets angry. And
when someone does you wrong, you do the same.
You and Jonah are both making the same assumption. You assume that life has a set of rules, rules
by which everyone needs to live. And
when you don’t live by the rules, something wrong has happened. Something wrong that needs to be made right.
Otherwise, it’s just not fair, right?
No one needs to teach these things to people. Everyone gets this sense from birth. Scientists have been able to detect a sense
of fairness in children
as young as 12 months. Maybe that’s why the Assyrians reacted so
quickly to Jonah’s message. They already
sensed that they had been breaking the rules.
Jonah’s message only confirmed what they already knew deep within.
But when God relents from judgment, Jonah gets so
upset that he says to God, I’m going to go outside the city and wait for you to
destroy it. And if you don’t, kill me
now. I’d rather die than live in a world
where You would spare the lives of these evil people. And in Jonah’s anger, you find the danger that
lies behind a desire for fairness. It
expands the wrongs of others and diminishes your own.
What do I mean?
Let’s go back to that white Mercedes that cut me off. If someone had smashed into that car a few
moments later, not too badly mind you, but badly enough, I would have felt a sense
of satisfaction. I might have even chuckled to myself. Serves you right, you jerk. But here’s the problem. As rude as his actions might have been, it didn’t
deserve a consequence like that. And second, even as I gloat, do you know what
I’m forgetting? I’ve cut people off in
traffic. Maybe I thought I had a good
excuse or simply did it by accident, but I’ve done it. As the band Dire Straits put it, when you
point your finger at someone, there are always three fingers pointing back at
you.
The attitude Jonah has,
this deep desire for pay-back, for vengeance lies behind almost all the evil
and senseless violence in this world. It doesn’t make the world a better place, it
makes it a worse place. And it makes
for far worse people in the end too, self-righteous, judgmental ones, who see
everyone else’s faults but their own.
Or as the preacher, Bill
Coffin puts it. God
knows it is emotionally satisfying to be righteous with that righteousness that
nourishes itself in the blood of sinners.
But God also knows that what is emotionally satisfying can also be
spiritually devastating.
But lots of folks, including religious folks react
just this way. After all Jonah is a
very religious guy, and because he is, he wants justice. He wants payback. But he’s also forgotten something. When God first ordered him to Nineveh, and he
blatantly disobeyed God, God not only spared him; God gave him a second chance.
But when it comes to these Ninevites, Jonah
wants them treated differently.
Why? Well, Jonah’s bad isn’t as
bad as theirs is. But who died and made
Jonah God? You’ll always feel your
wrong isn’t as bad as someone else’s.
And guess what, you’ll always be wrong. Why?
You don’t know. You don’t know
what was going on that led up to anyone’s wrongdoing, their childhood, their
experiences, their hurts. You can’t
honestly say that given that same situation, you would act any
differently. Maybe you would. But you don’t know. Only God knows. And you’re not God. No, you just want to play
God, when you’re angry. You have to
acknowledge that wrong, that debts, always go both ways.
Payback never works for anyone. But neither can you act like the wrong
doesn’t matter. Some people do that, and think they’re doing
the whole forgiveness thing. But
they’re not forgiving, they’re denying.
God doesn’t deny the evil the Assyrians have done. God calls them on it. God confronts them with it. And when you avoid doing that, when you
avoid calling out wrong, your avoiding isn’t all that different from vengeance.
In both cases, it’s all about you. It’s just in one place, you want to feel the
satisfaction of vengeance and in the other place, you want to avoid the dissatisfaction
of discomfort.
When I served on Long Island, I helped out a church
that was recovering from a pastor who had betrayed their trust by having
affairs with church members. Our regional
church leadership took away his credentials as a pastor, but not before
discovering that he had been messing up churches with this same sort of conduct
for years. But the powers that be in
those places had kept it quiet and moved the guy on. They might have said, they were showing
grace. They weren’t. They were just avoiding discomfort. And that’s a big difference.
So, what does God do here? God forgives.
What’s the difference between avoiding discomfort and forgiving? When you forgive, you first get yourself
out of the way, so you can then confront the wrong done. If you
don’t do this, your anger and hurt will always rule the day. It will either lead you to payback, which
will always be too much. Or it will lead
you to avoid, because you fear further hurt and anger. Only when you get yourself out of the way,
can you honestly deal with the wrong. Only then can you overcome evil with
good. Only then, can you be focused not
on yourself, but actually helping the one who wronged you get better, become
better, to changes things for the good.
And in this process, you become better too.
But how do you do this?
How do you forgive? How do you get yourself out of the way? You realize who you are. You are someone who needs forgiveness
too. As the writer Mary Gordon
put it, “To forgive is to give up the exhilaration of
one’s own unassailable rightness.” You
forgive because you realize you need forgiveness. And
when you’re hurt, that is what so easy to forget.
That’s where the message of what God did on the
cross has such power. There, God tells
you two things. First, nobody has gotten
it right. Everyone has failed. Everyone needs someone to make it
right. But at that cross, God tells
you. I’ve done that for you. I’ve taken the hit for every mistake, every
failing of your life. And the cost I
paid was brutal, but I paid it, because you mean that much to me.
When God in Jesus died on that cross, God
wasn’t avoiding the wrong. No, God was
confronting it, showing just how awful it was.
You are so wrong that nothing less than the death of God could save
you. But God was also showing this. You are so loved that this God was glad to
die to save you.
And when you know that forgiveness, that love, it gives you a power to do two
things. First, you can forgive because
you realize how much God paid to forgive you.
Second, you have the power to confront evil, because you know that you
already have the only thing that ultimately matters, God’s infinite love for
you. And nothing anyone can do, will ever take that
away. When you know that, you become
free. You become free to forgive because
you know you are so forgiven. And you become
free to face up to wrong, because you know you are loved. And that love gives you the courage to
confront even as you love. So, come to
the Love that gave everything for you, and experience freedom, the freedom that
only this God, this Love can give.
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