We left off in part 5 as we were beginning to enumerate and explain what jubilee forgiveness is not.
3. Jubilee forgiveness is not justifying what they did.
To justify means to declare someone or something righteous. As we learn to practice jubilee forgiveness, we must not fool ourselves into thinking that somehow the offender’s offense was actually righteous.
Righteousness is defined by the standards of God’s laws: the commandments, statutes and judgments. If any action or behavior is in violation of any of these, it is, by definition, evil and sin.
We who are Christian biblical universalists (not to be confused with any denomination or other religion using that word, universal, universalism, universalist, etc.) can easily be caught in a trap with this one. How so?
Well, since we know that everything that happens is part of God’s Plan, we must not carry this to the extreme of saying that it was actually a good deed that my relative was murdered because if that had not happened, then such and such could not have happened which turned out to be a very good thing. No, we do not think like that.
While we do acknowledge that everything that happens is part of God’s overall Plan, and that His Plan is the highest and ultimate good; we must also recognize that everything that happens is not good. Evil is part of God’s plan but evil is not good. Therefore, we forgive but we do not justify evil.
This principle is very clearly shown in the story of Joseph and his brothers. The brothers wanted to murder Joseph, but settled for selling him into slavery. Was that sin/evil? Of course, it was! But was it also part of God’s overall Plan? Of course, it was. So when Joseph forgave them, he did not justify or pardon their sin, but he did forgive them.
4. Jubilee forgiveness is not pardoning what they did.
A pardon is a legal procedure whereby an offender is released from the legal penalty for his action. A pardon is mercy granted by an entity who has the authority to do so, such as a governor or the president.
It was widely reported that when the Bulgarian or Romanian or Turk—whatever he was—who attempted to assassinate Pope John Paul II, that the Pope forgave the man. I think he even went to visit him in prison. But the fact is, the would-be murderer still went to prison.
So forgiveness can take place without having to pardon the perpetrator. By the way, didn’t they just tell us on the news recently (in 2006), that they had released Ali Acga from prison now?
On the personal level, let’s invent a dreadful example. Your 21-year old daughter or granddaughter has been raped. The rapist has harmed not only your daughter, of course, but everyone in the family and extended family is affected and offended. So we see that the forgiveness issue is one which affects you as well as your daughter.
As an overcomer candidate, must you forgive this offender? The answer is yes. But what we are in the process of doing here is making sure we understand that jubilee forgiveness does not mean that the rapist’s brutal act is condoned. Nor is it excused; nor is it justified; nor is it pardoned.
I would imagine that one of the hardest things anybody might ever have to do would be as a victim, to testify against the rapist, and at the same time, to be able to genuinely forgive that man…the hard part being genuinely forgiving him. And we will address later how we know when we have truly forgiven someone.
You see, in this hypothetical case, it is absolutely incumbent upon your daughter to testify against the rapist. Why? So that society will be protected from any further such actions by him.
How many times have we heard in the past few years of rapists and pedophiles who have been paroled from prison, who go out and do the same thing again—or worse, they murder their victim the next time.
I don’t know if you recall the case in Sarasota, Florida in the past couple of years (ca. pre-2006, when I initially did this study of jubilee forgiveness) of the man who kidnapped, raped and then murdered a little 11-year-old girl —I think her name was Carly Bruschia or something like that. And remember they caught the guy because there just happened to be surveillance cameras on the corners of some warehouse where he abducted her?
Well, that case hit pretty strongly on me not only because it was such an atrocity in itself but because I know that location. At the time they were showing the surveillance video on TV, my mother-in-law who lived in Sarasota called to say that it was right around the block from her house. I had taken many a walk around her block. So that heinous event was “close to home” to me in that sense.
So even when we must forgive for such an unspeakable crime, that does not mean we are obligated to speak out in favor of pardoning the rapist. There will be plenty of liberals and the ACLU doing that, don’t you know.
No, just the opposite, God’s law requires that for the good of society that the rapist be punished. Depending upon the circumstances of a rape, it might mean the death penalty for the rapist. Painful though it will be, the victim must testify against her attacker.
5. Jubilee forgiveness is not reconciliation.
This is important to understand. The two can be related. Reconciliation can be part of the forgiveness process, but it does not have to be. Genuine forgiveness can take place without reconciliation.
It takes two parties to reconcile. In some cases, it might be that there is no reconciliation possible. That might be because (1) the offending person is dead.
Almost ten years ago now, I shared with my tape ministry my personal testimony on forgiveness, and in those tapes I told how I had hated my father for much of my adult life, and how I went about learning to forgive him and then to try to reconcile with him.
Part of reconciliation is to restore a relationship. But sometimes that is not desirable at all because the initial relationship was bad. So it was with my father and me. So restoration to the way it had been was not desirable. So instead of restoration, it was more a case of the two of us beginning a new relationship as adult son to father.
My father passed away in 2000. Now supposing I had worked on forgiving him and had felt that I had achieved that and yet supposing that he had always and at every attempt, had refused to meet with me. And then he died. No reconciliation of any kind would have been possible.
Some of us may have similar situations. Say you had a bad relationship your mother or with a sister or a brother, whoever, and they died years before you ever knew of such a thing as jubilee forgiveness. It does not mean that you cannot forgive them just the same. Because, you see, the real work is not in them; the real work is going on inside your heart!
