Sometimes the human condition needs love, not forgiveness

Forgiveness isn’t always the answer to what ails us. That begs the question: When isn’t forgiveness the answer? The answer: When sin isn’t the problem.

I know that some Christians believe that sin is always the problem we have. We have historic, even biblical, testimony to that belief. “All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God,” suggests that sin is always the problem.

But sometimes, “sin” is only one term that we too glibly use to describe other life-conditions. Here is one visceral example. October is Domestic Violence Month, a time when we hope people will learn more about the tragic dynamics of domestic violence (or any kind of abuse).

Within faith communities, I believe the issue gets unfortunately more complicated when victims are made to feel that their “sin” caused the actual abuse. It happens, folks. When we deny that reality, we effectively close off any chance to offer effective, reconciliatory ministry to those victims (and to their abusers).

Have you heard this truism? “When all you have is a hammer, everything you see is a nail.” One religious corollary to that might be: “When everyone is a sinner, all you have to offer is forgiveness.”

A domestic abuse victim is too often a captive, not a sinner. She (or he) is captive in a destructive relationship and for emotional, physical or financial reasons feels incapable of being free from that relationship. The victim doesn’t need forgiveness. She (or he) needs release from captivity!

In “The Heart of Christianity,” Marcus Borg offers this insight: “When sin becomes the one-size-fits-all designator of the human condition, then forgiveness becomes the one-size-fits-all remedy. And this is the problem. If the issue is blindness, what we need is not forgiveness, but sight. If the issue is bondage, what we need is not forgiveness, but liberation … (The problem is not that we sinned), but that we are blind, estranged, lost, in exile, self-centered, wounded, sick, paralyzed, or in bondage.”

Forgiveness doesn’t always speak to these issues, friends. That is, unless our basic views of God and Jesus are as judges. If we understand God and Jesus in different ways, like radical hosts with arms wide open for example, we are more able to consider that our “condition” needs something more than only forgiveness.

I think of the wonderful story told by Rita Nakashima Brock in the powerful book she co-authored with Rebecca Parker, “Proverbs of Ashes: Violence, Redemptive Suffering, and the Search for What Saves Us.” In adulthood, Rita discovered that she was adopted. The man she knew as her father was not her birth father. Her birth father was from Puerto Rico.

With excitement and some dread, she headed there to meet her “new” family. When she met her grandmother, something very special happened. An aunt showed her dozens of baby pictures of Rita that her grandmother kept on a bedroom mirror. “She put your pictures on this mirror and looked at them every day so she would not forget you.”

Then Rita wrote: “I like to think God might be like this: a presence whom we have never seen – perhaps does not know exists – but who has loved us from the beginning.”

I think of the powerful small sculpture of “Grandma God” that I wrote about before in this column. Created by Marie, a domestic violence victim, it is testimony to a God who needed not to forgive, but was simply eager to welcome her into the family.

Forgiveness isn’t always the answer. But love is.