Getting Closer to Forgiveness - Part 3

So, how do you get closer to forgiveness?

First off, you don’t curse your enemies, even if they curse you.

And just to be clear, when Jesus said, “bless those who curse you,” he wasn’t talking about somebody calling you a potty-head (still one of my favorite). To curse someone meant to CURSE them: to make the evil eye toward them or to cast an incantation against them. Cursing an enemy was a kind of supernatural hack; it was designed to destabilize or neutralize your opponent. It’s all very True Blood.

Jesus tells his followers to cut it out, because cursing your enemy would break relationship and destabilize you. Cursing your enemy is to curse yourself. And even though I’ve never seen Harry Potter, I know they do stuff with wands in that movie, and I think that the wand thing just keeps ramping up until somebody’s head explodes or something. That’s the kind of prohibition on cursing that Jesus has in mind. Instead of matching curse with curse, Jesus’ followers are to go completely loving: they are to offer blessings and make prayers for their enemies. The type of prayer is not specified, but it’s a good bet that it is a blessing for the enemy’s benefit and increase.

(Say this in a whinny voice) But that’s so hard!! Yes, isn’t it. 

Jesus’ commands his followers to work for their enemies’ benefit and pray blessings on them. This is a word that is to shout down another worldview. It’s an ancient story of how things came to be and what sustains everything that is. And it is the worldview that Jesus came to overturn.

Walter Wink reminds us that many first century followers of Jesus --- both Jewish and Gentile followers --- perceived within the Roman Empire a demonic spirituality, which they called Satan. This is the dragon found in the trippiest book of the bible, the Book of Revelation.  These people not only feared this spirit, they saw it every day of their lives. They met Satan as it appeared in the crucifixion of their children by bored soldiers and in the casual annihilation of their religious practice by governors and bureaucrats. All of this cruelty wasn’t accidental. It was based on an ancient mythology that informed people about everything they came to accept as real.

The same thing happens today. The spirit of an institution (the military, the playground) is created not by supernatural forces, but by the very ordinary and seemingly rational choices that everyday institutions make and perpetuate. These values may seem totally normal (buy low sell high, focus on the family, lather/rinse/repeat [kidding about that one]) but if they become the all consuming center of a groups reality, to the exclusion of real, live, breathing humans --- including enemies --- then they are idolatrous. And idolatrous values become “spiritualized”. They become more than just a person’s opinion and become something that must be protected at all cost.

Wink names one form of this “institutions creating idolatrous parallel reality” the domination system. It is an institutional spirit characterized by unjust economic relations, oppressive political relations, biased race relations, patriarchal gender relations, hierarchical power relations, and the use of violence to maintain them all.  Regardless of the shape the Domination System takes, it has persisted now for at least five thousand years. Again --- it is the worldview that Jesus came to replace.

Forgiveness is the cornerstone of Jesus’ movement to replace the domination system. And the cornerstone is made up of --- you guessed it: LOVE. Not the feeling heavy kind of thing that most 21^st century North Americans are familiar with; this is love that acts for the sake of the other, because the other is of equal value to your own self. Forgiveness without love is a no-thing. Love without forgiveness is just feelings (sometimes).

More to come…