I have been thinking about forgiveness a lot recently, especially in the messy context of human reconciliation. I saw a film that dealt with the problematic forgiveness of an Auschwitz survivor who forgave Nazis. Gary, our dean, gave a thought-provoking sermon on the topic a couple of weeks ago, which included an illustration of an English clergy person’s resignation. She couldn’t serve with integrity at the altar of reconciliation when she was not in a place to forgive the terrorists who killed her daughter (if you ask me a supreme example of integrity and faithfulness on her part).
The study-group that I belong to is also examining this topic. On our first meeting, we looked at the movie, Crash. In an earlier post, I suggested that the film moved too quickly to reconciliation and redemption, esp. for the white characters. This week we are reading Miroslav Volf’s Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation. He is Croatian. My thoughts on the topic of forgivness are still forming, but I feel a series of posts coming. For now, however, here is a quote from the preface of Volf’s book:
“It was a difficult book to write. My thought was pulled in two different directions by the blood of the innocent crying out to God and by the blood of God’s Lamb offered for the guilty. How does one remain loyal both to the demand of the oppressed for justice and to the gift of forgiveness that the Crucified offered to the perpetrators? I felt caught between two betrayals—the betrayal of the suffering, exploited, and excluded, and the betrayal of the very core of my faith. In a sense even more disturbingly, I felt that my very faith was at odds with itself, divided between the God who delivers the needy and the God who abandons the Crucified, between the demand to bring about justice for the victims and the call to embrace the perpetrator. I knew, of course, of easy ways to resolve this powerful tension. But I also knew that they were easy because they were false. Goaded by the suffering of those caught in the vicious cycles of conflict, not only in my native Croatia but around the globe, I went on a journey, whose report I present in this book” (10).