Thus, jubilee forgiveness does not mean that reconciliation must occur. Because as we have just seen: (1) the offending person might have passed away.
Or (2) the offending person absolutely and always refuses to be reconciled. There is a third reason why complete forgiveness and reconciliation do not necessarily go hand in hand.
(3) It might be that there is no reconciliation possible because the offending party is not a person at all, but a group (such as a street gang or the Mafia). Those hopefully don’t apply to any of us, but God forbid, if someone had been entangled with the Mafia, I mean, how do you reconcile with the Mafia?
Or in the past 15 years, give or take, with the millions of illegal immigrants and the brutal MS-13 and Tren De Aragua gangs among, how does one reconcile with them? You don’t. But you can still forgive them.
So let’s take an example which is probably a little closer to home for most of us. Let’s say we have been the victim of unfair treatment by some department of government, whether it is for an undeserved traffic violation or—how about this—let’s say you got clobbered by the IRS—and all you were trying to do was to pay all the lawful taxes you owed, but you and they somehow came up with drastically different figures.
Of course, you then have two options: pay up or go to jail. To this day, you believe you were treated unjustly. The IRS and other government departments are faceless bureaucracies, so how does one practice jubilee forgiveness in that case?
Well, it is done in pretty much the same way as with an individual—we will get to the specifics later. The point here is that this is an entity, a group. It is a case where reconciliation is not possible, except if we limit the word reconciliation to mean that we now pay all the taxes that they demand, and we live with it.
6. Jubilee forgiveness does not mean that we deny what they did, or that we try to forget about the offense and simply expect that “time heals all wounds.” Maybe they heal, but usually not.
Here we are getting into that faculty of our soul which is the subconscious mind. Sometimes an offense can be so painful that the tendency of the victim is to suppress the memory of it. This often happens without conscious thought or intent. It is a coping mechanism but it is also a bad coping mechanism.
As you know, I was educated in a Catholic boarding school seminary as a teen-aged boy. You all have heard in the past decades now of numerous cases all over the country where Catholic clergy have admitted to pedophilia.
The church of Rome is beset with lawsuits in the hundreds of millions of dollars. It has driven some dioceses into bankruptcy. The abuse happened in the seminaries. It happened in the parishes.
For the record, I myself was never molested by a Catholic priest, but years ago I had a friend who was. He was molested as a boy by our parish priest. The parish priest got reassigned. I had served as an altar boy for that priest on literally dozens of occasions.
My friend did not suppress his memories of the event, but we now know that many boys did. They compartmented. They buried the memory of that awful event deep in their subconscious mind. Now, many years later, they are finally trying to come to terms with the awfulness of what happened.
I stated that the suppression of the memory, a denial that it happened, is not the way to deal with it. For one, as we try to suppress those memories, they could manifest in other ways. It might be the root cause of uncontrolled anger and rage which erupts for no apparent reason. It might be the root cause for irritability, for high blood pressure, nervousness or even a heart attack or stroke.
And so jubilee forgiveness does not mean that we deny that the sin occurred. Rather, we confront the reality of it. Yes, it happened. It was awful. But I forgive so-and-so anyhow.
7. Jubilee forgiveness is not blindness to what happened.
Some of these enumerated items are closely related. Whereas denial is usually an unconscious coping mechanism by which we repress the memory of what happened, blindness is a conscious and willing refusal to admit that a sin actually took place. It is pretending that no offense occurred.
Such a coping mechanism is just as dangerous to our mental and physical health, and the same type of symptoms could occur. Incidentally, it should go without saying, but certainly we do not assume therefore, that anyone who has had a heart attack or who has high blood pressure, etc., that such a person was raped or molested or whatever.
Obviously, there are hundreds or thousands of complex reasons why a person may have any particular physical condition and so let us not judge our neighbor based on the few statements I have just made regarding the possible mind-body connections. Our make-up is far too complex for any of us to claim infallibility there.
8. Jubilee forgiveness does not mean that we must forget the evil that was done.
Of course, we have all heard and most of us have probably said at some point: “Well, ya know, we’ve gotta forgive and forget.” We recognize that as a figure of speech because when we have been offended by really serious evil, it is almost impossible to forget the event.
And we probably shouldn’t forget it. There are lessons to be learned from it, and learning means that we have a memory of what happened. When we say “forgive and forget,” I think it means more that when we truly forgive, that the memory is no longer painful.
As we mentioned previously, it is not beneficial for us to try to suppress traumatic memories. At the other extreme, it is just as harmful to dwell on them. The proper course, the course to good mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual health is to deal with the trauma by responding to it with healing forgiveness—jubilee forgiveness.
Jubilee forgiveness is not a vacuum cleaner at work in our memory, sucking all the negative memories away. It is actually a greater display of God’s grace when we are fully cognizant of the painful and traumatic offense and yet we choose to forgive.
After all, God Himself does not have His memory erased, does He? Even though He says in several places in Scripture that He will remember our sins no more.
Hebrews 8:12 For I will be merciful to their unrighteousness, and their sins and their iniquities will I remember no more.
Since God is omniscient, He knows the past, present and future simultaneously. There is nothing that ever escapes His knowledge or memory. Verses like that are once again a figurative way of saying that He chooses to ignore them, to set them aside as nothing, as though they had never happened. And aren’t we glad of that? And so we should strive to do likewise.
(To be continued.)
~END~
