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WHO BLEEDS WHEN CHRISTIANS FIGHT? #9
EASY TO FORGIVE YOUR PRETTY FRAÜLEIN
Pete could hardly believe his ears. The digital display on his alarm clock read 2:38 in the morning. In the morning! It was the dead of night, and his immediate supervisor was on the phone. “I need a favor,” the older man said without preamble. “I just landed at LAX 20 minutes ago because of that big storm back east. And I get out here to the curb, and the Van Nuys Flyaway stopped running because of some tie-up on the 405. There’s no buses for at least three hours, they say.”
So what’s that got to do with me? Pete thought to himself. Truth be told, he flat-out did not like this guy. His boss was a selfish, argumentative man who ran the department with a heavy hand, routinely helping himself to favors while belittling the eight people who worked for him. Now he calls me up, AT HOME, here in the gloom of night. And he could hardly believe it when his boss said, “I’m sorry, Pete . . . but could you run down here and pick me up? I’m at Terminal Four. We’ve got that big teleconference at ten this morning, and if I don’t get at least some shut-eye, we’re going to blow that crucial Sacramento account.”
And Pete, even as he heard the boss’s request-slash-demand, even as a million excuses flooded into his mind, a million in-your-face smart ways to tell this egotistical boss to just walk the 45 miles home, he slowly fumbled for the pair of pants he’d dropped on the floor a few hours before. He was going to do it. He’d hate himself for chickening out, he’d boil all the way to L.A. and all the way back, his wife would give him an earful in the morning, but he was going to get in the car, drive 45 minutes down to the stupid airport, and pick this clod up and take him home so he could go beddy-bye.
The amazing thing was this — and a groggy-eyed Pete marveled about it over pizza the next day with his three best friends at work. “If any of YOU guys had called me,” he confessed, “at two in the morning, and said you were really stuck, snowstorm back east, Flyaway on the fritz, could I give you a ride home, blah blah blah . . . I’d do it. No problem. Middle of the night, no problem. Freeway’s empty, I got Arrow 93 FM classic rock to keep me awake, we both get home and sleep in an hour, come in late, no problem.” He took a long slug of extra-caffeine, full-strength Coca-Cola before concluding the thought. “Because we’re all friends here. But because I don’t like this guy . . . I get all bent out of shape.”
Friend, does that story sound familiar? We just made it up for the purpose of our discussion today, but isn’t it true that we forgive and overlook and carry on with a lot of things from the people we love, that drive us right out of our tree when someone we disdain pulls the exact same thing?
It’s interesting that the Bible describes this very LAX phenomenon. Another commuter named Pete — author of two epistles in the back of your Bible — has this to say. I Peter chapter 4, verse 8:
“Above all, love each other deeply, because love covers over a multitude of sins.”
Isn’t that true? If you love someone, that covers over their sins. If you love someone, you forgive them for calling in the middle of the night. How many of you parents have said to your adolescent children, “You can call us any time! If you’ve been at a party, and you need a designated driver, call. If you’re pulled over for speeding, call.” If they’re away at college, they know that your home is their home, even at 2:38 in the morning. That’s the one knock on the door you will never resent. And even if they get a little drunk and land in jail, and call you up to go their bail, you put up with it. Because, as Peter says here, love covers over a multitude of sins. The Message paraphrase puts it this way:
“Love makes up for practically anything.”
How many newlywed couples on a misfiring honeymoon can attest to that one?
Well, all of this puts up on a spiritual billboard our big question, then. How can we get to love this “Pete,” this bad boss who calls us up at midnight? On our honeymoon, we love our spouse. But in the church, there are many people we frankly do not love . . . and we’re not about to take nonsense from them any longer. And so, where people rarely fight on a honeymoon, they fight in church all the time. Because the love is not there to cover over the “multitude of sins.” And so again we ask: where is the love? How can we get it?
In his book, Mere Christianity, C. S. Lewis has a chapter entitled “Forgiveness,” where he writes about the admittedly difficult task of “loving” an enemy. “This terrible duty,” he calls it. Then he adds:
“Everyone says forgiveness is a lovely idea, until they have something to forgive, as we had during the war.”
Meaning the horrors of World War II. And then Lewis goes on to admit that sometimes our enemies are terrible people. No, maybe they are not all the Gestapo, but sometimes even a wife can be an ogre. The person in the next pew may be unlovable. They may deserve our contempt. Maybe they exhibit cruelty and treachery, and of course, all Christians should HATE cruelty and treachery. And, by extension, those who demonstrate it. Right?
Well, this gifted Christian writer goes on to gently remind us that there is one bad Christian who is sometimes petty and mean and selfish and cruel and treacherous . . . and we keep on loving that Christian. That Christian is US, and no matter how bad you may be, you keep on loving and forgiving yourself, don’t you?
But notice this interesting suggestion. He writes:
“We ought to hate . . . them in the same way in which we hate things in ourselves: being sorry that the man should have done such things, and hoping, if it is anyway possible, that somehow, sometime, somewhere, he can be cured and made human again.”
Did Jesus see those cynical, nail-driving, dice-throwing Roman soldiers there at Calvary, and long to have them made morally right again? Or the thief on the cross . . . and I mean the bad one, the one who went to his death with a curse on his lips? And you know, somehow it becomes the arduous and heroic task of the Christian to think of this thoughtless supervisor, or this “Pete,” or that renegade child of ours, or the selfish, egotistical church deacon who dominates the board meetings — and somehow, with prayer and fasting, have “the mind of Christ” about that person. Because if we can have at least a “spiritual love” for them, a Christ-like kind of love, that love will cover over a multitude of sins.
And really, it comes down to this. You are a citizen of God’s eternal kingdom. You’re going to dwell there in that land of harmony for a millennium and beyond. But so is that person in the next pew over. God needs to remake you and He needs to remake them. And somehow we need to take our petty — and yes, our not-so-petty — resentments, our long list of grievances, and simply surrender them to the reality of God’s rule in heaven. It is God’s task to make us ready, to make us holy and fit. Our job is to love each other and to allow that love to cover over a multitude of sins.
C. S. Lewis suggests that by this hard-as-nails theology it is still all right to think someone needs punishing. It is appropriate, according to this essay, for a Christian to go to war against an enemy, all right to believe that capital punishment is right and sometimes deserved.
“We may kill if necessary,” he writes, “but we must not hate and enjoy hating. We may punish if necessary, but we must not enjoy it.”
And when the desire to get revenge, to savor hatred, comes along, we have to just kill it, he writes. “Hit it on the head,” every time it bobs its head up, day after day, year after year. Boom! Love your enemy! Boom! Love your enemy! Love him! Christ loves him . . . YOU love him!
The apostle Paul writes in Ephesians 2 about how Jesus —
“ . . . is our peace, who has made the two one and has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility.”
So we have to ask: which is bigger? What Jesus did at Calvary, or our resentment at 2:38 in the morning when that supervisor calls from curbside at Terminal Four? Is God’s kingdom more important, more lasting, than this red-faced moment? Are we citizens of that Better Land, or are we not?
When you put it in stark terms of miles on the freeway, 45 miles down the 405 is not nearly as far as Jesus’ midnight trip from heaven to curbside at Bethlehem.
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